"The God and His Man" and The Book of the Short Sun

mark millman · 22 Dec 1999, 12:39 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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From: mark millman <millman at us.ncipher.com>
Subject: (urth) "The God and His Man" and The Book of the Short Sun
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 12:39:17
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At 2:26 pm on Monday 13 December 1999, mantis wrote:

> Furthermore: A51 might have some relevance to OBW;=20
> Zed, although just a sketch, seems rather like Blue (and=20
> the adventures that narrator has there are rather like those=20
> that Man has on Zed).

And at 11:55 pm on Thursday 16 December 1999, William
H. Ansley responded:

> "Isid Iooo IoooE" has long plagued me. . . .  [I]t does=20
> look like the identifying number of a machine, a computer=20
> model number, for example.  Certainly Isid Iooo IoooE is=20
> an artificially intelligent computer (or something very much=20
> like one) as well as a god.
>
> Double-trunked elephants are found on both Zed and Blue=20
> does. It is a pity that we are not told how many legs Zedian=20
> elephants have.

I took a look at "The God and His Man" this morning in my paper-
back copy of _Endangered Species_ (it appears on page 203), and=20
at the bottom of page 205, I found a reference to (I paraphrase),=20
"great trees like islands, each with its own inhabitants" in the steaming=20
lands.  This suggests to me the little we heard about Green's enor-
mous trees, and so I suspect that if the short story has relevance to=20
OBW, it's because it relates to the entire BotSS, and that Zed repre-
sents the Blue-Green system (compressed by time and literary pro-
cesses into a single planet).  I confess that I have a hard time fitting=20
the high, hot lands and the cold lands into this scheme, so maybe it's=20
just the steaming lands that represent Blue and Green, and the other=20
lands are freighted with other referents.  Or, and perhaps more=20
likely, this is another case of Wolfe returning to ideas and images that=20
he's used before, expanding on them in the larger work.  Certainly=20
the computer-god in its spacecraft could go either way here.

By the way, Siegfried's magic cap in the _Nibelungenlied_ is the=20
Tarnhelm.  In German, "Tarnung" could mean "a descendant of
the family Tarn".  Siegfried, of course, also had a magic sword.

Mark Millman

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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