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How fun. Not that you need the suggestion, but one of my favorite books is all about this theme of warfare and competitive pressures of various kinds pushing (and corrupting) scie…
16 Nov 2017, 16:22
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This has been suggested before, but I don't think anyone has offered a good answer to: why should Chris or Chris's son becoming Blackbeard be the esoteric meaning of _Pirate Freedo…
29 Apr 2015, 15:33
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I saw this anti-Puppy argument previously brought up in, I think, a New Republic blog; they added on as another example R.A. Lafferty. It doesn't work because of the timing: the po…
28 Apr 2015, 16:31
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An interesting bit about the politics of _The Land Across_:…
02 Oct 2014, 19:20
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Thoughts on this classification? Going through them: 1. new gods: no, Forlesen is powerless and the universe is old 2. praisers: no 3. soldiers: no 4. sportsmen in paradise: no 5.…
14 Sep 2014, 19:04
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Exactly. On the other hand, if he has some source of information about the egg, then conditional on his new information each day, he may be able to update his beliefs as he goes al…
07 Sep 2014, 14:16
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Hard to say. It could be a reflection of her age and old-person smell: sandalwood is an old perfume and scented smoke source, but it also has some medicinal uses including as a fum…
27 Aug 2014, 15:22
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That's an out-of-universe reason for the setting yes, but look carefully at Odilo's introduction: he tells us it's Halloween and he's heard silly false stories: But even though th…
26 Aug 2014, 19:46
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Inire is an ambiguous character all along; remember he is not human, and is partially responsible for the destruction of Urth and murdering millions/billions of people for the sake…
26 Aug 2014, 19:40
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I found the thing 'not unlike a doll' to be quite mysterious when I first read it. I thought that it might be the returned form of the cat, but since it was buried with Sancha and…
26 Aug 2014, 18:59
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Dicken doesn't seem to come up much. In the one hit in the copies I have: Herbert came up in the same session though: Might be more hits on Urth.net but you'll have to struggle t…
07 Aug 2014, 15:47
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Tarnung is likely a Ring reference to the Tarnhelm, which grants invisibility. Given that the other magic item is a maser which creates waves of coherent straight radiation, the Ta…
07 Aug 2014, 00:03
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It's hard not to read _Island of Dr Moreau_ as a twisted Garden of Eden scenario: a tropical paradise isolated from the rest of the world, overseen by a benevolent creator, who rai…
28 Jul 2014, 15:30
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I don't recognize any actual argument in your email. All I see is venting about how 'offended' you are. So what. Why is it off-limits to discuss Wolfe's impending death? That is o…
14 Jul 2014, 15:17
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Doesn't that same objection of the logical indeterminacy of language, pace Wittgenstein & Quine, also apply to natural language?…
21 Jun 2014, 14:37
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An impressive overview as expected, but one point felt under-addressed. Wolfe seems to think that the 'uninvented inventions' are a major theme of the story, but you hardly mentio…
08 Jun 2014, 21:50
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And another post on Crooked Timber: http://crookedtimber.org/2014/05/07/gene-wolfe-is-82/…
07 May 2014, 20:14
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Is the translation good?…
17 Jan 2014, 23:03
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Yes. Grepping my 5 ebooks of _New Sun_, there are the following hits: There was a sudden intensity in his quavering voice. "Severian, the king was elected at the Marchfield. …
18 Dec 2013, 16:20
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So to put this in further context: Now, when I hear 'soothsayers' in close proximity to 'one suit', my instant expectation is that we are talking about Tarot and fortunetelling. F…
17 Dec 2013, 00:57
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_The Fall of Rome_ has come up once or twice on the Lafferty forums. It's a pretty odd book. I had the opportunity to read most of it in a library once. IIRC, it was sort of a nonf…
03 Dec 2013, 04:30
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Curious. Comes off as a mish-mash of a Cold war anti-Communist potboiler and the Dracula myth (Transylvania, national paranoid fear of 'the Turks') with some jarring contemporary f…
22 Oct 2013, 14:34
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I've heard a great deal about ICO, and own _Shadow of the Colossus_. They're famous as the standard examples now for 'games as literature', because of how they have a theme or mess…
23 Sep 2013, 16:17
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Yes, there's one apparently largely finished and soon to come out; google 'The Land Across' for previous links and news articles.…
05 Aug 2013, 18:04
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I think the post is pretty clear that that is not what was going on there; the studio simply wanted to guarantee that a competing film couldn't be made. It's a good thing - Laffert…
14 Jul 2013, 19:33
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Well, I wouldn't swear to it - I am hearing impaired and so I'm not *sure* that's what he said, but it certainly sounded like it. Feel free to listen to that section, it's not long…
26 Jun 2013, 17:24
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How sure are we that Obama was born on Urth? Where is his birth certificate proving he was native-born in Ascia as required by the Constitution? Perhaps he's really from the Common…
30 Apr 2013, 16:46
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It's surprisingly rare: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=autarch&year_start00&year_end 00&corpus&smoothing=3&sharehttp://i.imgur.com/tvf6jCT.png A direct Google Book…
18 Apr 2013, 16:02
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Sequelae: - Photo of Wolfe: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/oldonliner/8625154326/ - 2:03 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_ppTMudsp0…
17 Apr 2013, 02:02
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I've never heard this claim before, and it sounds pretty interesting. Is there anything I can read on this topic?…
10 Apr 2013, 16:51
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But it can work. There are commensal worms, and mutualistic worms. They may not be as famous as the partnership between nitrogen-fixing bacteria and plant roots, but they exist. We…
10 Apr 2013, 16:06
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It sounds much more like a maggot or worm origin to me.…
10 Apr 2013, 14:22
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Low prices could be due either to oversupply *or* lack of demand. I do not recall anything in 5HOC indicating that people are procreating so much that they cannot afford their chil…
03 Apr 2013, 22:39
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Synopsis: I'm not sure why, but for some reason I thought that _The Land Across_ was going to involve time travel or dinosaurs!…
10 Mar 2013, 03:33
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A biography is hard work: who will fund the years of work for a really good one? How would one convince Wolfe to cooperate and that one isn't a flake? Anyone who needs some emails…
17 Dec 2012, 17:02
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JJ: So Lewis and Chesterton would have been among the formative influences in your paradigm. GW: Oh yes, very definitely. JJ: Could you name others, within the area of t…
17 Dec 2012, 16:52
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That's charitable, yes. If we go by Thalassocrat's timeline, he claimed IIRC, that Chris was born in 2007? If he really was, then the monorails are not very strong evidence of bei…
27 Nov 2012, 19:13
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A Ferguson update from Google Alerts: http://news.virginia.edu/content/phd-student-one-three-national-book-collecting-contest-winners…
22 Oct 2012, 02:20
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Also of interest: http://litreactor.com/columns/primer-gene-wolfe-the-subtle-master…
10 Oct 2012, 19:16
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I think it's much more likely this was just an early clone experiment, abandoned due to poor impulse control & self-discipline.…
27 Aug 2012, 20:37
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I read this long ago, but nuclear fallout never occurred to me. It doesn't fit in a story about ecology & money, a sudden nuclear war wouldn't be a persistent hazard over the entir…
02 Aug 2012, 22:04
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I sincerely hope the Founding Fathers would not have endorsed those predictions when they were made; I had more respect for them. (On the other hand, the colonists *were* conspirac…
01 Aug 2012, 20:52
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I have a long-standing interest in predictions and what they reveal, which would alone would justify my interest, but besides that... I care because I wish one of my favorite auth…
28 Jul 2012, 14:18
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Perfectly possible: one of Lafferty's semi-historical novels was about some noble Indians in the early Western period, _Okla Hannali_. And there's some fairly overt commentary in t…
07 Jun 2012, 00:51
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The timing and subject matter remind me of one of R.A. Lafferty's more famous short stories, "Narrow Valley".…
07 Jun 2012, 00:05
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The book *is* dedicated effusively to Gaiman by Wolfe; it's not unreasonable to think that Wolfe targeted it at Gaiman or simply gave Gaiman some hints or something. I took a quic…
04 May 2012, 15:32
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Hm, we didn't think it was very deep - Bax was indeed the evil twin who by the end murders his brother and usurps his wife and possessions, just like Emlyn was the evil twin and Ie…
03 May 2012, 20:44
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Probably: He had like 220 published short stories, so 'vast majority' is probably wrong there, but I don't recall 16 published novels, and then there's all the poetry and miscella…
16 Apr 2012, 14:27
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The info on his estate was also interesting, as frustratingly oblique as he is. I hadn't known about the extended family (which is weird, why didn't it go to one specific relative)…
16 Apr 2012, 02:34
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What 'may' happen is irrelevant; what matters is what does happen, since you are criticizing status quos. As has been pointed out many times because it's apparently so counterintu…
12 Apr 2012, 00:52
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