{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1138",
    "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": "whorl",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1138,
    "subject": "The Godling",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2001-02-12T11:14:55+00:00",
    "last": "2001-02-12T11:14:55+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0012-0193@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Dan Parmenter",
        "address": "dan at lec.com"
      },
      "date": "2001-02-12T11:14:55+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) The Godling",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Henry the K, he say:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "4) The Godling bothered me a bit.  It was too big to be a functioning\nmeat animal in a 1G gravity field. It was much bigger than Baldanders\nand it didn't need to stay in the water. It just stuck out for me as\nsomething that had no apparent technological explanation. Sure it came\nfrom the > tanks, but it was just too big for me to swallow....."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Alga agrees:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "This bothered me more than anything else in the book (and there were\nother things that did too--I'm less happy with this book than some of\nthe rest of you seem to be). The godling seemed absolutely *senseless*\nto me--way too big for an environment rapidly running out of resources,\ntechnically totally awkward and novelistically sort of useless too. I\nmentioned my dismay to mantis and also, as an aside, that after the\nelaborate preparation for super-taluses at the end of BotLS, I was\ndisappointed that we never got to see them. And he replied along the\nlines of, What makes you think we didn't? This may have been a playful\nanswer--but the godlings seem so wrong as \"meat animals\" that I throw it\nout as something to think about."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "My first reaction to the godling was that it was something like Hayao\nMiyazaki's \"god soldiers\" from his NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF WIND\n(especially the original comic book version where they played a larger\nrole than in the movie if you've seen it).  The god soldiers were\nbio-mechanical, rather large, and seemingly somewhat hollow inside.\nNot a \"super talus\", though I like that hypothesis too.  \n\nMy only real problem was that once introduced, they were dropped and\nbarely mentioned again.  That's my only real problem with much of\nWolfe's writing: the \"embarassment of riches\" phenomenon, great\nconcepts trotted out and then dropped, great characters introduced who\nthen recede into the background (I won't be happy until I get my\nMaster Xiphias solo story!  Any relation to Pike?).\n\nShellac\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}