{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1156",
    "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": 1156,
    "subject": "Petty complaints (RTTW spoilers)",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2001-02-14T01:08:24+00:00",
    "last": "2001-02-14T01:08:24+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0012-0218@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "William Ansley",
        "address": "wansley at warwick.net"
      },
      "date": "2001-02-14T01:08:24+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) Petty complaints (RTTW spoilers)",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "At 6:03 PM -0500 2/13/01, <akt at attglobal.net> wrote:\nFrom: Kieran Cleary <kcleary at jb.man.ac.uk>> Subject: Re: (whorl) Pig,\nGodling"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 2,
          "text": " Alga,\n\n Couldn't agree more re Pig. Did he like deciphering that dialect? He\ndid\n nae!"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "It fashed my een! And my kin are Scottish on my mother's side--which\nmade it all the more irritating! I know where your kin are from despite\nthat \"uk\" in your address...."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Hi, alga and all.\n\nI finally had time to finish RTTW. I can't say that I was all that \nthrilled with it either, for a variety of reasons. I found Pig's \ndialect quite irritating as well; there were some things he said that \nI never figured out.\n\n(Now that I think about it, I suppose that the fact that Hornsilk \ncould always understand Pig could be taken as more evidence that \nHornsilk was really Silk all along. In TBotLS, Silk could always \nunderstand, Tick, that highly annoying catacrest that always used \nrandom consonants at the beginnings of the words it spoke. (Something \nthat has always bother me: what was the catacrest's real name? It \ncouldn't have been Tick, if that's what it called itself.))\n\nIn fact I got heartily sick of all of the \"distinctive\" ways Wolfe \ncame up with for his characters to speak in this book: Pig's dialect, \nthe village of the Yodas, Olivine's repeating, Olivine's repeating \nherself, Prolocutor Italics and Remora's mumblings."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": " > The encounter with the godling struck me as very similar to one of\nSev's\n meetings with Juturna ('I would save you'), or with the hierodules,\nwhere\n they kneel before him. In a sense, the godling is a debased version of\na\n hierodule, and recognises Silk as the 'holy one'.\n\nWell, yes. But I do think the operative word is \"debased.\" I love\nJuturna and the hierodules and think they are used *extremely* well by\nthe author (especially in that last book that some on this list like to\nput down), but as I said in an earlier post, the godling, to me, seems\nlike a Hollywood special effect that serves no purpose other than cover\nart."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I was also bothered by the impossibly large size of the (big) \ngodling. Wolfe should make up his mind, is he writing science fiction \nor isn't he?\n\nAs far as the cover art goes, this book far surpassed all of the the \nothers in the wrongness of the cover, in my opinion. The artist \napparently read the book with very little attention.\n\nOn p. 53 the godling is described as having \"a smooth, domed head.\" \nNo mention of a hat or hood. So where does the artist come up withe \nthe very peculiar headgear he puts on the godling's head? From p. 139.\n\n--------------------\nThe yellow flame of the candle rose; he shut his lantern, mesmerized \nby the end of the godling's thumb, the smoothly rounded face of a \nfaceless man wearing a peaked hat that was in fact a claw.\n--------------------\n\nSo the artist puts a hood with a bizarre, claw-like forward thrusting \npeak on his godling's head but no claws on his hand. I guess it's \njust me, but I find this profoundly irritating.\n\nMore complaints to come!\n\nWilliam Ansley\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}