Tracquing Song

m.driussi · 09 Aug 1997, 22:44 · from urth-v0003.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: m.driussi at genie.com
Subject: (urth) Tracquing Song
Date: Sat,  9 Aug 97 22:44:00 GMT
Message-ID: <urth-v0003-0215 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0003/0215.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

Reply:  Item #5721678 from URTH at LISTS.BEST.COM@INET#

Nutria,

Ah, there you are!

Re: "Tracking Song" and FIFTH HEAD.  While I'm really =3Dnot=3D trying to
paint TS as a miniature to TBOTNS (as, say, "A Cabin on the Coast"
stands to CASTLEVIEW, or "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" stands to THE
FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS <g>), still, I'll take your statement as a
challenge.  And imho, nope, there are no famous scenes from FIFTH
HEAD that jump into my mind as I read TS.

"My grandfather is a robot and my aunt is myself"--nope.
"I stuck my head through the library window"--nope.
"Nearly the whole city was related to me"--nope.
"So I killed my `father' and took his place"--nope.
"The most enigmatic of the `aliens' are actually from Earth"--nope.
"So I killed my employer, an anthropologist, and took his place"--nope.
"The mast of the ship grows down like a tree root, the ship doesn't
move"--nope.

And so on.

I agree with you that =3Dthematically=3D TS has some similarities with FHC.
(Perhaps strongest with the abo centered middle tale.  Then again, FHC
has no terraforming whatsoever; nor is there a shift from a "dying world"
to a "reborn world"; and the FHC issue is, imho, more alien/human rather
than animal/human, if one cares to make such distinctions--clearly I do!)
I was relating the scenes that reminded me of the later work--if there
are specific scenes in TS that remind you of exact scenes in FHC, by all
means mention them!

alga,

I left off another reading, the Shaman's Death Quest.  Keep an eye
out (but not like Odin!) for Lap or Scandinavian tales of a Santa-like
sleigh--this Great Sleigh business sounds so familiar, but I can't
find the fingerhold.

=3Dmantis=3D

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net