{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/sflovers/155", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "sflovers", "thread": { "id": 155, "subject": "_There are Doors_ Gene Wolfe", "messages": 7, "voices": 6, "first": "2000-11-23T02:49:48+00:00", "last": "2000-11-29T07:09:14+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Lucy Kemnitzer", "address": "ritaxis at cruzio.com" }, "date": "2000-11-23T02:49:48+00:00", "subject": "_There are Doors_ Gene Wolfe", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I keep seeing Gene Wolfe discussions here, so I keep trying Gene Wolfe.\n\nUsually I bump into pieces out of some immense series (is it _Long Sun_ or\n_New Sun_ or both?) and I don't even bring them home. I brought home _Free\nLive Free_ and I was interested but it was slow going and I didn't finish\nit before it was due. So I brought it home again, and also _There Are\nDoors_.\n\nThis is a book I definitely should have read when I was a kid, when I was\ngobbling up Saki and H G Wells's short stories. It has just that feel -\nor oh, Dunsany or Walter de la Mare: mysterious other worlds you find doors\ninto, ineffable longing, did I say mystery? Unresolved.\n\nI read the whole thing. The writing is very fine. But.\n\nNowdays I am a prosaic old lady and while I don't demand a neatly finished\nstory, I want the premise to be sensical and real. Ineffable longing can\nget me started, but that's all.\n\nLucy Kemnitzer" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "John Boston", "address": "john.boston at verizon.net" }, "date": "2000-11-23T04:52:31+00:00", "subject": "Re: _There are Doors_ Gene Wolfe", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "You would probably like his supposedly YA novel THE DEVIL IN A FOREST.\nIt masquerades as prosaic.\n\nJohn Boston" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Ron Henry", "address": "ronhenry at clarityconnect.com" }, "date": "2000-11-27T15:23:08+00:00", "subject": "Re: _There are Doors_ Gene Wolfe", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "ritaxis at cruzio.com (Lucy Kemnitzer) read from the teleprompter:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Usually I bump into pieces out of some immense series (is it _Long Sun_ or\n_New Sun_ or both?)" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Both. And don't forget Short Sun now, too, which has rounded the far turn\nand will soon be coming into the home stretch.\n\nRon Henry" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Joe Slater", "address": "joe at yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au" }, "date": "2000-11-28T01:57:03+00:00", "subject": "Re: _There are Doors_ Gene Wolfe", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I think it's best to view the _New Sun_ series as a single extended novel,\nwith _The Urth of the New Sun_ as its sequel.\n\nThe _Long Sun_ books are more like a normal series, and I think that they\nare so contiguous with the _Short Sun_ books that they should be seen as\none extended series.\n\nI really love the _New Sun_ books. They're beautiful, although a lot of\nwork. It's only on the second or third reading that some things start to\nmake sense. I'll give you an example of what I mean by beauty:\n\nSeverian, a callow youth, rescues a stranger whom he discovers to be\nVodalus, the famous outlaw. Vodalus gives him a coin as his token. Looking\nback on this, in one of the later books, Severian muses that he was\nVodalus' man from that moment. Just as a soldier is enlisted by taking a\ncoin (e.g., the \"Queen's Shilling\") so Severian had been enlisted without\nknowing it. After all, he points out, things work of themselves or not at\nall, and it is the rankest superstition to think that you need belief to\nmake things work.\n\nNow, isn't that wonderful? Wolfe adds layers of depth and complexity to a\nsimple event; not by making it mean something *later* but by stressing the\nmeaning that was already there. In doing so he puts forward an argument\nwhich most of us would accept, but in an entirely new context. Do these\nsocial laws have effect even if we don't know of them? We could argue this\neither way, but who would have thought of describing the question as\nsuperstitious?\n\nJDS" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Richard Horton", "address": "rrhorton at prodigy.net" }, "date": "2000-11-28T03:59:18+00:00", "subject": "Re: _There are Doors_ Gene Wolfe", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I think Wolfe is our greatest contemporary SF writer. So I'm biased.\nTake my words with whatever grains of salt you need.\n\nBut why not try the short stories? \"Forlesen\". \"Seven American Nights\".\n\"The Other Dead Man\". \"La Befana\". \"How the Whip Came Back\". \"How I Lost\nthe Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion\". \"The\nRubber Bend\". \"The Marvelous Brass Chess-Playing Automaton\". \"The\nZiggurat\". \"Our Neighbour, by David Copperfield\". \"The Eyeflash\nMiracles\". \"Empires of Foliage and Flower\". \"Tracking Song\". \"Suzanne\nDelage\". and so on. It's an utterly remarkable list.\n\nRich Horton" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "John Boston", "address": "john.boston at verizon.net" }, "date": "2000-11-29T03:57:23+00:00", "subject": "Re: _There are Doors_ Gene Wolfe", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Wolfe's books are vastly more intelligent and literate than most other\nfantasy series, and they are not prompted by a desire to establish brand\nname recognition. That doesn't necessarily mean you will like them, but\nthey are simply not comparable to the usual lineup of quests for magic\nswords/dragons/royalty stuff. If you don't like Wolfe's books, it will be\nfor altogether more interesting reasons. And as others have pointed out,\nthey're not really fantasy, though NEW SUN is superficially more like\nfantasy than the other books.\n\nJohn Boston" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Robert Borski", "address": "rborski at charter.net" }, "date": "2000-11-29T07:09:14+00:00", "subject": "Re: _There are Doors_ Gene Wolfe", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Wolfe is currently 1100 pages into a new work tentatively entitled \"The\nWizard Knight.\"\n\nAfter he finishes it, he hopes to write one or two more Soldier books - or\nso he's told me.\n\nRobert Borski" } ] } ] }