# Digest whorl.v012.n043

*The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 10 Feb 2001*

<https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1126>

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### akt
*10 Feb 2001, 16:37*

> From: Henry Kaiser <hkaiser at mindspring.com>
> 4)  The Godling bothered me a bit.  It was too big to be a functioning
> meat
> animal in a 1G gravity field. It was much bigger than Baldanders and
> it
> didn=B9t need to stay in the water. It just stuck out for me as
> something tha=
> t
> had no apparent technological explanation. Sure it came from the
> tanks, but
> it was just too big for me to swallow.....

This bothered me more than anything else in the book (and there were
other things that did too--I'm less happy with this book than some of
the rest of you seem to be). The godling seemed absolutely *senseless*
to me--way too big for an environment rapidly running out of resources,
technically totally awkward and novelistically sort of useless too. I
mentioned my dismay to mantis and also, as an aside, that after the
elaborate preparation for super-taluses at the end of BotLS, I was
disappointed that we never got to see them. And he replied along the
lines of, What makes you think we didn't? This may have been a playful
answer--but the godlings seem so wrong as "meat animals" that I throw it
out as something to think about.

-alga


*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

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