-
I hardly need to mention it, but gee. And we have such proven talent around here--alga's paean to Cordwainer Smith "Miyameefla" (sung to tune of "Mona Lisa") springs to mind. I b…
26 Feb 2002, 19:00
-
Well I'm glad someone besides me is watching "Futurama"! :) I had no idea of Turangalila (amazing catch, Nutria!). I had a vague association with the movie . . . hmm, what was it…
26 Feb 2002, 14:20
-
I was looking for something else at a cavernous used bookstore. A Bova anthology popped up, and it had the Gene Wolfe story "The Blue Mouse" in it. Reading the first page I couldn…
24 Feb 2002, 01:09
-
FWIW, and it may add to your argument, Wolfe does use the word "fulgurator" in chapter 7 of SHADOW. =mantis=…
23 Feb 2002, 03:57
-
Yes, I think this is the reading that satisfied our friend Adam Stephanides (whom we haven't heard from since, hmmmm . . . check for burn marks!). That is to say (my sense of it, …
21 Feb 2002, 23:24
-
But this was one of those cases where, once I had sent it, the doubts came in. The tree farm, etc. Things that the military/industrial complex is not assuredly involved in. So th…
20 Feb 2002, 20:47
-
There I was, writing about Nihilism ("Nile-izm," as I pronounce it) and I mentioned the helmeted astronaut in passing (probably Neil Armstrong; with that whole thread created or re…
20 Feb 2002, 15:35
-
Good point, to bring in the Library as another group/mode. But eek, we're lost on that ending again! Definitely--I tried to make clear that it was our questions that were causing…
20 Feb 2002, 04:12
-
Roy Lackey wrote a solid message, beginning: Roy went on to point out more notes on the title, saying that the "hour" in question is pinpointed at the death of the three ken-kins;…
19 Feb 2002, 19:57
-
I do not know much about textual differences in various foreign language translations of TBOTNS. In fact, I know practically nil. However, I do know this: the first volume of the …
15 Feb 2002, 23:29
-
My strong impression is that Bloom enjoys Lindsay and Crowley so very much because their work (well . . . A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS, let us say, since I've never seen Bloom mention any …
11 Feb 2002, 21:58
-
Thank you, Bibliographer! Ah, so your sense is that it was a hoax? =mantis= SIRIUS FICTION booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley 57 Lexicons left until OP! http://www.siriusfict…
11 Feb 2002, 02:56
-
Rumored to be a book published by Tower Publications: "The Making of a Classic: My Experiences Writing The Book of the New Sun" by Gene Wolfe. Google search turns up nothing. Any…
11 Feb 2002, 01:10
-
I must also be at fault: I thought I was using "evolve" as "change from one state to another state." I then qualified it as being good or bad with regard to human institutions suc…
09 Feb 2002, 22:24
-
Joe, your memory is quite good, but your word-hoard contains a few false coins. "Algophilist" is not "ghoul-lover," nor does it function as a synonym for "necrophiliac" as you sug…
05 Feb 2002, 00:03
-
Yes, exactly so. I was trying to keep it within genre, and the Aldiss novel had recently come up anyway within a Wolfe context. I will agree that the delicate phrasing makes this…
03 Feb 2002, 16:25
-
"Hour of Trust" is the short story in THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR DEATH AND OTHER STORIES AND OTHER STORIES. Spoilers to follow. I'm not certain but I'm pretty sure that Kali worshipers…
01 Feb 2002, 00:29
-
Well . . . in general, maybe; in specifics, not exactly. That is to say, the example we have in the text (URTH), is that the Ship sails out of the Briah universe and into the (pre…
07 Jan 2002, 01:26
-
We are told that Gene Wolfe's Tolkien essay was written for that book of essays on Tolkien, but it was not published there after all, and was published in "Interzone." Following t…
04 Jan 2002, 22:14
-
Hello there Andy Robertson, Welcome aboard! Thank you for getting permission to post the essay on your website, and for posting the essay. (And for telling us about it!) It see…
04 Jan 2002, 16:25
-
Thanks Sunanda! Joel Sieh also caught this and I thought he and I had posted to the list! Here is my quote and response to him. Addendum: we both arrived independently at the not…
15 Dec 2001, 15:43
-
Oh, one more thing! This isn't a New Sun tie-in. The love interest in TPM is tortured off-stage (by a fellow who likes pain himself and likes to inflict it, too). As a result of…
15 Dec 2001, 01:25
-
Before I lose the trace thoughts alltogether, I should mention a few notes on THE PARADOX MEN. (I did ask Damien Broderick, and sure enough, he has read TPM, but to my surprise he…
15 Dec 2001, 00:01
-
Recent Gene Wolfe item not mentioned here (iirc): An interview in magazine "Black Gate." =mantis= Sirius Fiction Has Moved To http://www.siriusfiction.com/…
07 Dec 2001, 18:34
-
In the 40s/50s, Charles L. Harness wrote a long work eventually known as THE PARADOX MEN. Recently I read this novel for the first time. Right now I'm looking for folks around he…
01 Dec 2001, 18:20
-
Jerry Friedman wrote I finally asked over on the Whorl side and Rostrum pointed me toward ON BLUE'S WATERS, p. 51. "In addition [to Scleroderma's account], there was a man in Urb…
30 Oct 2001, 11:53
-
Over on the Urth side we were working again on the Invisible Library project. So among all the other texts-within-the-text, we were talking about Scleroderma's "Book of the Long Su…
30 Oct 2001, 09:42
-
Oops. Blaine is not the forger, Louis Gold is the forger of THE LUSTY LAWYER by "Amanda Ros": so should the pseudo-author be '"Amanda Ros" (Louis Gold)'? It is an accent over the…
25 Oct 2001, 15:53
-
"The New York Review of Science Fiction" (issue Number 158, October 2001) has an essay by Robert Borski, "Khaibits and Other Shadows: Looking for Severa in THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN.…
16 Oct 2001, 07:40
-
In light of today's terrible attack on Manhattan, some of us were concerned about our dear alga, aka Alice Turner. She is okay, I'm happy to report. But we also worry about our o…
11 Sep 2001, 14:46
-
_Thrust_ was a fanzine, which then was renamed _Quantum_, and then ceased publication. The remark in question was made by Gene Wolfe himself, as reported in the interview publishe…
05 Sep 2001, 14:57
-
Travel back through time--Today! Note that the compression is based on average speed, not peak speed. This implies, I think, a flight profile Boost/Glide/Boost. I compared a num…
04 Sep 2001, 09:15
-
In light of this year's "Planet of the Apes" fiasco (hey, you all know me, I'm rabidly against remakes--and I was never a huge fan of the Apes franchise, either--so I was quite opp…
21 Aug 2001, 13:18
-
Here's another bit of trivia that I've stumbled upon in correspondence with Gene Wolfe. Maybe someone can use it as an inspiration to write about Gene Wolfe and genre mysteries? …
15 Aug 2001, 15:47
-
Hey gang, Recently the discussion of alternate history touched on Hitler, and the question of "what if a less irrational/idealistic/insane leader had led Germany into WWII and bey…
11 Aug 2001, 17:44
-
I had a conversation with Gene Wolfe a few years ago now, and we got the important topic over with quickly and then just chatted about things that were of more interest and more im…
03 Aug 2001, 13:50
-
I read in the paper this morning that sf author Poul Anderson died of illness on Tuesday at his home in Orinda. =mantis=…
03 Aug 2001, 12:49
-
Roy, We did talk about this before, but it may be too time-consuming to review it. IIRC, I brought up many of the questions you are raising now. Buried on grounds of estate, etc…
17 Jul 2001, 16:27
-
Here's another thought on the reading of the coldhouse prank. A reading that Weer is directly responsible for the prank would seem to be at odds with a "Purgatory" reading of the …
15 Jul 2001, 19:35
-
Hello Dan, and welcome. We did talk about this a lot before, but the search engine might not be able to help (since it was all in the still-open volume?). There is no solid conse…
12 Jul 2001, 16:43
-
I think that Bobby Black seems so real because his episode comes very early in the text (we have nothing to test it against), and the events around the accident are quite detailed …
11 Jul 2001, 11:11
-
Allow me to expand upon that. We read the coldhouse story. Because of the context of the larger novel, and because it is spooky, we sense that Weer is scared. Because of the con…
10 Jul 2001, 09:59
-
Actually she asks "Where is my husband?" This doesn't entirely invalidate what you are saying:they are still talking about existence (either living vs. dead; animate vs. inanimate…
29 Jun 2001, 14:16
-
Hey look! Robert Borski has reactivated the map section of "Cave Canum"! (For a long time there was a space there, but no content. I'd given him some photocopies of original ske…
29 Jun 2001, 09:37
-
For some strange reason I see this story in a very clear light right now. Please forgive me if I belabor the obvious. "Alien Stones" is quite dense. It is a braid of a few diffe…
29 Jun 2001, 08:44
-
Well hey, don't stop there--keep going! And didja ever figure out the base 12 numbering system? We are given a few (3 numbers and the decimal point; there are 7 undefined), and t…
28 Jun 2001, 16:14
-
And alga, she found the show Ghastly, unwatchable. Ha-ha! I found the book unreadable twelve years ago, abandoning it soon after the library fire; yet I found the tv show (first …
28 Jun 2001, 08:01
-
Ah. Okay. Apparently I'm being so sloppy with terms that I'm nearly incomprehensible. SHORT/LONG SUN EARTH biography fiction autobio…
21 Jun 2001, 12:15
-
It was my impression that the word is from Esperanto rather than Italian. Fitting the pattern that seems to exist in some places on the Whorl (and Earth as well), where there is a …
21 Jun 2001, 08:38
-
Hoo, boy. Look here. I mean it! 1) TBOTLS is revealed near the end to have been written by Horn. 2) TBOTSS starts off with some revision to that--it wasn't just Horn, but Horn …
20 Jun 2001, 17:26
Urth Net