{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3260",
    "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": 3260,
    "subject": "story cycles",
    "messages": 2,
    "voices": 2,
    "first": "2002-05-16T07:36:12+00:00",
    "last": "2002-05-16T15:09:13+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0205-989@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "David Duffy",
        "address": "davidd at qimr.edu.au"
      },
      "date": "2002-05-16T07:36:12+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Re: story cycles",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Apropos suites and mosaics, there is a much older model such as the\nstories about Robin Hood etc.  There, they are cycles.  They may represent\nepisodes in the one narrative, variations on a theme.\n\n| David Duffy (MBBS PhD)                                         ,-_|\\\n| email: davidD at qimr.edu.au  ph: INT+61+7+3362-0217 fax: -0101  /     *\n| Epidemiology Unit, Queensland Institute of Medical Research   \\_,-._/\n| 300 Herston Rd, Brisbane, Queensland 4029, Australia  GPG 4D0B994A v"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0205-990@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes",
        "address": "ddanehy at siebel.com"
      },
      "date": "2002-05-16T15:09:13+00:00",
      "subject": "RE: (urth) Re: story cycles",
      "in_reply_to": "<urth-v0205-989@digest.urth.net>",
      "reply_link": "subject",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "David Duffy wrote:\nApropos suites and mosaics, there is a much older model such as the\nstories about Robin Hood etc.  There, they are cycles.  They \nmay represent episodes in the one narrative, variations on a theme."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "... which, as I understand it, is precisely _not_ what a suite or mosaic\nis -- you're talking about what in modern commercial writing terms would\nsimply be called a series, stories which perhaps build up a more complete\npicture of a central character or theme, but which don't really interact\nbeyond that. The point of the pure \"story suite\" is that the stories \nactually comment on and, in a sense, revise each other -- that the whole\nis not only greater than the sum of the parts, but _different_ from the\nsum of the parts; the parts heterodyne or synergize or whatever this\nyear's term is for things working together to produce effects not clearly\nobvious from the two separately.\n\nThe mosaic (as I am understanding the term) is somewhere in between -- \nthe stories are more separate, like the stories of a \"series,\" but work\ntogether to produce an emergent picture. I picked Mike Resnick's \n\"Birthright\" as an amazingly clear (to me) example; better known but \nperhaps not quite as clear would be Cordwainer Smith's tales of the\nInstrumentality of Mankind, the Underpeople, and all that ... where the\npoint is not just that they share a common future (like, say, Niven's\n\"Known Space\" or Heinlein's \"Future History\") but that they build a \ntotal effect that is, again, greater-than-the-sum but not essentially\ndifferent from what's clearly present in the parts. An even less clear\nexample, because it probably wasn't planned as such but has emerged as\nsuch, would be Le Guin's \"Hainish\" stories.\n\nI suspect that the various Lupiverse series, taken together, can be\nsaid to constitute something of a mosaic ... I don't think there's\nanything emergent from the whole that isn't present in the parts (that\nwould be almost contradictory to the whole holographic style), but\nthe parts together imply a much larger and very whole picture of the\nuniverse."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}