Urth Net
"The God and His Man" and The Book of the Short Sun
↰ answers Michael Andre-Driussi
· by quotation
5 quoted lines
At 2:26 pm on Monday 13 December 1999, mantis wrote:
Furthermore: A51 might have some relevance to OBW;
Zed, although just a sketch, seems rather like Blue (and
the adventures that narrator has there are rather like those
that Man has on Zed).
And at 11:55 pm on Thursday 16 December 1999, William
H. Ansley responded:
9 quoted lines
"Isid Iooo IoooE" has long plagued me. . . . [I]t does
look like the identifying number of a machine, a computer
model number, for example. Certainly Isid Iooo IoooE is
an artificially intelligent computer (or something very much
like one) as well as a god.
Double-trunked elephants are found on both Zed and Blue
does. It is a pity that we are not told how many legs Zedian
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
at the bottom of page 205, I found a reference to (I paraphrase),
"great trees like islands, each with its own inhabitants" in the steaming 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 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 the high, hot lands and the cold lands into this scheme, so maybe it's just the steaming lands that represent Blue and Green, and the other lands are freighted with other referents. Or, and perhaps more likely, this is another case of Wolfe returning to ideas and images that he's used before, expanding on them in the larger work. Certainly the computer-god in its spacecraft could go either way here.
By the way, Siegfried's magic cap in the Nibelungenlied is the Tarnhelm. In German, "Tarnung" could mean "a descendant of the family Tarn". Siegfried, of course, also had a magic sword.
Mark Millman