{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2051",
    "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": 2051,
    "subject": "\"The God and His Man\" and The Book of the Short Sun",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-12-22T12:39:17+00:00",
    "last": "1999-12-22T12:39:17+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0028-0653@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "mark millman",
        "address": "millman at us.ncipher.com"
      },
      "date": "1999-12-22T12:39:17+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) \"The God and His Man\" and The Book of the Short Sun",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "At 2:26 pm on Monday 13 December 1999, mantis wrote:\nFurthermore: A51 might have some relevance to OBW; \nZed, although just a sketch, seems rather like Blue (and \nthe adventures that narrator has there are rather like those \nthat Man has on Zed)."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "And at 11:55 pm on Thursday 16 December 1999, William\nH. Ansley responded:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "\"Isid Iooo IoooE\" has long plagued me. . . .  [I]t does \nlook like the identifying number of a machine, a computer \nmodel number, for example.  Certainly Isid Iooo IoooE is \nan artificially intelligent computer (or something very much \nlike one) as well as a god.\n\nDouble-trunked elephants are found on both Zed and Blue \ndoes. It is a pity that we are not told how many legs Zedian \nelephants have."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I took a look at \"The God and His Man\" this morning in my paper-\nback copy of _Endangered Species_ (it appears on page 203), and \nat the bottom of page 205, I found a reference to (I paraphrase), \n\"great trees like islands, each with its own inhabitants\" in the steaming \nlands.  This suggests to me the little we heard about Green's enor-\nmous trees, and so I suspect that if the short story has relevance to \nOBW, it's because it relates to the entire BotSS, and that Zed repre-\nsents the Blue-Green system (compressed by time and literary pro-\ncesses into a single planet).  I confess that I have a hard time fitting \nthe high, hot lands and the cold lands into this scheme, so maybe it's \njust the steaming lands that represent Blue and Green, and the other \nlands are freighted with other referents.  Or, and perhaps more \nlikely, this is another case of Wolfe returning to ideas and images that \nhe's used before, expanding on them in the larger work.  Certainly \nthe computer-god in its spacecraft could go either way here.\n\nBy the way, Siegfried's magic cap in the _Nibelungenlied_ is the \nTarnhelm.  In German, \"Tarnung\" could mean \"a descendant of\nthe family Tarn\".  Siegfried, of course, also had a magic sword.\n\nMark Millman"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}