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Josh Geller asked: I haven't heard of that one, unless you mean "The Game in the Pope's Head" (or less likely, "How the Bishop Sailed to Inniskeen"). The first is in RIPPER!, an …
17 Jun 2002, 19:33
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TAKE MY ADVICE is a book of letters from people, advice to younger generations. The advice-givers are from a fairly wide spectrum. Gene Wolfe has a letter in there. The book is …
03 Jun 2002, 00:31
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So we posit a technocratic solution, a human-to-inhumi blood bank. Foster dependence, or codify the biological to nullify the unpleasant while accepting the unchangeable. Somehow…
31 May 2002, 18:04
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There does not seem to be any objection to the basic notion of "Wolfe-lite," nor to the placing of PANDORA BY HOLLY HOLLANDER as the ultimate example of Wolfe-lite. The contrast t…
30 May 2002, 17:40
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Thank you for giving us this example. It seems that you disliked URTH on first read because it seemed jumbled, pointless, and/or it did not add anything to your reading of TBOTNS.…
27 May 2002, 14:25
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Thank you for the example. This must be a fairly common experience for Wolfe-readers: the reader, through talking with other readers, through reading lit crit from John Clute and …
26 May 2002, 20:52
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In writing once again (no doubt seen for the first time by many) about his disappointment in TBOSS, William Ansley writes: Ah! I will steer clear of the more irritating aspects o…
26 May 2002, 14:07
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WorldCon 2002, in San Jose' California. August 29 to September 2. Gene Wolfe intends to be there. I just sent in my check, so I'll be there. Anybody else around here planning on…
24 May 2002, 17:48
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Adam Stephanides asked me to name the titles to my atomic-scale reviews. THE FOUR JOHNS is the one that is "screamingly good until it completely blows out (alas!)"; THE MADMAN TH…
21 May 2002, 15:44
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I would not argue too strenously with you. If you want to see Gene Wolfe's take on TDE, see his essay "The Living Earth" in JACK VANCE: CRITICAL APPRECIATIONS AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY. …
20 May 2002, 17:57
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Blattid reported: Sounds good. So would Steinbeck's CANNERY ROW and Jack Vance's THE DYING EARTH both be further examples of "story suites", or are they something-else-again? =m…
11 May 2002, 00:31
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Intriguing notion! I haven't read much Lafferty, he exists in one of my blindspots, but it is possible. APOCALYPSES, perhaps? Not that collection, STRANGE DOINGS, I don't think .…
07 May 2002, 23:54
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If there are no abos, really, and never were, then how to explain the astronomical observatory--the trees predate the French colonists by around 120 years. Maybe they grew that wa…
07 May 2002, 16:05
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Does THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY (1911) have some reference to that title? In any event, it shows up, with a little quote, in Bierce's short story "The Man and the Snake" (1891). See h…
07 May 2002, 04:47
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Umm, that's the Romulus and Remus bit, iirc. When I read Romulus and Remus, I don't see "interplanetary war" . . . do you? Fish and Frog are certainly urban vs. rural, without qu…
07 May 2002, 00:41
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I wrote "A Closer Look at the Brown Book" (New York Review of Science Fiction #54, Feb. 1993). I remain quite interested. To blattid: I think there are strong parallels between t…
06 May 2002, 23:37
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Ladies and Gentlemen, Late breaking news--LEXICON URTHUS is now officially out of print. Some are still in the distributor system, so orders via Amazon.com might still be filled …
02 May 2002, 02:54
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Leaving aside the issues of shape-changing (yes/no), and abo existence (yes/no), one thing I think this quote does point to rather strongly is telepathy in general and the weird ps…
26 Apr 2002, 23:15
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When you write "prehistoric," do you mean "from Gondwonaland"? If so, the adjective form is "Gondwonan"; this might help telegraph your position with greater precision. If you do…
24 Apr 2002, 13:29
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Regarding a timeline for 5HC that puts humans originating from another star Adam Stephanides, re-reading the Gene Wolfe interview (1992), quotes and responds: =mantis= SIRIUS F…
21 Apr 2002, 16:46
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Adam Stephanides told the story, just in time, too, since I would have done it in another hour or two. The only thing I would add is that the story itself was published in Damon K…
19 Apr 2002, 16:05
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Well hey, if people are still perculating on 5HC, get on over to Ultan's Library and read the two essays there. First by Peter Wright, who, as I've written before, does a great jo…
16 Apr 2002, 21:06
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Alga quoted John Barach and responded: Roman V, as well as being a numeral, was also the vowel "u." For French-speaking citizens of the double planets, W (as in Wolfe) is double-…
16 Apr 2002, 13:38
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I don't recall if this has been noted already or not, but our own Robert Borski is mentioned by name in the David Hartwell intro to Gene Wolfe's "The Walking Sticks" in David Hartw…
16 Apr 2002, 01:08
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Well iirc you don't like (Harold Bloom's favorite) A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS enough to re-read it because it is too much in the perversity and cruelty dept. So maybe the 5HC novella ma…
14 Apr 2002, 01:11
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No, I'm not trying to make a new list of uncollected pieces, honest! At the moment I have a side project, or a trivia question that I don't want to clutter up the list with. So i…
10 Apr 2002, 15:28
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I can't recall any detail from the Urth Cycle that shows Lune as having a surface gravity of 1 g. Please remind me. I know that I have speculated upon Lune's local day being shor…
06 Apr 2002, 15:18
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Further possibilities flowing from the notion of Green being in an outer orbit relative to Blue. A six year planetary orbit in our solar system would be somewhere in the region of…
29 Mar 2002, 03:56
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The latest recurrence of the thread on human/alien DNA compatibility has brought to my mind what I consider to be the strongest cases. The "Sector General" works of Ted White; gal…
27 Mar 2002, 16:49
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That's funny, because I don't normally think of the people of the Commonwealth having saints (granted that they are all named after Catholic saints, but I have never seen this as a…
26 Mar 2002, 19:09
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Duh! In my previous figurings, I put Green as a Venus stand-in. Those jungles, doncha know. But hey, if Green is a full disk in the sky (iirc it is always a disk, never crescent…
26 Mar 2002, 00:39
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Everybody has different opinions about ranking stories. Nick Gevers dislikes "Walking Sticks," but I like it, in fact I probably like it better than "Hour of Trust." But now I'm …
25 Mar 2002, 19:12
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I am toying with the idea of how to create a composite built up of votes, rankings. It wouldn't be done online here--I think people would send me emails using a ballot I would pos…
24 Mar 2002, 20:33
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Yes, it should. Alas, it is not. This is the technical aside. (Rather like the way that "Folia's Story: the Armiger's Daughter" Amazing/Fantastic 11-82, is actually the tale told…
22 Mar 2002, 03:46
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John Barach whipped up a very nice list. Good job! (I wish you'd done it 12 hours earlier, but still.) UME reports this as being a group title for 4 pieces: At the Volcano's Lip …
22 Mar 2002, 02:42
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Is it? Dang! I was just cringing at the Ultan's Library typo (which may in fact be correct according to your title), so I double-checked against "Urth Man Extraordinary" (not "Ur…
21 Mar 2002, 22:03
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Right. Well you've just caught me at a bad time for such a thing: recent discussion about a story that has bugged me for 20 years ("Hour of Trust"), and then the rediscovery of a (…
21 Mar 2002, 19:52
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Rostrum, Okay, we have found the list at Ultan's Library! (Some of the library rats were using it as a slide for a theme park based on Chutes and Ladders.) Well, it needs to be …
21 Mar 2002, 17:37
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I recently read the Hartwell/Cramer anthology THE ASCENT OF WONDER: THE EVOLUTION OF HARD SF. It is a good antho; it is a thick antho; it has two Wolfe stories in it ("Procreation…
18 Mar 2002, 21:14
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Another possibility that I don't think we ever discussed around here is that Green might be so far removed from "nature" that, rather than thinking of it as a world or a terraforme…
14 Mar 2002, 17:34
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Experiment: build a model in our solar system. Let Blue = Earth, move Venus out a bit, rename it "Ishtar," and let's see. I want Ishtar to orbit within Martyn Fogg's "Moist Greenh…
14 Mar 2002, 02:30
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New experiment: we want to see how far away Earth-like planets would be in order to have an angular diameter about equal to the Moon and the Sun seen from Earth (0.52 degrees). Th…
13 Mar 2002, 22:52
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As a matter of fact Typhon represents an alien invader, and it seems probable that he brought the exultants along with him. From how far afield they came (perhaps as nearby as Sku…
13 Mar 2002, 02:53
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Another way to approach the Blue/Green conjunction is to determine the size of Green in the sky of Blue, from its "usual" size to its greatest size at closest approach. For simpli…
13 Mar 2002, 02:19
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No. The sequence itself is rather non-chronological (as I recall), but it was published in the following order: THE PASTEL CITY A STORM OF WINGS IN VIRICONIUM (also known as THE F…
12 Mar 2002, 19:07
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Jerry Friedman quoted and queried ". . . the Forests of Lune, fifty thousand leagues away" (III, ch. 32, para. 4). "LEAGUE, a unit of distance equal to three miles" (AMERICAN HER…
12 Mar 2002, 00:46
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Right. I don't. He seems to have intent; and from the text he seems to have the ability (unless that power stopped once the white fountain was in place). There are half-glipmses o…
10 Mar 2002, 02:53
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Adam Stephanides asked about some stories. I'll quote Joan Gordon by way of reply, adding a little: "Wolfe's first published science-fiction story, this is an initiation story sh…
07 Mar 2002, 21:09
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In "Languages of the Dying Sun" (Damien Broderick's EARTH IS BUT A STAR; also in NYRSF No. 149) I wrote something somewhat similar. I was talking about how Wolfe uses techniques t…
05 Mar 2002, 16:03
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Assuming that Lune Diameter = 2160 miles, and Orbit = 150,000 miles . . . And using formula S = 57.3 * D/R Shows us that the angular diameter (i.e., size in sky from Urth) of Lun…
04 Mar 2002, 00:17
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