{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1893",
    "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": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1893,
    "subject": "Jim, about those scientists....",
    "messages": 2,
    "voices": 2,
    "first": "1999-11-02T00:22:41+00:00",
    "last": "1999-11-02T04:34:40+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0028-0333@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Daniel Fusch",
        "address": "dfusch at hotmail.com"
      },
      "date": "1999-11-02T04:34:40+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Jim, about those scientists....",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Hi, Jim!\n\nSuperior evidence can be a decided advantage!\n\nActually, I was wondering exactly the same thing...are there any good \nscientists in The Book of the New Sun? That is--scientists who aren't \nburning children, eviscerating their captives, or sewing new heads on \npeople....\n\nI don't remember any right off hand. Father Inire, physicist...but as you \nsaid, he's the alien. And there's Master Ash, but he's more of a historian \nthan a scientist. I think.\n\nI just remembered that in \"The Sword of the Lictor,\" Severian speaks of the \nscientists to whom people go when they want to become zoanthropes. Are these \ngood scientists or bad scientists? They'd be pretty awful in OUR society, I \nimagine. But in Severian's society?\n\nThe curators in the Botanic Gardens are botanists, and they don't seem \nmalevolent. Their task is the preservation of extinct forms of plant life, \nafter all.\n\nYes, I guess the curators are the good scientists, then.\n\nHmmm, how come Severian always meets all the bad (or should I say \"mad\"?) \nscientists?\n\nWell, Jim, I would surmise that in Severian's age, there are no \ngovernment-funded scientists (or not many, anyway), and science is an \nindividual pursuit--often for individual gain. Presumably there are also a \nfew good scientists who are acting for the greater good of mankind, but they \nseem to avoid Severian. It must be his torturer's outfit that scares them \naway.\n\nOh, well."
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0028-0334@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "William H. Ansley",
        "address": "wansley at warwick.net"
      },
      "date": "1999-11-02T00:22:41+00:00",
      "subject": "Re: (urth) Jim, about those scientists....",
      "in_reply_to": "<urth-v0028-0333@digest.urth.net>",
      "reply_link": "subject",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "I just remembered that in \"The Sword of the Lictor,\" Severian speaks of the\nscientists to whom people go when they want to become zoanthropes. Are these\ngood scientists or bad scientists? They'd be pretty awful in OUR society, I\nimagine. But in Severian's society?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "This irresistibly conjures up (to my mind at least) an alternative version\nof _The Wizard of Oz_ (perhaps it is one of the stories in the Brown Book\nwe don't get to see) where Dorothy steps out of her flying house in (what\nis taken to be) a white lab coat and is asked by the Scientist of the\nNorth...\n\nYou fill in the rest (or ask alga).\n\nWilliam Ansley"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}