# There Are Doors, by Gene Wolfe *The SF-Lovers list — 3 messages, 3 voices, 27 Sep 1989* > 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. --- ### Peter da Silva *27 Sep 1989, 02:25* Has anyone else read this one (probably, by now... it's out in paper)? Is this a reprint of an early Wolfe, or what? It's very '50s in many of its attitudes, yet it's got what seems to be a commentary on AIDS. It's not a bad book, but it's got more the feel of an early Phillip Jose Farmer than a current Wolfe. Peter da Silva --- ### Chuq Von Rospach *27 Sep 1989, 05:00 · follows Peter da Silva* > Has anyone else read this one (probably, by now... it's out in paper)? Is > this a reprint of an early Wolfe, or what? It's very '50s in many of its > attitudes, yet it's got what seems to be a commentary on AIDS. It's not a > bad book, but it's got more the feel of an early Phillip Jose Farmer than > a current Wolfe. No, it's a new book, first publishing in hardcover last year. It seems to be another one of Gene's experiments, similar to Free, Live Free. I couldn't get into it at all, even though I like his writing. Others I know loved it. A few hated it. Chuq Von Rospach --- ### Jeremy Crampton *27 Sep 1989, 13:34 · follows Chuq Von Rospach* chuq at Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) says: >> [Peter Da Silva says]: >> Has anyone else read this one (probably, by now... it's out in paper)? Is >> this a reprint of an early Wolfe, or what? It's very '50s in many of its >> attitudes, yet it's got what seems to be a commentary on AIDS. It's not a >> bad book, but it's got more the feel of an early Philip Jose Farmer than >> a current Wolfe. > No, it's a new book, first publishing in hardcover last year. It seems to > be another one of Gene's experiments, similar to Free, Live Free. I > couldn't get into it at all, even though I like his writing. Others I know > loved it. A few hated it. Indeed. It was published as a paperback either this month or last month by Tor (it was their lead item) and originally published in 1988 in hardback as Chuq says. In the next _Foundation_ (46) Gwyneth Jones is going to write a long review on it. In 1985, three years before it was published, Wolfe said about it: ***SPOILERS*** "I have difficulty doing people who are well below my intellectual level. I've set myself this... if I can go and talk about current work, I'm trying to write a novel called _There_are_Doors_. The hero or central character of this novel is a mentally ill department store clerk. He doesn't read. He isn't intellectual. He watches television. He's not very well socialised, and he's not entirely different from me. But he's different from me in certain ways. And I try to handle him because it's a good exercise for me to try and handle him...He's hard to do. And I'm trying to do it, and it may well flop. But if you're not willing to take chances of failing then you can't push back the borders. "In my story this man is not sub-normal. He's normal, and that's what's wrong with him." Jeremy ---