Damon Knight's The Man in the Tree The Urth list — 3 messages, 3 voices, 15 Mar 2005 https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/4377 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. ============================================================================== Jason Willard — 15 Mar 2005, 18:10 I'm far from having read all of the Urth posts, so if I'm making an obvious point, forgive me. I'm in the middle of cataloguing my books and came to The Man in the Tree by Damon Knight. I got it a few months ago because I knew he was an influence on Wolfe, but didn't pay any more attention than that. Apparently, the main character's name is Gene Anderson - which, with my rough familiarity with etymology, I'd break down as Gene Other Son. Fitting, since Wolfe claimed Knight grew him "from a bean." The back blurb reads: "A poet, a millionaire, a circus freak. Gene Anderson was all of these and much more. An incredible eight-and-a-half-foot giant, he had a power, a gift that enabled him to reach into other worlds and bring back miracles into this one. He saw a magnificence in the universe that nobody had ever seen and brought the light of truth to man where only darkness had been. But like all prophets, he was feared as much as loved - and hated by one tortured soul who was determined to see him die..." Just from that I hear echoes of Peace and the New Sun. The copyright is 1984, right after the original tetralogy of New Sun finished, so I'm curious what kind of give and take there is between the two... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Georg Schönegger — 15 Mar 2005, 23:56 in reply to Jason Willard 'Anderson' means 'Son of Andreas', Andreas coming from greek and meaning valiant or manly. georg ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dan'l Danehy-Oakes — 16 Mar 2005, 10:30 in reply to Georg Schönegger True but so what? A folk etymology is as good as any other for purposes of creating significance in a work of fiction. > On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 08:55:51 +0100, Georg Sch?negger > wrote: > > 'Anderson' means 'Son of Andreas', Andreas coming from greek and meaning > valiant or manly. > > georg > _______________________________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------