Subject: (urth) name of a name

From: Damien Broderick <damien at ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
Date: Wed, 01 Apr 1998 11:51:30 +0000

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works]

manthis sez: 

< Broderick should write more!  

Hey, I'm dancing as fast as I can!  (Four books out last year; one of them,
THE WHITE ABACUS, just won the Aurealis Award for best sf novel of the year.)

What I'd *lerv* to see - but surely never will - is some cross-referencing
discussion of my 1986 novel THE BLACK GRAIL (Locus: `the first serious work
of science fiction I've encountered which clearly shows the influence of
Gene Wolfe's spectacular tetralogy...  he isn't trying to re-write or
imitate Gene Wolfe, he's just drawing on Wolfe's work as part of his
literary heritage.'  Debbie Notkin, July 1986)

< (I forget--was "The Changeling" covered in the
essay?  If not there is room for more expansion.)

No.  Haven't read it.

tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk (Tony Ellis) sez:

< Damien, in your fascinating Peace essay a few posts back 
you say that 

>The name of the narrator of Wolfe's *The Fifth Head of Cerberus*, never
>given in that text, can be determined to be Gene Wolfe.

I'm not quite sure how you arrive at this. Could you 
elaborate, please? >

On p. 6 of my pb edition, he finds in the library books that are plainly by
Kate Wilhelm, Virginia Woolf, Bernard Wolfe and Vernor Vinge (by mistake as
VVinge).  `I never found any books of my father's'.  U.s.w..

Damien

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

---

From: Tony Ellis <tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 01 Apr 1998 13:13:12 +0000

01/04/98
                                                                      13:00
 RE>name of a name

>THE WHITE ABACUS, just won the Aurealis Award for best sf novel of the 
year.)

The heartiest of hearty congratulations, Damien! I'll start looking out for
your name in this hemisphere.

>VVinge).  `I never found any books of my father's'.  U.s.w..

Very astute of you  to have spotted this. (Either that, or very 
stupid of me to have missed it.) I suppose if Wolfe is a typical
American-Irish name then it's reinforced slightly by the photograph
of his mother Number Five sees, where he declares her to be of Celtic
origin.

All the same, I think I would say "can be theorised to be" rather
than "can be determined to be"... We can't be sure his name isn't
Witherspoon. :-) And where are you getting Gene from? The
Gene-geneticist pun is the sort of thing Wolfe loves, of course...

While I'm writing... what are we supposed to make of the 
strange building Number Five (or Gene) sees in the 
photograph? "...a very long wooden house only a story in height,
with a porch or veranda that changed its architectural style
every twenty or thirty feet so as to give almost the impression
of a number of exceedingly narrow houses constructed with
their side walls in contact."

I did think of a motel, but the fact that this is a sepia photo
suggests something a little older. Is wooden, one-storey
terraced housing characteristic of a particular time or place?