Subject: (whorl) The Godling

From: Dan Parmenter <dan at lec.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 11:14:55 +0000

Henry the K, he say:

> 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't need to stay in the water. It just stuck out for me as
something that had no apparent technological explanation. Sure it came
from the > tanks, but it was just too big for me to swallow.....

Alga agrees:

> 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.

My first reaction to the godling was that it was something like Hayao
Miyazaki's "god soldiers" from his NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF WIND
(especially the original comic book version where they played a larger
role than in the movie if you've seen it).  The god soldiers were
bio-mechanical, rather large, and seemingly somewhat hollow inside.
Not a "super talus", though I like that hypothesis too.  

My only real problem was that once introduced, they were dropped and
barely mentioned again.  That's my only real problem with much of
Wolfe's writing: the "embarassment of riches" phenomenon, great
concepts trotted out and then dropped, great characters introduced who
then recede into the background (I won't be happy until I get my
Master Xiphias solo story!  Any relation to Pike?).

Shellac

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