Urth Net
Digest whorl.v012.n043
↰ answers Henry Kaiser
· by quotation
2 quoted lines
From: Henry Kaiser <hkaiser at mindspring.com>
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=B9t need to stay in the water. It just stuck out for me as something tha= t had no apparent technological explanation. Sure it came from the tanks, but it was just too big for me to swallow.....
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.
-alga
*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.