From: David_Lebling@avid.com
Subject: (urth) "Tracking Song" Underground
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 98 12:18:43 


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

alga,

The underground sequence with the robots and Mantru bothers me, too. One
way out of it, a tortuous one I admit, is to say that the narrator has
become a man, just as the riders of the sleigh have become angels, and
the robots obey him for that reason.

Didn't the story first appear in an anthology called _After Man_? I
think that in the literal, DNA sense there are no humans in the story.
The angels are post-human, the narrator is just-human, Mantru is
a-human, and the various humanlike animals are pre-human.

I'll have to spend some more time with the story, though, before I'm
sure, but it just feels right to me.

Looked at in purely stfnal terms, it's a venerable trope. When humans
leave the earth, literally or figuratively, the inheritors are often
dogs.  Think of Simak's _City_, Anderson's _Brain Wave_, Smith's
Underpeople (not exactly inheritors), and so on.

As for writing it up, hmm, for whom?  NYRSF?

    -viz
    (david_lebling@avid.com)