Subject: Re: (urth) Little, Big stuff

From: Alex David Groce <alex_groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2000 15:00:09 +0000

Hmmm...  I think I know what I'm reading as soon as I finish the Lafferty
fest that I'm indulging in at the moment.  Thanks to all for the various
useful insights on LB.

Michael:  Yes, LB as a whole is much less compelling than the individual
parts taken by themselves, which are (with only a few exceptions, such as
the Eigenblick thing) beautiful indeed.  Maybe this fits the "inside is
bigger than outside" theme...

Alga:  Yes, Crowley is much less of a genre writer than Wolfe, but I really
wasn't thinking of it in genre terms, but as a kind of thematic connection
to Dunsany (who obviously wasn't drawing on "genre" sources, since as such
they didn't exist for him anymore than for Carroll or Kingsley).  This,
handled as anything other than the rather crass Niven "iron drove out the
magic" or the simple story of someone from "reality" whisked off to fantasy
to be a hero, hasn't really been used much in conventional genre work, has
it?  Usually fairy and reality are nicely compartmentalized, with fantasy,
while more "fun," usually given a fairly explicit short end of the ontological
stick.  Crowley is certainly more in keeping with the 19th c. sources he's
using than anything I'm aware of in-genre.

Mantis:  Perhaps Crowley cruelty really does explain the ending--after all, 
Engine Summer strikes me as the same thing, amazing beauty that in the end 
sums up to an extremely cruel vision of a personality trapped in amber.
Wolfe at his most savage is considerably kinder to his poor fictional
creations, although perhaps this just shows a lack of nerve on his part,
while Crowley has what it takes to let the Revolutionary do it's work and
not pass the knife under the door.

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)
Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department
8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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From: Jack and Melissa Holcomb <jackandmel at socket.net>
Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2000 23:24:39 +0000

Ah!  Finally something I feel equipped to comment on, a little!  I've read
LB, but it was years ago.  It just went into the bedside table pile again
(right under the Gormenghast omnibus  --so it'll be awhile).

> using than anything I'm aware of in-genre.

That's pretty much true, although there seems to be a growing body of
stories/books dealing with the interpenetration of faery and mundanity.  I'm
thinking of Emma Bull's overrated _War for the Oaks_ and Charles de Lint's
stuff, all of which seems to work from the assumption that the faery place
has been/is being marginalized, although it is still accessible--and the
upshot seems generally to be that encountering faery enriches existence.
This body of work has been christened (poorly, I think) Urban Fantasy, and I
suspect that a lot of it is written in imitation of _Little, Big_, despite
the fact that they seem to disagree with it premise.  (In fact, I seem to
recall that the most recent trade paperback release of LB was touted as both
Urban Fantasy and Magic Realism.)

There is one exceptional treatment of the boundaries between faery and
mundanity that leaps to my mind: Robert Holdstock's excellent Mythago Wood
books.  That's a very different notion of faery--actually an externalized Ju
ngian collective unconscious--but it has a similar effect of drawing people
in and making them less than they were.  In fact, I'd say there's a strong
streak of Lovecraft through the Mythago books.

Sorry to drag us even farther off topic.

Say, does anyone know if there's a Holdstock e-mail list anywhere about?

Jack
jackandmel at socket.net