Subject: (urth) "The God and His Man" and The Book of the Short Sun

From: mark millman <millman at us.ncipher.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 12:39:17 +0000

At 2:26 pm on Monday 13 December 1999, mantis wrote:

> Furthermore: A51 might have some relevance to OBW; 
> Zed, although just a sketch, seems rather like Blue (and 
> the adventures that narrator has there are rather like those 
> that Man has on Zed).

And at 11:55 pm on Thursday 16 December 1999, William
H. Ansley responded:

> "Isid Iooo IoooE" has long plagued me. . . .  [I]t does 
> look like the identifying number of a machine, a computer 
> model number, for example.  Certainly Isid Iooo IoooE is 
> an artificially intelligent computer (or something very much 
> like one) as well as a god.
>
> Double-trunked elephants are found on both Zed and Blue 
> does. It is a pity that we are not told how many legs Zedian 
> elephants have.

I took a look at "The God and His Man" this morning in my paper-
back copy of _Endangered Species_ (it appears on page 203), and 
at the bottom of page 205, I found a reference to (I paraphrase), 
"great trees like islands, each with its own inhabitants" in the steaming 
lands.  This suggests to me the little we heard about Green's enor-
mous trees, and so I suspect that if the short story has relevance to 
OBW, it's because it relates to the entire BotSS, and that Zed repre-
sents the Blue-Green system (compressed by time and literary pro-
cesses into a single planet).  I confess that I have a hard time fitting 
the high, hot lands and the cold lands into this scheme, so maybe it's 
just the steaming lands that represent Blue and Green, and the other 
lands are freighted with other referents.  Or, and perhaps more 
likely, this is another case of Wolfe returning to ideas and images that 
he's used before, expanding on them in the larger work.  Certainly 
the computer-god in its spacecraft could go either way here.

By the way, Siegfried's magic cap in the _Nibelungenlied_ is the 
Tarnhelm.  In German, "Tarnung" could mean "a descendant of
the family Tarn".  Siegfried, of course, also had a magic sword.

Mark Millman

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