{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2487",
    "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": 2487,
    "subject": "Lovely Green Ste. Anne",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2000-12-05T20:48:42+00:00",
    "last": "2000-12-05T20:48:42+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0030-0155@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "akt",
        "address": "akt at attglobal.net"
      },
      "date": "2000-12-05T20:48:42+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Lovely Green Ste. Anne",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Tony, I find this eerie. When I skimmed your post in the digest I did\nnot notice your subject line. I thought you were proposing 5HC as a\nprototype of the Short Sun situation, and I was all prepared to come\nback at you with an argument involving how certain patterns and subjects\nalmost always stay on a writer's mind and constantly show up in the work\nwithout there necessarily being a connection (there are exceptions, but\nnot so many). But you weren't. And now I have to do that switchover\ndebate thing and make the point myself! And I don't even get to refute\nit. Oy!\n\n-alga"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "From: \"Tony Ellis\" <tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk>\nSubject: 5HC: a timeline with no dates"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Every time I re-read ‘A story’ in 5HC, I find myself piecing things\ntogether again from scratch and from the few notes I’ve pencilled in\nthe\nmargin of my worn paperback. I made this little timeline to give\nmyself\na solid base to work from, and I thought I might as well inflict it on\nthe rest of you, too. It has no dates, but lots of quotes to show that\nI’m not just making all this stuff up.\n\n1. “`We were mostly long, and lived in holes between the roots of\ntrees.’” Millions of years ago, a native species existed on St. Anne."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "It"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "was telepathic, but by our standards mindless. It may have had the\npower\nto change its shape: “’When we came some of you looked like every kind\nof beast…’”\n2. A human spacecraft from a prehistoric civilisation on Earth\nsplashes\ndown on St. Anne: “’It is possible that our home was named Atlantis,\nor\nMu…’”\n3. “’The first heard the songs of the second and sent them out again –\ngreater, greater, greater than before.’” The native species\ntelepathically receives and amplifies the thoughts of the newcomers.\nThis has two effects:\na) the humans feel something they have never known before, perhaps the\naboriginal ‘dreaming’ Sandwalker and his people share, and are seduced\nby it: “’We had no songs when we came here – that was one of the\nreasons\nwe stayed…’”\nb) awakening to sentience, the native species is enthralled by the\nnewcomers: “’We [the humans] so impressed your kind that you became\nlike\nus…’” If they are shape changers, they begin to actually look like\nmen.\n4. Over time, the human arrivals lose all trace of civilisation, all\nmemory of earth. The ability to use tools atrophies. They become the\nHill People, and the Marsh Men.\n5. The native species becomes the Shadow Children: \"mock men\". Stoned\nout of their tiny telepathic minds on a narcotic plant that makes them\nfeel like God, they see themselves as the mighty star-crossing humans,\nand Sandwalker’s people as the “native animals”. Their communal\ntelepathy makes this self-perpetuating.\n6. On earth, the 20th century comes and goes.\n7. The Shadow Children project a telepathic shield, hiding St. Anne\nand\nits sister world from detection by passing spacecraft.\n8. Sandwalker’s story takes place. The Shadow Children remove their\nshield.\n9. A human spacecraft from a future civilisation on Earth splashes\ndown\non St. Anne."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}