{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/sflovers/73",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "sflovers",
  "thread": {
    "id": 73,
    "subject": "(SPOILER) FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS (was Sentient Computer Novels)",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1988-08-25T05:03:40+00:00",
    "last": "1988-08-25T05:03:40+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<sflovers-v13-263-2@digest.sf-lovers>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Dan Tilque;1893;92-101;",
        "address": "dant at mrloog.la.tek.com"
      },
      "date": "1988-08-25T05:03:40+00:00",
      "subject": "(SPOILER) FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS (was Sentient Computer Novels)",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "There's a lot of SPOILERS in this article, Cave Canem ... I mean Caveat\nLector.\n\nAlan Bostick writes:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Dan Tilque (that's me) writes:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 2,
          "text": "The Wolfe book did not have direct human-computer access in it.  The\nclosest it got was human personalities stored on mobile computers (not\nexactly robots, but close).  The stored personality was not a main\ncharacter, nor was storing personalities a major theme of the book."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Not true!  The stored personality was, in fact, the personality of the\nnarrator!  (You have to read the story very carefully to get this, almost\nas carefully as you do to figure out what the narrator's name is.)"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Yes and no.  The stored personality was that of an earlier clone of the\nnarrator.  The reader gets no first hand account of how the computer-human\ninterface felt or operated.\n\n[real SPOILERS follow]\n\nThe book is really about serial clones and how they would tend to get into\na rut and the increasingly drastic attempts to escape the rut.  Also about\nhow the clones unconsciously sabotaged those attempts.\n\nDan Tilque"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}