URTH |
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)