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How do you know this? I haven't read The Wizard, but I recall somebody writing on this list that each world but the topmost is basically made out of stuff rejected by the world abo…
26 Sep 2007, 21:45
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Hello again, everyone. I haven't posted for a long time, for various reasons, but when I saw that this was a thread about Able's thuggishness, I couldn't resist. It's nice to see t…
21 Sep 2007, 18:40
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Lafferty is one of my very favorite authors. I would start with _Nine Hundred Grandmothers_, his first story collection; it's his most new reader-friendly collection, and probably …
25 Jul 2007, 16:06
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Rereading this passage, I noticed something odd. Like you, I had believed that the Apr. 23 entry, as well as the note preceding it, were written by V.R.T. (as the officer's behavio…
09 May 2007, 15:32
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I wasn't doubting that articles could be written on controversial issues. Rather, I was concerned that such articles might either devolve into "editing wars" or become long and sh…
07 Jul 2006, 14:18
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That would certainly meet my objections as far as editing is concerned. There's still the question of copyright. I'm not aware of the ins and outs of various licenses, but I presum…
05 Jul 2006, 21:51
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As somebody who at one time did a fair amount of posting to the list, I'm not thrilled with the idea of all my posts being thrust willy-nilly into the public domain. I'm even less …
03 Jul 2006, 15:16
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I looked at _Attending Daedalus_ a few months ago and wasn't impressed. As best as I can remember, these were my main objections: 1. I really would like to accept Wright's reading…
29 Jan 2006, 15:38
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On the personal blog of the person who wrote that post, there are two other posts on Wolfe: http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2005/09/on_terrible_neo.html and http://acep…
22 Oct 2005, 01:35
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As far as I know, there is no evidence that the Increate considered the shaping of the Hierogrammates to be a sin. The Hieros' shaping of the Hierogrammates is spoken of in terms e…
07 Apr 2005, 17:03
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For that matter, the destruction of Urth doesn't cost the aquastors who fought with Severian anything, since they only exist inside Severian's head. There are only two real people …
07 Apr 2005, 17:02
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Agreed. As I read it, the punishment was placing the black hole in the Sun, and the New Sun is the lifting of that punishment. Tzadkiel's words to Severian at the "trial," and Aphe…
01 Apr 2005, 11:59
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But no bigger a problem than those in the real world who died before Jesus's birth. For that matter, the inhabitants of Urth are virtually all damned anyway. There was a discussion…
30 Mar 2005, 20:28
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on 3/24/05 6:55 PM, Dayton Williams at lord_dimwit at hotmail.com wrote: [snip] Did you investigate the archives? While their size can be overwhelming, there's a lot of useful stuff…
28 Mar 2005, 07:57
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I never found Urth as depicted in BotNS to be particularly surreal, or unreal. Picaresque, yes, but not surreal. UotNS, though, I did find disjointed and dreamlike to the point of …
28 Mar 2005, 07:56
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True; but, if the universe of the Sun cycle is our universe, then the Incarnation has already taken place; whereas if it's a previous universe, as Wolfe once said in an interview, …
28 Mar 2005, 07:56
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But as soon as they were evacuated they'd start breeding at normal rates. Asked who will survive, Baldanders says "Those on ships, possibly. Those whose ships are in the air or in…
28 Mar 2005, 07:55
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My recollection of the five books is spotty, but here's what I found looking through UotNS. First Idas tries to kill Sev, but he assumes it's because she's working for Abaia (51). …
27 Mar 2005, 11:41
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Do you have a quote for this? You certainly know the text better than I do; but my vague recollection had been that while the H's believe they are doing the will of the Increate, t…
25 Mar 2005, 18:28
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Even if the Urthians who would be evacuated would be only a fraction of Urth's population, they'd probably be more numerous than those who survive the New Sun's coming are; and hen…
24 Mar 2005, 14:25
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I was thinking of stories like "The Blue Mouse," "Bluesberry Jam," and the fairly recent one, whose title I forget, where the protagonist is on the run from a female IRS agent. --…
16 Feb 2005, 20:22
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The interviewer mentions Wolfe's use of the "concept of the messiah" as a theme, and asks him how he has been able to keep his "emotions ... [from] block[ing] the intellectual exam…
13 Feb 2005, 08:01
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I'd said I wouldn't rehearse my objections to the Silk-to-Pig-to-Horn scenario, but other people have raised the issue, here are some of my reasons for believing that Silk's memori…
13 Jan 2005, 14:51
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I won't rehearse my disagreement with the "PigSilkHorn" scenario again, but I did want to mention something that I just noticed (if this has been noted already, I apologize). When …
06 Jan 2005, 18:45
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Upon thinking about it some more, Gaiman doesn't do it as often as I'd had the impression he did. In fact, the only real example I can think of is "Murder Mysteries," which is in h…
08 Dec 2004, 07:05
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A couple of comments before we lahy this to rest (as we seem to have reached the point of talking past each other): But Gaiman could have figured out some way to have the Professo…
29 Nov 2004, 07:01
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Sorry it's taken so long to reply; I was out of town. Actually, on the question of sex roles in Narnia, either in general or as regards "the problem of Susan" in particular, I don'…
19 Nov 2004, 17:52
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Thanks for your courteous reply; I'll try to keep my answer in kind. In fact, I remembered that scene. I was a fan of the Narnia books as a child and read them all, most of them m…
07 Nov 2004, 18:11
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I'll confess that when I started this topic I was being a bit of a provocateur (though there's at least one person on the list who iirc shares Gaiman's view), so I appreciate both …
05 Nov 2004, 14:23
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The fantasy anthology FLIGHTS, which contains a novella by Wolfe (at least according to the editor, though the boundary between a novella and a novelette has never been clear to me…
28 Oct 2004, 20:02
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UotNS does more to raise new enigmas than to resolve old ones, imho. Iirc, Wolfe said somewhere that his editor had originally wanted him to add a paragraph or so to the end of Ci…
02 Oct 2004, 16:25
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In the archives to HogBlog (http://www.koschei.net/blog/ July 15, 2003), I came across the following description of Wolfe's talk on Catholicism and SF at Readercon: "Gene Wolfe gav…
08 Aug 2003, 18:39
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-------Original Message------- I would go along with this. I too find Little, Big deeply moving; but if you don't, I don't think that there's any "key" which will make you like i…
28 Jul 2003, 14:54
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And Wolfe undoubtedly knows he doesn't have a perfect memory. Which is why, if he had intended to create a character with a perfect memory, and to provide many illustrations of th…
14 Jul 2003, 13:25
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What convinces me is the number of discrepancies Roy has found, rather than any specific one. We know that Wolfe is a careful writer; if he were going to create a character who re…
12 Jul 2003, 14:25
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Going back to Terry's original question, on 4/14/03 8:43 AM, Terry Lago at Confining myself to the five major-publisher collections, which are _The Island of Dr. Death..._, _Castl…
19 Apr 2003, 13:51
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Yuck; this may be my least favorite Wolfe story, with its combination of misogyny and heavy-handed satire. I do like the bit about "her Louis XIV secretary, Sal," though. I've ne…
19 Apr 2003, 13:42
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Thank you for your kind words; I appreciate them a great deal. I wouldn't have done anything without your and Michael's encouragement. And congratulations on the book finally app…
08 Mar 2003, 02:57
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No problem. I just wasn't clear where you were coming from. To clarify what I was talking about with TAD and TBOTLS (and, rereading what I wrote, I see I was unclear), what I was…
20 Feb 2003, 20:17
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I haven't read the Soldier books in a long time, and my memory of them is dim, so you may well be right about Latro. But V.R.T. is searching for the truth about himself, not for h…
20 Feb 2003, 20:17
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[snip] Well, the paragraph you quote was triggered by my rereading Patrick O'Leary's THE IMPOSSIBLE BIRD, which, while it may not be "about love," does contain convincing depictio…
18 Feb 2003, 01:51
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It's odd, but there are some considerations which make it more plausible. For one thing, for every dead father there's a woman who is a mother, and probably a mother with one or mo…
03 Feb 2003, 22:43
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Neat! I'm a fan of Beck's Captain Marvel, but I never noticed that. Actually, Captain Marvel was published not by Dell, but by Fawcett -- which got its start with Captain Billy's…
01 Feb 2003, 05:07
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Actually, I think I basically agree with you on that point. A man who holds onto his doll is choosing an ideal woman over a real woman, and hence depriving a real woman of a chanc…
30 Jan 2003, 14:40
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Captain Billy's Whiz Bang? <g> This was a popular American humor magazine of the 1920s and 1930s, though far less sophisticated than the New Yorker; see http://www.compedit.com/wh…
29 Jan 2003, 15:02
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[snip] I'm not quite sure what you're disagreeing with. But if it was the assertion in my final paragraph, I probably expressed myself more strongly than I'd meant to. I didn't …
26 Jan 2003, 15:11
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I may be forgetting something again, but I don't remember getting the impression that unmarried men were in grave danger, Al Bailey's fate notwithstanding. In any case, marrying f…
25 Jan 2003, 14:20
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On rereading the relevant passages, I'm inclined to agree with Roy that the dolls are more like toys for children. If Tina was meant to be worshipped, why would she call her owner…
24 Jan 2003, 15:08
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Could you elaborate? It's been a long time since I've read the novel, but I don't recall any indications of this. --Adam…
22 Jan 2003, 14:51
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Both these things may not represent traditions indigenous to Otherworld, but bits of our culture that have "leaked" across. Otherworld could have adopted Christmas as a purely sec…
21 Jan 2003, 14:52
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