{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3265",
    "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": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 3265,
    "subject": "For Mantis on Vance - was RE: (urth) OT: further possible",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2002-05-20T16:34:33+00:00",
    "last": "2002-05-20T16:34:33+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0205-1007@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes",
        "address": "ddanehy at siebel.com"
      },
      "date": "2002-05-20T16:34:33+00:00",
      "subject": "For Mantis on Vance - was RE: (urth) OT: further possible",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Apologies for the OT thread I am doubtless about to start."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Mantis wrote:\nOTOH, while I'm not certain about the publication history of \nCANNERY ROW (did sections appear in magazines, etc.), my\nunderstanding of THE DYING EARTH is that it is 6 stories, and\nonly one of them was published in magazine form--that was the\nsame year (1950) that the book came out, and as such amounts\nto a publicity release (just as \"The Tale of the Student and\nHis Son\" and \"The Armiger's Daughter,\" two tales from TBOTNS, \nappeared in magazines).  Or so it seems to me."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Hoom. Obviously, those are cases of taking chapters from a novel\nand printing them separately as short stories. If THE DYING EARTH\nwas indeed written as a novel (about which more below), then that \nwould be more or less the case here, except that -- really, the\nWolfe excisions are hardly even chapters, given that they are \nseparate stories read or told by persons in the novel, which would\nnot be the case with a bit from TDE printed as a story."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "So fix-up \"in the classic sense of van Vogt,\" well hmmm.  \nDivining Vance's (probable) intentions rather than the\npublishing record (making TDE a \"failed\" van Vogt fix-up?).\nAh well, such quibbles!  Look, blattid said \"more of a\nfix-up,\" not \"exactly a fix-up,\" so there's no quibble, even."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Indeed.\n\nAnd while I would not venture to divine Vance's intentions (I'm \nsomewhat of an intentionalist, but only where the author has \nmarked a clear intentional trail, and, for that matter, only \nwhen the printed text doesn't clearly shout defiance to the \nintention so marked), this discussion caused TDE to drift rather\nprecipitately to the top of my to-reread pile, and so I reread\nit over the weekend and ...\n\nH'mmm. My first response was to wonder where the marvellously\nstylized Vancean dialogue was. I suppose that developed over \ntime; and indeed, it appears somewhat more as the book goes\nalong.\n\nAnd my second response was to question how much of an influence\non tBotNS this could really be; there's almost nothing of the \nflavor of the latter here, to my admittedly somewhat jaded \nlectoral palate ... none of the complexity of language, of\nincident, of character, even, really, of background. Granted\nI'm comparing a book I've just read almost as a newcomer to \none I've pondered over for years, the background of TDE does\nnot _feel_ deep or complex to me -- no deeper than required\nby the necessities of the individual stories.\n\nAnd that, really, is the See Below. For me, at least, the \nstories in TDE are very much individual stories. There are\nlinks, characters from one appear in another, but they are,\nI think, less unified than (say) Leiber's yarns of Fafhrd \nand the Gray Mouser. Episodes from a single and singular\nfuture world, but not, to me, producing anything larger as\na group than the sum of the parts.\n\nSo for the more dedicated Vanceans on the list, I suppose \nthe obvious question would be whether I, as a rather casual \nreader, am missing anything here? This book is the one most\noften cited when recommending Vance to a Wolfe fan; other\nthan the gross-scale influence on New Sun, the fundamental \nidea (which, actually, wasn't entirely new here either) of \nthis incredibly ancient Earth, is there something deeper?"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}