Re: Humans as raccoons?

:: Hm.  "This Immortal"?  Or maybe the Jade D'arcy series?  How about
:: Childhood's End?  Ah well, I suppose there are (different) mismatched
:: elements in each of those. 

: ilya2@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 "Childhood's End" (before the Breakthrough) is pretty close to what I
: had in mind -- although humans are more im****tant to Overlords than
: what I was thinking of.  I know nothing about the other two. 

Childhood's end is sort of an "uplift" scenario, so maybe one could
consider Brin's books in the Upliftiverse are an instance.

Zelazny's "This Immortal", the Vegans (the star, not the dietary
restriction) encounter earth in dire straits after a nuclear war, and
help save the remnants of humanity as a...  well, humanitarian gesture.
The mismatched element there being that the vegan/human relation****p
isn't really master/pet.  Plus they don't exactly... take over earth,
though with their economic influence they might just as well have.

Oh, and "master" reminds me: "Farewell to the Master".
More mismatches, but after all, "*I* am the master." says Gnut.
But I digress...

In the Jade D'arcy series, interstellar travel is managed by a mysterious
extradimentional entity who provides ****tals.  This alien is known for
being quite cryptic, but it's fairly clear he considers most of the
races he's providing ****tals for as pets... or maybe garden plants.

Hm.  Wasn't there a scene where Trance Gemini prunes a bonsai tree
in an echo of what had just happened to humans or nietzscheans or
somebody?
I recall that at the time I was reminded of the Jade D'arcy entity,
who had made some similar comment about "pruning back" one of the races
that had been using the ****tals.

    "I think man is the most interesting insect on earth, don't you?"

                        --- Marvin the Martian


Wayne Throop   throopw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
   http://sheol.org/throopw