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Side note to Craig: Yes, THE JEWEL-HINGED JAW is excellent, as is its successor, STARBOARD WINE. Chris writes: Goodness, how dare I argue after that flattery? 8*) But I seem to…
24 Apr 2003, 20:17
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Me: Gareth (I reverse the order of your paragraphs to come to my point more quickly): I suppose the word "exact" is what prompted my question. Obviously it does not mean that "ev…
24 Apr 2003, 17:45
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Blattid: Matthew: It seems to me that you are saying here that persons (characters) and events (narrative) are not part of "the real," but places (streets and caves) and inanimat…
24 Apr 2003, 17:41
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Me: Sepia: Actually, I think what it fails to correspond with is fact. Reality, truth, fact: three different concepts that need to be distinguished clearly. Something that can b…
24 Apr 2003, 17:13
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Sepia ends by writing: I think you're right, and so will cut to a few points where ... well, we don't necessarily _dis_agree but perhaps emphasize different aspects. And I have so…
23 Apr 2003, 22:12
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Sepia writes: ...taken to its (logical?) conclusion, this line of thought may lead us to conclude that _all_ texts are in some important sense fiction, that "history," "biography,…
23 Apr 2003, 19:44
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My reply to Pa.Nutria, I hope, answered Mike Sakesegawa's question, and some of ArchD'Ikon Zibethicus' also. But Zibethicus asks other questions I want to address. Usual warnings …
23 Apr 2003, 19:05
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Fair warnings as before. Pa.N. rephrases: Well, though I still wish to avoide the "real" question, I at least have some clue as to how to approach this. Further, I think I can me…
23 Apr 2003, 17:42
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Matthew inquires: Can you show me a fictive universe which maps exactly against the real? If so, how can you know it does? (Note that I am, with courage and restraint, refrainin…
23 Apr 2003, 16:29
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Thank you. Yes ... ... but ... ... _all_ fiction is set in a parallel world or alternate history. This is perhaps an intensified way of stating the case, but I believe it is fu…
23 Apr 2003, 04:06
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Fair warning: This is going to be boring to about 50% of listmembers; contains a lot of stuff that some of you have seen before, either from me or from outside reading; and I don't…
22 Apr 2003, 19:26
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It's also (imho) telling that he says -- using Wolfean bigwords -- that Jolenta, who brought out lesbian tendencies ('tribidism') in many women, brought out sadistic tendencies ('a…
21 Apr 2003, 23:47
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H'mmm. While I agree that RAH's writing about sex (both in the concrete and the abstract) is very little short of abysmal, it's never affected me that way: possibly because I _am_ …
21 Apr 2003, 19:09
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I wrote and Deacon Mushrat responded: Yes, yes, yes, sort of, and yes. I say "sort of" for Burroughs because he's writing outside the SF genre, using tropes from the SF/F toolbox …
20 Apr 2003, 03:39
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Oh, good lord, I remember THE HARRAD EXPERIMENT. Leon Urine, wasn't it? Or packaged to look like his stuff anyway (I remember seeing it on the racks next to MILA-somethingteen). My…
20 Apr 2003, 01:27
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You mean like the religious bigot in JOB, or the female narrators in FRIDAY and TO SAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET (and even chunks of "THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST--"? I'm just sayin', is all .…
18 Apr 2003, 17:57
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Clarification: I refer to the books, not the man. The Cornelius books, the S'n'S megaseries, the Pyat books, the Dancers ... all Moorcock's work seems to me to breathe the thick at…
18 Apr 2003, 16:19
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'70s? With a career that extends from the mid-'60s to (thus far) 2003, calling Fairport Convention '70s _anything_ seems a bit ... well, inaccurate anyway. They definitely begin wi…
18 Apr 2003, 15:46
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Allan Lloyd writes ... in part ... [...] Now, I haven't read all these. (I suspect that even Moorcock hasn't read everything Moorcock has written.) But I think that some of the e…
17 Apr 2003, 17:33
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Yves Menard, not at all the author of the Quixote, points out thatthe animals Isangoma mentions are South African in origin and observes that: Which is much better stated than my…
17 Apr 2003, 16:40
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Rostrum writes (excerpt, excerpt): Alternative view: I tried three times to read PALE FIRE and never once succeeded in getting more than 20 pages into it. It is, to me, one of the…
16 Apr 2003, 16:10
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Che, Thanks for the kind words about my theorizing. Or (3) Severian is accustomed to "lifting body" style "fliers." SHADOW, ch. XXI (pp.191-2 in my Timescape h/c): Into vie…
16 Apr 2003, 03:34
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Forgive me if this has already been done, but ... I recall a while back there was an argument that the Jungle Garden scene was connected somehow to the South America of roughly-ou…
15 Apr 2003, 16:35
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First, I want to chime in agreement for the Ted Chiang collection. Reading it was like having my head blown off several times with small weapons fire. Astonishing writing about cra…
14 Apr 2003, 17:09
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This is a great topic. I have three especial favorites. They're all from tBotNS, and they're all (I'm afraid) rather long. 1. I think Wolfe isn't generally so much a writer of me…
11 Apr 2003, 05:01
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If you please, we blattidae hiss or crackle. We do not yelp. Alas, the real explanation was much more mundane and kind of dumb. Back in February, my employer changed the format fo…
10 Apr 2003, 23:42
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Just testing to see if I can post now. If so, thanks, Ranjit!…
10 Apr 2003, 19:20
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Aaargh. I can't _believe_ I left Tim out of my list. I even had my copy of "Earthquake Weather" in my pocket when I was making it. Last Call / Expiration Date / Earthquake Weath…
01 Mar 2003, 01:01
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H'mmm. I guess some of this depends on what you mean by "younger generation." Many of the '60s/'70s "New Wave" writers are technically younger than Wolfe. I'll assume you mean so…
28 Feb 2003, 18:25
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Really, I'm surprised nobody's mentioned either of the obvious in-genre examples: Sturgeon. Almost anything after about 1950 by Sturgeon. But even more: Le Guin. Especially TE…
20 Feb 2003, 23:09
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Marc, this is really reaching. A generation might, conceivably, be enough time for the appearance of some double-limbed monsters. No argument there. But a generation isn't -- a t…
20 Feb 2003, 20:50
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Fair enough ... I tend to use terms like "the Christian view" to refer to the mainstream views (i.e., those shared by Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and most of the larger and ol…
19 Feb 2003, 20:34
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Bouncing off some of Nigel's points ... I'm not quite ready to pronounce the coming of Summer, but ... Yes/no ... and likewise yes/no to the original statement that the Christian …
19 Feb 2003, 00:05
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...which was hardly my point. I was just directing attention to a bit of current science that I figured would be of interest to Wolfe readers, because of his cosmological concerns.…
14 Feb 2003, 19:30
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Probably reverse-engineering ... with data like this, I suppose they have enough information to work out the higher- order differentials (i.e., the rate change of the rate of cha…
14 Feb 2003, 18:31
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Unfortunately for those of us who like cyclic universe theories, it appears that "The universe will expand=20 forever. It will not turn back on itself and collapse=20 in a great cr…
14 Feb 2003, 17:26
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Mantis asked: Huh?!? Sputter!?! You know, the question of what sex (or age, or race, or any other physical characteristic) of the narrator never came up in my mind. Not once. …
07 Feb 2003, 18:27
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Okay, I was hoping people would wait a day or two and let one-and-all get read "Castaway" before the spoilage should begin ... but since it has, some thinks from the blattidaean mi…
07 Feb 2003, 17:26
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There's a new (posted yesterday) Wolfe story, "Castaway,"=20 on scifi.com: http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/wolfe2/ No spoilers, but I think it's one o…
06 Feb 2003, 23:36
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Oops ... and I even knew that. If I recall correctly, when Detective Comics Comics began publishing revisionist tales of the Big Red Cheese, in the late '70s, they memorialized …
03 Feb 2003, 16:44
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Adam wrote ... Aside from the well-known "The Music Man" reference, there's another thing that might be of interest ... a subtle joke known to some comix fans, perpetrated by C.C…
31 Jan 2003, 16:36
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Josh Geller wrote... H'mmmm. "Baldanders" is _from_ Borges, if I recall correctly ... and there's nothing about him that particularly makes me think of Delany, his fiction or hi…
29 Jan 2003, 20:02
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Rostrum asks: One of the most fabulously useful resources on the Web is the Online Books Page at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ an attempt to keep up and index all books an…
27 Jan 2003, 17:08
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I think "more" -- in that he's not asking to have Seawrack back on the terms Horn-in-Horn's-body had her before; he is (I think) asking the Mother for her freedom.…
27 Jan 2003, 16:48
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I think rather "actual 'supernatural' beings," though not necessarily gods. -- I put the word "supernatural" in quotes because I believe, and I believe that Wolfe either believes o…
24 Jan 2003, 17:09
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Don't see why not ... I was trying to keep my list Merkin.…
24 Jan 2003, 17:07
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Not to mention _Time and the River_, _A Man in Full_, and _You Can't Go Home Again_. But while we're at it let's not forget ... Gary K. Wolfe (SF critic) L.E. Wolfe (author of t…
24 Jan 2003, 16:56
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The one thing we all seem to agree upon is that the weird scene at the end of OBW is a major turning point, and key to any full interpretation of _SS_. I've never been quite able …
23 Jan 2003, 16:38
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Not so; Dionysius also died. Frequently.…
23 Jan 2003, 00:33
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Not necessarily ... consider the Hebrew calendar, which has twelve lunar months and adds a thirteenth "leap" month when needed -- it's needed in seven years out of the calendar's …
21 Jan 2003, 16:41
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