WMG / The Inverted World

It was really a different planet.

During the course of the story, the moving city encountered increasingly hostile natives, who tried to attack the city with primitive weapons at first, and with firearms later. It would be plausible to assume that, in order to maximize their chances of victory against the city, the natives would eventually try to manipulate its inhabitants into killing themselves. Get hired as workers, learn where the city comes from, concoct a lie that levers on the desperation of its inhabitants and leads to infighting, and if accepted by everyone, the complete destruction of the city. Success!

Except that the Earth All Along twist falls apart as soon as it is analyzed. If there was really a generator that causes more dramatic perception distortions the farther away people are from it, why did people in the city (even people who never left the city) perceive people who worked in the Past or the Future as age-shifted? If it was really just hallucinations, how did Helward survive two years, when all he had to eat was two days' worth of rations? Why does everybody suffer from the same perception distortions? Why are they coherent with relativity, even when they are experienced by people who never heard about relativity? Why are they not experienced by anyone moving westward or eastward? And finally, how could the same device have two completely unrelated effects (and one as a side effect of the other), namely the generation of energy and the generation of a coherent set of alternative perceptions?

It's much more probable that, if such a generator was ever tested on Earth, it actually tapped the energy from another universe, and an instability caused it to transport a whole city from Earth to that universe.

• Another possibility is that long-term exposure to the translat generator causes matter to adhere to a different set of laws of physics, so the city and everything originating from it behaves the same way it would on a hyperboloid world. As this effect seems to last after the generator is turned off, the city will probably be destroyed when the translateration window moves too far away.
  • This is further supported by the fact that Elizabeth notices that Helward's height relative to her own is different in the city than in the north.
  • Also, if everything weird that happened in the South was a hallucination, how did Helward see the ocean from there ^note "Further north, there was a blueness: a pure, sapphire blue, bright on the eyes..." when he didn't know it was there, and it should have been far beyond the curve of the Earth from where he was?
  • The Destaine's invention was adopted quite recently in the rest of the world, so people may be familiar only with its short-term effects, which are either limited to distortion of perception, or end immediately after end of exposure, and so can be mistaken for such distortion.