{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2225",
    "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": 2225,
    "subject": "LB Foreword",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2000-05-02T12:17:25+00:00",
    "last": "2000-05-02T12:17:25+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0028-0957@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Jim Jordan",
        "address": "jbjordan at gnt.net"
      },
      "date": "2000-05-02T12:17:25+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) LB Foreword",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "OOOOOKAAAYY.\n\tSo, I read LB in a Quality Paperback Club omnibus edition (which contains\n*Beasts* and ES). But the book fell apart as I read it, so I ordered the\n\"hardcover\" from the SFBook Club, published by Bantam, and it just came.\n\tThe QPBC edition has a different pagination, and includes a 1990 Foreword.\nI don't have a scanner and don't feel like typing it all in, but here is\nthe gist of it and most of the second half of it. JC says that he worked on\nthe book from 1969-1978. He says that he began with writing a long family\nchronicle, and then came up with \"the idea, for instance, of a fairy\nreligion. Marianne Moore defined poems as 'imaginary gardens with real\ntoads in them'; I thought I would try to create an imaginary garden with\nreal fairies at the bottom of it.\n\t\"I came upon a Persian parable called _The Parliament of the Birds_, which\nsupplied me with a plot remarkably -- uncannily -- suited to what I had\naltready thought up.\n\t\"Lastly, I had toyed for some time with the idea of writing a story, or a\nseries of stories, about a powerful mage who solves crimes or puzzles like\na detective, puzzles that turn out to be cosmogonic or otherwise\nearthshaking: the reawakening of a sleeping emperor, for instance -- or\nsomething like that.\n\tSo, this all came together. A last quotation: \"... Among the very first\nimages I had had of my family was of a man packing his married life in a\nbag and setting off on a final journey: and some eight years later I wrote\ndown that scene, close (at last!) to the end of the book, the book you have.\"\n\tSo, there it is for those who don't have it. \n\nNutria, the Kind  and Helpful"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}