Tracking Song

Minor comment here regarding the name "Cim Glowing." I never thought it was a typo because I took her name to be referring to the light source mentioned in the first day's entry: "the light is a luminous fungus suspended from a rawhide thong." It seemed reasonable to me that the blossoms blowing in the wind at her birth might either be (or be covered by) this luminous fungus.

Anyway, I fell behind on the podcasts when the pandemic hit (working from home + no daycare doesn't leave much time for podcasts) but I'm starting to catch up again. Looking forward to rejoining the forum!

Mind = blown (but I think the gravity is key here). But what an interesting reading. It's so pessimistic where my instinct on Tracking Song which is optimistic, as if Wolfe is envisioning a future engineering triumph.

I was debating if this could be Mars. Lower gravity, very cold, two moons. But, it would have to be mostly terraformed. There's breathable atmosphere and enough water to form snow.

Further thought: what if this is some future Earth and the second moon is actually the Great Sleigh group's orbiting mothership? "That's no moon, that's a space station!"

Global cooling was a projected environmental problem back in the 70's (I recall seeing books and articles about it, though I was too young to understand them). Plus, there was always the potential for nuclear war and the subsequent nuclear winter. That explains the ruins under the mountain - maybe some sort of military storage depot. Does not explain the lower gravity, unless Cutthroat spent time in higher than Earth gravity before returning to Earth. Or he's just modified to be stronger and faster than a regular person.

I'm recalling trying Gamma World in around the 6th to 8th grade, so 82-84. Something like that. Totally gonzo game. One step in creating your character was rolling for mutations, which were generally superpowers. I distinctly recall rolling up a character with an extra eye on his hand, so I could look around corners. TSR had several new games out about that time: Gamma World (post-apocalypse sci-fi), Boot Hill (Western, actually a pretty good game), and Top Secret (Bond-style spy stuff, always turned into more of a para-military bloodbath with our group; big groups and stealth don't really mix).

Oh wow, I somehow completely missed that RPG even though I was addicted to TSR RPGs in the 90s! I will have to find that.

You make some great observations and I especially love your understanding of the NDVA wand -- that's the most Wolfeish thing I've heard and is now my head canon.

My sense of the Great Sleigh is that it is the complete spaceship and not some sort of shuttle that comes down from a mother ship. Still, it's hard to imagine something like that going airborne and then breaking orbit, even given the gravity situation. But Wolfe must have thought that through, right?

PS. this whole story has a real Gamma World (TSR post-nuclear apocalypse RPG) feel to it.

Some thoughts as I just finished reading Tracking Song and am part-way through the wrap-up episodes.

Is Cutthroat a reliable narrator? He tells us that he sometimes deletes or records over his narrations of events. This is a change from the usual epistolary structure of written records (e.g., The Screwtape Letters).

I immediately compared the club-bow to the rivebows from China Mieville's Bas-Lag setting. The rivebows shoot sharp metal discs - which I always think of as sawblades from a circular saw or something like that.

The Great Sleigh leaves a 100m wide track in the snow. That's massive! For comparison, the USS Ford nuclear aircraft carrier is 43m wide at the waterline and 78m wide at the deck. The Panama Canal - one of the engineering wonders of the modern world - is only 49m wide.

Snow sailing - not sure about snow, but ice sailing (or iceboating, as it's sometimes called) is definitely a thing. I've never tried it, but it looks amazing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceboat

You guys talked about singing the song of the law - this totally reminded me of the beast-men in The Island of Dr. Moreau reciting the laws about not attacking humans or each other.

Is the Seven Snows name (that Cim almost gets) a callback to the epigraph?

Finally (for now, anyway), the endiva wand - maybe it's the engineer in me, but I figure that's a pronunciation of an acronym. Something like NDVA, for Neural Disruptive Voltage Applicator. Maybe it's high technology the Great Sleigh people dropped and someone found?

Nothing will now be able to convince me that this isn't a Star Trek away mission with a universal translator!

The idea that this was a surgical procedure to make a human capable of emulating the speech of these sentient beast-men I think also really doubles down on the Christ imagery. It's the same basic idea: sending a modified aspect of yourself to try to experience what it's like to be one of your creations.

I really enjoy casually and occasionally reading about work on Neanderthal (and now Denisovan) societies, but I've never encountered Lieberman before. Are his ideas still in vogue?

Just had a chance to listen to your podcasts on The Keys to December and your subsequent take on Tracking Song, and it reminded me of something I’d been meaning to post. I came here to the forum, and I saw that someone else had a really good take on the name Cutthroat. I was thinking that the name Cutthroat referred to a surgical scar on the protagonist. But what neck surgery would make sense in the context of the story? The larynx (voicebox) is in the throat suspended from the hyoid bone at the base of the tongue, and its position in the throat is related to the ability to produce human-like speech sounds. [Full disclosure: I’m a biological anthropologist who specializes in evolutionary anatomy of the head and neck related to vocalization/speech]. The earliest work (by Philip Lieberman) that gained some notoriety for applying concepts of speech physiology and vocal tract anatomy to Neanderthals came out in 1968, 1971, And 1972, and Tracking Song was published in 1975. Lieberman’s basic idea was that a low, descended larynx allowed us, modern humans (but not Neanderthals, which are either a subspecies of our species or a separate species entirely), to pronounce certain sounds like the vowels in “see,” “saw,” and “sue.” These sounds are in 95% of the world‘s languages (and the “see” sound alone is in >99% of languages) and they maximize speech perception by differentiating and expanding one’s vocal repertoire. I only thought of all this after re-reading the story and listening to your initial podcast on Tracking Song, so I do need to go back and read the parts about speech and communication in the story to check if there is anything else to support this take. However, it would be interesting if Cutthroat’s larynx/vocal tract were modified to either make him “subhuman,” to facilitate the production of “animal-like” sounds, or to insert a language translator or something like that (that one‘s for you, Glen - is this another instance in Wolfe fiction of a Star Trek-like universal communicator?). (Depending on what you think the narrator is, I guess the surgery could also be taken As making a beast-man ”more” human by lowering the larynx - not my particular take, but intriguing).

A while ago I posted something on this forum trying to trace Wolfe’s knowledge of anthropology/archaeology/human evolution (from Peace and some of the shorter stories), and I think this could be another example - the idea of a modified larynx maps onto what-was-then state-of-the-art scientific knowledge that Wolfe might have picked up as a scientifically-literate person. And it is really interesting that the original scientific context of this larynx/vocal tract difference was that Neanderthals had a diiferent configuration and therefore couldn’t fully produce modern human-like spoken language. In this context Neanderthals might be equivalent to the beast-men that are on their way to “becoming“ human. (I should also note here that views of Neanderthals have changed over time and the 1970’s view seems a little uncharitable in hindsight).

Finally, your discussion at the end of the 2nd Keys to December Podcast about spoken language and the ability to communicate (to disagree or otherwise) being the Hallmark of humanity is spot-on, and was certainly a popular idea in the 1960’s/1970’s when Wolfe was writing. This idea has been challenged since then and it is clear that other animals (Birds, monkeys, apes, dolphins, elephants) possess elements of what were once considered unique aspects of language. I think Wolfe made this transition in some of his fiction, too, but whether it was a natural revolution in his own thinking or in dialogue with broader scientific thinking I can‘t say. For me, Wolfe’s exploration of the non-human/human divide (who should we consider to be “people”) is one of the most intriguing aspects of his work and informs some of his best stories, but especially Tracking Song. Thanks for producing such stimulating discussion in your podcast!

I love this reading of Cutthroat. I know you don't mean that he is a fish-person, but this line of thinking did get me to wonder whether there any fish-people on this planet since we do seem to get a bird-person at the end.

I love this reading of Cutthroat. I know you don't mean that he is a fish-person, but this line of thinking did get me to wonder whether there any fish-people on this planet since we do seem to get a bird-person at the end.