Subject: _There are Doors_ Gene Wolfe

From: Lucy Kemnitzer <ritaxis at cruzio.com>
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 02:49:48 +0000

I keep seeing Gene Wolfe discussions here, so I keep trying Gene Wolfe.

Usually I bump into pieces out of some immense series (is it _Long Sun_ or
_New Sun_ or both?) and I don't even bring them home. I brought home _Free
Live Free_ and I was interested but it was slow going and I didn't finish
it before it was due.  So I brought it home again, and also _There Are
Doors_.

This is a book I definitely should have read when I was a kid, when I was
gobbling up Saki and H G Wells's short stories.  It has just that feel -
or oh, Dunsany or Walter de la Mare: mysterious other worlds you find doors
into, ineffable longing, did I say mystery?  Unresolved.

I read the whole thing.  The writing is very fine.  But.

Nowdays I am a prosaic old lady and while I don't demand a neatly finished
story, I want the premise to be sensical and real.  Ineffable longing can
get me started, but that's all.

Lucy Kemnitzer

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From: John Boston <john.boston at verizon.net>
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 04:52:31 +0000

You would probably like his supposedly YA novel THE DEVIL IN A FOREST.
It masquerades as prosaic.

John Boston

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From: Ron Henry <ronhenry at clarityconnect.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 15:23:08 +0000

ritaxis at cruzio.com (Lucy Kemnitzer) read from the teleprompter:
>_New Sun_ or both?)

Both. And don't forget Short Sun now, too, which has rounded the far turn
and will soon be coming into the home stretch.

Ron Henry

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From: Joe Slater <joe at yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au>
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 01:57:03 +0000

I think it's best to view the _New Sun_ series as a single extended novel,
with _The Urth of the New Sun_ as its sequel.

The _Long Sun_ books are more like a normal series, and I think that they
are so contiguous with the _Short Sun_ books that they should be seen as
one extended series.

I really love the _New Sun_ books. They're beautiful, although a lot of
work. It's only on the second or third reading that some things start to
make sense. I'll give you an example of what I mean by beauty:

Severian, a callow youth, rescues a stranger whom he discovers to be
Vodalus, the famous outlaw. Vodalus gives him a coin as his token.  Looking
back on this, in one of the later books, Severian muses that he was
Vodalus' man from that moment. Just as a soldier is enlisted by taking a
coin (e.g., the "Queen's Shilling") so Severian had been enlisted without
knowing it. After all, he points out, things work of themselves or not at
all, and it is the rankest superstition to think that you need belief to
make things work.

Now, isn't that wonderful? Wolfe adds layers of depth and complexity to a
simple event; not by making it mean something *later* but by stressing the
meaning that was already there. In doing so he puts forward an argument
which most of us would accept, but in an entirely new context. Do these
social laws have effect even if we don't know of them? We could argue this
either way, but who would have thought of describing the question as
superstitious?

JDS

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From: Richard Horton <rrhorton at prodigy.net>
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 03:59:18 +0000

I think Wolfe is our greatest contemporary SF writer.  So I'm biased.
Take my words with whatever grains of salt you need.

But why not try the short stories?  "Forlesen".  "Seven American Nights".
"The Other Dead Man".  "La Befana".  "How the Whip Came Back".  "How I Lost
the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion".  "The
Rubber Bend".  "The Marvelous Brass Chess-Playing Automaton".  "The
Ziggurat".  "Our Neighbour, by David Copperfield".  "The Eyeflash
Miracles".  "Empires of Foliage and Flower".  "Tracking Song".  "Suzanne
Delage".  and so on.  It's an utterly remarkable list.

Rich Horton

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From: John Boston <john.boston at verizon.net>
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 03:57:23 +0000

Wolfe's books are vastly more intelligent and literate than most other
fantasy series, and they are not prompted by a desire to establish brand
name recognition.  That doesn't necessarily mean you will like them, but
they are simply not comparable to the usual lineup of quests for magic
swords/dragons/royalty stuff.  If you don't like Wolfe's books, it will be
for altogether more interesting reasons.  And as others have pointed out,
they're not really fantasy, though NEW SUN is superficially more like
fantasy than the other books.

John Boston

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From: Robert Borski <rborski at charter.net>
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 07:09:14 +0000

Wolfe is currently 1100 pages into a new work tentatively entitled "The
Wizard Knight."

After he finishes it, he hopes to write one or two more Soldier books - or
so he's told me.

Robert Borski