About

This is a personal, unofficial mirror of four public archives in which readers discussed the work of Gene Wolfe. Two are mailing lists: the Urth list, on The Book of the New Sun and Wolfe's work generally, and its sibling the Whorl list, on The Book of the Long Sun and The Book of the Short Sun. It exists to make a scattered public archive readable: to give it working conversation threads, full-text search, and pages that load.

Two more are older and are kept here as selections rather than in full, because both carried far more than Wolfe. Usenet is the newsgroup that ran under three successive names from 1982, before either list existed and for years alongside them. SF-Lovers is the moderated digest that ran out of Rutgers from 1979 to 2000. It was a mailing list rather than a newsgroup, and most of it is its own: 180 of its 256 correspondents appear nowhere else here. Through the eighties it and the newsgroup were gatewayed to each other, so 37 of its 385 messages also sit in the Usenet archive word for word. Both copies are kept. The message really did go out to both rooms, and removing either side would leave conversations with holes in them.

It also covers 1992 to 2000, which the Usenet archive cannot. Every surviving capture of rec.arts.sf.written begins in 2003, and the only archive holding the decade before it is Google's, which stopped supporting Usenet in 2024 and never offered a way to take a copy. The date coverage is incidental, though; the archive is kept for its own contents.

Urth and Whorl ran side by side until January 2002, when Whorl was merged into the Urth list. Many of the same people posted to both.

All four are kept apart here, as they were apart then — the archives are not combined, and no conversation runs between them. A thread from any of the smaller three carries its mark: Whorl, Usenet, SF-Lovers. Anything unmarked is Urth, which is most of what is here.

Browsing covers all four together. Search covers the two mailing lists, with Usenet and SF-Lovers offered as options above the results — those two are selections out of general forums rather than whole lists, and they answer a different question. Turn either on and it stays on for as long as you keep searching.

Where the content comes from

Every message here was posted to a public mailing list or a public newsgroup and published in a public archive at the time. Nothing was taken from a private forum, and nothing was obtained by circumventing any access control.

• Urth, April 1997 – September 2003, and the whole of Whorl, November 1996 – January 2002 — the static archives still hosted at urth.net/urth and urth.net/whorl.
• Urth, September 2004 – February 2022 — the Mailman/pipermail archive, which is no longer served from its origin and was recovered from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
• Usenet, September 1982 – April 2019 — Wolfe threads only, taken from six newsgroups held by the Internet Archive's Usenet collections.
• SF-Lovers, April 1981 – November 2000 — Wolfe threads only, taken from all thirty-four digest volumes at archive.org.

Please treat urth.net as the primary source. It is the archive the list itself kept, it is still online, and it should be cited in preference to this mirror.

Ownership

I do not own this content and claim no rights in it. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. The mirror is offered for archival, research and study purposes, without charge, without advertising, and without any claim of ownership, endorsement or editorial authority over what the correspondents wrote.

Quotations of Gene Wolfe's work, and of other authors, appear only as the correspondents quoted them while discussing those works.

Not affiliated

This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the operators of urth.net, the moderators or members of the Urth list, the estate of Gene Wolfe, his publishers, or any other organisation. Any views in the messages are those of the people who wrote them, and are reproduced rather than endorsed.

What this site records

The web server keeps an ordinary access log — the page requested, the time, the browser, and the visitor's IP address. Those raw logs are discarded after a week. What is kept from them is a summary: how many visits, from which countries, to which pages. Nothing in that summary identifies anyone.

There is no analytics service, no tracking script and no cookie. This site sets none and loads nothing from anyone else — the fonts are served from here rather than from Google, so no third party is told that you visited.

Corrections and removal requests

If you wrote something here and would like it removed, your name or address taken off entirely, or an attribution corrected, write to contact@darkrealm.vip.

Accuracy

• Threading is partly inferred. Where a message carried no reply header, its place in a conversation was guessed from its subject line. The reader labels those as “follows … · by subject” to distinguish them from links read out of real headers.
• Dates are as sent. A few carry impossible values because the sender's clock was wrong; those are shown as they arrived.
• Times before 2004 are often ambiguous. Nearly half of those messages carry no timezone in their header, so the time shown may be out by several hours and the times within a conversation can appear to run backwards. The order is not a guess: messages are shown in the order the list's own archive numbered them as they arrived, which is why a reply can carry an earlier clock time than the message it answers.
• Some text has been reformatted — quoted passages re-joined where a mail client broke them mid-sentence, list footers removed.
• Some of it is missing — see below.

Where accuracy matters, check the original at urth.net.

What is missing

• October 2003 – August 2004. Missing from the original archive.
• Fifty-two months between September 2004 and February 2022, the longest runs being May 2015 – August 2017 and March 2021 – January 2022. Some of those months the list was quiet, so it’s hard to tell what is actually missing (if anything).
• 806 messages named in the reply headers of messages that survive, but never archived. Sixty-four are rebuilt from what the replies quoted; the rest are gaps in a conversation.
• Twenty-three more survive in the Wayback Machine as single pages and have not been fetched yet.
• Whorl: December 1997, January 1998, April 1998. Otherwise whole, November 1996 to January 2002.

If you have any of this, please get in touch. A subscriber’s own mail folder is the likeliest surviving copy of the months no archive kept.

Contact

If you find something wrong or have suggestions, please get in touch.

contact@darkrealm.vip

The mark

The sun in splendour is Héraldique meuble Soleil 2 by Bruno Vallette, used under CC BY-SA 3.0. Recoloured and rescaled to fit the type; the outline is his.