{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/387",
    "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": 387,
    "subject": "woof",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-03-01T20:03:46+00:00",
    "last": "1998-03-01T20:03:46+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0007-0574@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Alice Turner",
        "address": "al at interport.net"
      },
      "date": "1998-03-01T20:03:46+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) woof",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "We had a long and very enlightening discussion of \"Tracking Song\" a few\nmonths ago.  I had a new thought about it last night, literally as I was\nlying in bed falling asleep.\n\nI think the narrator is a dog, specifically a domestic dog who has\nfallen out of (or ejected from) the car his humans are riding in. The\nfall gave him amnesia, favored plot device of writers.  How can you tell\nhe's a dog?  He has the marks on his neck of a leash or collar; a\n\"birthmark\" that goes \"from one side of the hair on the back of my neck\nto the other.\"  He only comes up the shoulders of the Wiggikki, who are\nwolves (few dogs are as large as a wolf).  When he finally meets the\nproprietors of the Great Sleigh, they are angels.  What dog owner is not\nan angel to his dog?\n\nOf course, I'm not saying the narrator _is_ a dog literally, but in the\nsame sense that the Wiggikki are wolves, and so forth.  The robots obey\nhim because he is \"human,\" not literally, but of all the human-like\nanimals they encounter, he is the most human; more human than Mantru,\nwho is a-human or ex-human, mostly likely a homunculus (in the TBotNS\nsense). The narrator does exactly what you would expect a loyal dog to\ndo: find his masters again; though, being a dog, he's distractable on\nthe way. He eats the artificial food because it's what a dog raised on\nkibble would be used to (the moral dimension aside).\n\nAgain, I'm not claiming this story is the dream of a dog, but that that\nthe narrator fills the dog's role in the story.\n\nWhat do you think?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I was a major participant in that discussion---I got quite obsessed with it\nfor a while. And I'm quite taken aback by this new thought---and quite taken\nwith it too. This is one of those interpretations that I think the author\nmay never have thought of, and that may yet have truth. I'm going to think\nabout this for a while. Viz, I had thought about writing about this story,\nbut I could never find a hook that satisfied me. Why don't you think about\nwriting about it instead? I can help--I help with this sort of thing for a\nliving.\n\n-alga-"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}