Schuster subverts Ivanhoan theology by introducing the Kaballah. Part of his argument is that:
before the creation, no thinking, speaking creatures existed;
therefore, God's existence lacked the element of being observed and comprehended;
therefore, it was incomplete;
but the perfect God cannot be incomplete;
therefore, it was necessary for Him to create conscious beings that would be able to know Him.
The idea is that the Ivanhoans are unused to thinking outside their orthodoxy but some of them want to so dissension can be sown. But they need to hear Schuster's ingenuous arguments only to discard them! Surely God is believed to know and comprehend Himself? And why accept the premise of a perfect God in the first place?
I do not understand the description of the wheelless wagon at the end of the story but why was Falkayn able to think of the constant-width polygon when the Engineer was unable to?
In "The Three-Cornered Wheel," Falkayn is seventeen;
in "Wingless," his grandson, Nat, grows up and befriends Ythrians on Avalon;
in The People Of The Wind, their descendant, Tabitha Falkayn, grows up among Ythrians on Avalon;
in The Day Of Their Return, generations later, an Avalonian Ythrian spies on Aeneas;
in "Starfog," Daven Laure contacts descendants of Aenean rebels in another spiral arm -
- and that, unfortunately, is as far as the History of Technic Civilization extends.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
God is infinitely perfect and infinitely happy and needs nothing. And I prefer Dante's explanation in the DIVINE COMEDY of why God created living, conscious beings: out of LOVE for His creation and a desire to see other beings, however lesser than Him, declare "I am" before Him.
I remember the verbal description of constant width polygons given in "The Three Cornered Wheel, and I think I understood it. But I agree including some diagrams illustrating how such a thing could work is a good idea.
Sean
Sean,
I agree that, with Christian belief as a premise, love, not any kind of necessity, would be the reason for creation.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I also think it makes more logical sense as well. For God to create "compelled" by necessity would mean He is not truly God.
Sean
"I do not understand the description of the wheelless wagon at the end of the story but why was Falkayn able to think of the constant-width polygon when the Engineer was unable to?"
The 'wagon' was a flat bed resting on a series of rollers each with a cross section shaped as a Reuleaux triangle.
This video come close to the idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk0VpdH_S3Q
but in the story there was a mechanism to take a roller from the back of the wagon to the front so the flat bed wouldn't fall off the front.
Also in the story one of the other humans on Ivanhoe suggests that David Falkayn thought of it because he had run across the concept more recently in school.
BTW the story is mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Reuleaux triangles
Kaor, Jim!
Years ago, somewhere in the Internet, I came across an article discussing this Anderson story, with diagrams illustrating this use of constant-width polygons. They helped in making sense of Reuleaux triangles.
A COMPLETE COLLECTED WORKS OF POUL ANDERSON should include similar diagrams as an appendix to "The Three-Cornered Wheel."
Ad astra! Sean
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