{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/392",
    "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": 392,
    "subject": "\"Tracking Song\" Underground",
    "messages": 2,
    "voices": 2,
    "first": "1998-03-02T12:18:43+00:00",
    "last": "1998-03-02T16:51:51+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0007-0579@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "David_Lebling",
        "address": "david_lebling at avid.com"
      },
      "date": "1998-03-02T12:18:43+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) \"Tracking Song\" Underground",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "alga,\n\nThe underground sequence with the robots and Mantru bothers me, too. One\nway out of it, a tortuous one I admit, is to say that the narrator has\nbecome a man, just as the riders of the sleigh have become angels, and\nthe robots obey him for that reason.\n\nDidn't the story first appear in an anthology called _After Man_? I\nthink that in the literal, DNA sense there are no humans in the story.\nThe angels are post-human, the narrator is just-human, Mantru is\na-human, and the various humanlike animals are pre-human.\n\nI'll have to spend some more time with the story, though, before I'm\nsure, but it just feels right to me.\n\nLooked at in purely stfnal terms, it's a venerable trope. When humans\nleave the earth, literally or figuratively, the inheritors are often\ndogs.  Think of Simak's _City_, Anderson's _Brain Wave_, Smith's\nUnderpeople (not exactly inheritors), and so on.\n\nAs for writing it up, hmm, for whom?  NYRSF?\n\n    -viz\n    (david_lebling at avid.com)"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0007-0581@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Mark Millman",
        "address": "mark_millman at hmco.com"
      },
      "date": "1998-03-02T16:51:51+00:00",
      "subject": "Re: (urth) \"Tracking Song\" Underground",
      "in_reply_to": "<urth-v0007-0579@digest.urth.net>",
      "reply_link": "subject",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "This is another quick bibliographic note.  \"Tracking Song\" was originally\npublished in _In the Wake of Man_, a three-story anthology edited by R. A.\nLafferty.  I've forgotten the third contributor.  The book is from the\nmid-70s, maybe 1975.  Again, I'm away from my library and can't check.\n\n_After Man_, by the way, is the title of a book by Dougal Dixon which\npresents a look at the fauna of the earth after 50 million years of\nevolution in a post-human world.  It's a fascinating and beautiful book,\nand, now that I think of it, it has charts indicating the probable\npositions of the continents (according to geologists' best guesses) at\nintervals from the present time to the period under discussion in the text.\nThey might be of some use, though they don't include changes related to\nglaciation or global warming, or to more transitory shifts in rivers and so\nforth, in the continuing debate over the geography of Urth.  I think I'll\ntake a look when I get home; I urge anyone else who has access to a copy to\ndo the same.\n\nMark Millman"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "David Lebling wrote:\nDidn't the story [\"Tracking Song\"] first appear in an\nanthology called _After Man_?\n\n   -viz\n   (david_lebling at avid.com)"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}