# (no subject) *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 16 Oct 1998* > 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. --- ### Kevin J. Maroney *16 Oct 1998, 10:54* > At 08:47 AM 10/16/98 -0400, Rostrum wrote: > Memory. "Memory" doesn't seem to me to be a theme, but a subject matter (just as, say, time-travel is a subject matter). "All of life is a fragmentary memory, even as we are living it" would be a theme. Wolfe repeats *tropes* over and over--tricks with memory and memory palaces, resureections and wars, killing one's friends (I often find myself wondering who, exactly, Wolfe killed that he feels so guilty about it--perhaps he's working through war guilt, or possibly he just finds it a fascinating subject), stage-acting, and so forth. The equally brilliant John Crowley returns again and again to a few well-defined themes--the past is fundamentally different from the present and the present is constantly fundamentally changing into the future; the entire world is a palace of memory. Wolfe is more varied. Yes, memory features prominently in _The Book of the New Sun_ and the _Soldier_ novels (and in so many smaller works) but in very different ways; I would say that its role in _The Book of the Long Sun_ is, while certainly not absent, much less central and not in a thematic continuum with either of those. More central to Wolfe's work is his ideal of heroism, which is a remarkable mixture of self-determination and self-sacrifice. The degree to which his characters are refined by suffering, but never lose sight of the fact that their heroism is grounded in a need to protect their friends and their world. (Of course, that doesn't fit Alden Weir at all, probably the least admirable of Wolfe's protagonists. But even Weir has the self-determination of a Wolfe hero.) ``` Wombat Kevin Maroney kmaroney at crossover.com Kitchen Staff Supervisor New York Review of Science Fiction http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/nyrsf.html ``` ---