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Hmmm. I'm sticking on that "gentle" bit . . . :) Seriously, Cugel the Clever is a ribald rogue of the picaresque school, and Rhialto's mages are . . . words escape me. The other…
20 May 2002, 18:21
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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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You are right! And the trees were not likely cut down by the first starship crew. It was done by the settlers (aka colonists), and the first wave of settlers could not have come …
20 May 2002, 15:52
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Did I attack? Did I attack your motives for writing? I tried to make it clear that I wouldn't touch your opinion, but I took umbrage at your hurtful words that, imho, verge on fl…
20 May 2002, 00:48
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Endy didn't like PANDORA then, and he doesn't like PANDORA now. That's fine. OTOH, PANDORA is in excellent company with CATCHER IN THE RYE! For myself, I like CATCHER better tha…
19 May 2002, 04:50
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Okay, granted the greater degree of pieces altering each other's meaning. Neither one is likely to be a story suite . . . but the final word would have to come from Le Guin. :) OT…
15 May 2002, 17:02
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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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Actually I wasn't thinking of that angle! Even though I've often wondered about the relationship between "Life" and "Books" in PEACE, and "Life's true experience missed while read…
10 May 2002, 03:14
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You present your case well. It does seem odd, the disconnect between killed/not-killed and "gone." Then again, I hope we can agree that there is some kind of linkage between Ardi…
08 May 2002, 20:44
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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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Well hmmm. It seems as certain as his forgery of THE NECRONOMICON and his forgery of Kate's diary. As Adam Stephanides noted before, it is a big pointer to the nature of Gold's b…
07 May 2002, 22:56
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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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Robert Borski's heroine as werwolf theory seems very sound. FWIW, this has similarity to a bit in URTH, wherein Severian is attacked in the dark on the ship Tzadkiel. As no doubt…
07 May 2002, 15:46
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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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I wrote something along those lines for "Vance Space" (my chapbook on Vancean sf) and David Langford took me to task on some of my sloppy details regarding SPACE OPERA. First, the…
06 May 2002, 03:51
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John Barach asked about LEXICON URTHUS: No, there are no plans for either. =mantis= Sirius Fiction booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley PEACE: a timeline WITH dates! Come see! …
03 May 2002, 03:00
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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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I could see these two elements (with thematic links back to "Eyebem"--I've been reading ORBIT anthos in memory of Knight's passing) and also, since this is the sort of Wolfe ending…
01 May 2002, 16:18
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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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Okay, so basically ala Howard's Hyperboria and/or the world of Moorcock's Elric. That is, homo sapiens sapiens from between 125,000 to 5,000 years ago. I can grasp that. "Mu" (so…
25 Apr 2002, 16:34
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Well no, "scientific name" isn't what I'm looking at--it is the "date stamp" that each one carries. Granted, the list which you allude to is a mixed bag of real and legendary plac…
24 Apr 2002, 18:54
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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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I gather that Tony Ellis has no interest in including the notion that Sainte Anne/Sainte Croix (or one or the other) constitute Eden, or the origin point for human beings, such tha…
20 Apr 2002, 15:26
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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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Ah come on, blattid--I =wrote= that essay (published 9 years ago, fwiw), and now you're just spoiling all the fun for Jerry Friedman's voyage of discovery! I am not kidding: there…
18 Apr 2002, 16:31
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Welcome aboard, Andrew Bollen. On the topic of Blue and Green factions . . . About ten or twelve years ago I asked Gene Wolfe whether there were Blue/Green style factions in Ness…
18 Apr 2002, 16:20
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Wow. So you might be in the market for a (U.S.S.) Monitor as the Minotaur, eh? Fantastic worlds await you! (Gee, this is like making balloon animals as party favors--actually I …
18 Apr 2002, 02:55
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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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I believe that 17 was an unlucky number to the Romans, and they got it from the Etruscans. (Robert Graves, I, CLAUDIUS, probably.) The Group of 17 (Ascian leadership in TBOTNS) is…
27 Mar 2002, 19:14
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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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Now you're just wise-cracking, or you are the new guard to come on duty in interrogating. I've been through that thread simply too many times. Baldanders is a bad guy, as signifie…
26 Mar 2002, 23:18
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I wrote 1960s when I really wanted to convey the unbounded time past the Bradbury childhood decade. I didn't mean to suggest that "The Small Assassin" was written in any particula…
26 Mar 2002, 21:46
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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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Right. We (well, me and someone else around here) were more distracted when hard sf guy Vernor Vinge had human kids crash on a random planet that just happened to have edible grai…
26 Mar 2002, 17:01
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I went to the library to check. Yep, that's the one. Thanks! Danny/Dinosaur, alliterative like Rodrick/Rex. Danny says, "Let's go." The adult who sees them and stares is a poli…
26 Mar 2002, 02:07
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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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But it is not at the entrance to the Botanic Gardens! From the stairs one can see the Botanic Gardens building, yes. But the stairs of the quote are rather long and steep and lea…
25 Mar 2002, 18:58
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I don't recall that you ever mentioned which edition you were quoting from. I don't have every edition; I am aware of a few different typos in the editions I have (the Easton Press…
25 Mar 2002, 03:21
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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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