Subject: (urth) Peter Wright's - Shadows of the New Sun

From: Jonathan Laidlow <ultan01 at yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 12:29:51 +0000

My partner in Ultanic crime, Nigel Price, reports that he has received a copy of Peter Wright's new book SHADOWS OF THE NEW SUN and so I can officially report that it is finally in print.

Published by Liverpool University Press and costing about twenty quid (which must be nearly 40 of your dollars) the book is divided into two halves. The first half contains 14 interviews with GW, spanning his entire career. It reprints interviews with Lawrence Person, James Jordan, Colin Greenland and Nick Gevers among others. The second half reprints a selection of GW's essays on writing, including the excellent "Books in the BotNS".

It is an excellent collection. The paperback ISBN is 184631058X and if you buy books from Amazon, I urge you to use the link on www.ultan.org.uk as we an poach a little bit of the money from Amazon in the hope of one day repaying Nigel for setting up the webhost and URL.

Jonathan
editor, www.ultan.org.uk

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Subject: urth Digest, Vol 34, Issue 42

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re:  New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press (Matthew King)
   2. Re:  New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press (don doggett)
   3. Re:  New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press (don doggett)
   4. Re:  New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press (don doggett)
   5. Re:  New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press (Mo Holkar / UKG)
   6. Re:  New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press (Solomon, Joshua)
   7. Re:  New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press (Nigel Price)
   8.  Unrequited Love by Gene Wolfe (Kieran Mullen)
   9.  the elephant in the room (don doggett)
  10. Re:  the elephant in the room (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 20:16:09 -0500
From: Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <936D7D91-3D3E-4231-ABEF-A018DDB292CE at gmail.com>
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On Jun 26, 2007, at 5:01 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

>> If I hadn't known the story was by Wolfe, this sentence would have
>> revealed it:
>> "I'm going to pry, Roberta. I'm going to ask you about things that
>> are none of my business. I hope you'll answer."
>
> Yeah ... that sounds like it could come right out of Silk's mouth,
> doesn't it?

Or Able, or the father from "Ziggurat", or Latro on his better days.   
If I'm remembering rightly, the protagonist of Memorare also spoke  
like that.

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:05:16 -0700 (PDT)
From: don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <210591.1321.qm at web32409.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

--- Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> The Robinsons are fleshly:
> 
> "Either the Robinsons could not have a child of
> their own, or were  
> unwilling to undertake the travail and expense of a
> real child."

Not necessarily. Wolfe's best trick is to make us make
assumptions. The only statement of fact in the
sentence is that the Robinsons don't have "real"
children. It's suspiciously vague in the face of this
Ro- pattern of the names. Even undertaking the travail
and expense of a real child has no concrete meaning.
Birthing a child? Procuring a child? Cloning one? All
of these could be an expensive ordeal. 

Don

The Evangelists: a Lesser Apocrypha                                                                        http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid8109961

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Message: 3
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:15:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <845956.59488.qm at web32404.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

--- Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> And why does the narrator give himself the role of
> the evil dwarf in  
> his imagining of a fecund human past?

Maybe this is reaching on my part, but Herman Hesse
wrote a story about a hideous dwarf who belonged to a
princess. He's given a puppy that he loves more than
anything, but the princess'
jackass husband drowns it. So the dwarf gets revenge
by poisoning the prince and himself, leaving the
princess alone iirc. What this might have to do with
the story, I'm not sure. It also seems to have
reflections of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
where everyone is a replicant, but not everyone knows
it.

Don

The Evangelists: a Lesser Apocrypha                                                                        http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid8109961

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------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 22:34:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <204532.13323.qm at web32407.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

Okay,
 
I may crash and burn with this, but be darned if I'm
not going to try to fly.

First. You don't cook a salad. You prepare it. And if
you're a cook rather than a chef, you don't specialise
in salads. And the money won't be that great. 

This is from the Word Detective (google that and
"cook"):

 {Our everyday "prepare food" verb "to cook" first
appeared in the 14th century and is derived from the
much older noun form, which comes from the Latin
"coquus," which also gave us "concoct." As might be
expected from an activity so central to human life,
"to cook" has spawned a variety of slang and
colloquial senses over the years, including "to ruin"
and,      alternatively, "to do very well" (as in "to
cook with gas"). "To cook"      meaning "to falsify,
tamper with, present in a secretly altered form" is
actually one of the oldest slang senses of the verb,
dating all the way back to at least the early 17th
century, and is directly drawn from the "prepare
carefully" sense of "cook."}

Okay, so what is salad? Well a salad, in addition to
being a food, can also simply mean a "variety of
things". BUT. . . another word for salad is sallet,
which is also a helmet with eyeslits from the middle
ages.

So, I think that Julianne's dad is some sort of
biomechanical engineer that specializes in sallets:
brain pans and such. And Julianne is literally made
from strips of meat. Either a clone or a Jonas type
hybrid. But she's as artificial as Roberta.

Don

The Evangelists: a Lesser Apocrypha                                                                        http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid8109961

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------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 10:28:23 +0100
From: Mo Holkar / UKG <lists at ukg.co.uk>
Subject: Re: (urth) New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <20070627092800.D4EF61BB57 at che.dreamhost.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"; format=flowed

At 05:15 27/06/2007, Don wrote:
>Maybe this is reaching on my part, but Herman Hesse wrote a story 
>about a hideous dwarf who belonged to a princess. He's given a puppy 
>that he loves more than anything, but the princess' jackass husband drowns it.

A more familiar reference might be to Rumpelstiltskin, who spins 
straw into gold for the miller's daughter in exchange for (he hopes) 
her first-born child.

I'm also picking up references to Don Juan -- the great hand which 
drags people down to Hell, and the quotation from Byron about his dog?

The epigraph is from Shakespeare's 144th sonnet:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil,
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turned fiend,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell:
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

although what to make of that, I don't know. Possibly also a 
reference to Lord Alfred Douglas's "Two Loves", one of which famously 
dare not speak its name?

I'm not sure why the narrator implores God to forgive him for taking 
Rover back to Roberta. Julianne has already said that she didn't want 
Rover, so it's not like he could have stayed there. Unless the 
narrator thinks that Julianne was lying about this? He's said that he 
was doubtful when Roberta said that both girls called the deal off.

Mo

------------------------------

Message: 6
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 10:46:43 +0100
From: "Solomon, Joshua" <J.A.Solomon at city.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: (urth) New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press
To: <urth at urth.net>
Message-ID: <C2A7F093.178D0%J.A.Solomon at city.ac.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain;    charset="US-ASCII"

> Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 17:35:36 -0400
> From: "Joel Sieh" <joel.sieh at gmail.com>
> 
> Roberta, Robber, Rover, and the Robinsons all have "Ro" names.  Julianne is
> the only exception.  I wonder if there's anything to that?

Yeah. I'm pretty sure we're supposed to think about Shakespeare's Romeo. And
Julianne is like Juliet.

> Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:01:08 -0700
> From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <danldo at gmail.com>
> 
> I am reminded a bit of Isaac Asimov's story, "Segregationist," a story
> about a surgeon who is opposed to the practice of putting machine
> parts into human bodies. The "shock ending" reveals that the surgeon
> is, himself, a robot (a fact important in the context of Asimov's robot
> stories, in which robots very much reflected the position of Blacks
> in mid-20th-century America).

Me too. Again, I think we are supposed to draw a parallel between racial
segregation and robot/human segregation. Note the exchange
"What do you get if you mix black and white?"
"Grey if you mean paint. Brown if you mean people."

bee
-- 
Joshua A. Solomon
http://www.staff.city.ac.uk/~solomon

------------------------------

Message: 7
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 10:56:02 +0100
From: "Nigel Price" <nigelprice at onetel.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) New Wolfe Story at Subterranean Press
To: "Urth" <urth at urth.net>
Message-ID: <AFEFKBJKJDDJOMBNACBNMEIMDEAA.nigelprice at onetel.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

I think it's a really good short short-story. As already pointed out, there
seems to be a distinct possibility that the narrator is him-, her- or itself
a robot. The situation on "his" world is paradoxical. It is sterile because
humans have opted for the mechanical rather than the biological, but
introducing segregation between humans and machines turns out not to be the
answer to solving the problem. It introduces pain and sorrow without solving
the preference. This seems to be in part because the dogs retain a natural
preference for their own kind which humans have lost. The girls, in
contrast, prefer their opposites. The robot girl is made miserable by the
way the robot dog shows her her own lack of humanness while the human girl
and her family are burdened by the biological inconveniences of a real dog.

It's a sad little tale, but brilliantly told and full of unexplainedly
sinister notes and references. The narrator has from the start a slightly
devilish quality that isn't quite substantiated by the apparent facts of the
story. He begins with references to devils hauling sinners off to hell and
acts and speaks throughout like a stalker or a paedophile, though nothing
that he does actually justifies this impression. He's interfering and
unwise, that's all. But maybe that's enough, and maybe that's the - or a -
point of the story. If you're miserable and disatisfied, it's easy to spread
your unhappiness to others. The narrator lives, by his own description, in a
machine paradise and he's the snake in the garden introducing machine
unhappiness.

Maybe he really is a robot Satan, or at least a robot Satan analogue?

Nigel

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Message: 8
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 11:42:25 -0500
From: Kieran Mullen <kieran at ou.edu>
Subject: (urth) Unrequited Love by Gene Wolfe
To: urth at lists.urth.net
Message-ID: <D6B0B0BA-9532-4677-8DB4-CDEC17B8E24E at ou.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed

>
> On 6/26/07, Matthew Keeley <matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Subterraneanpress.com just posted a new Wolfe story. Should be an
>> interesting read. Does anyone know if Wolfe plans to publish any  
>> books with
>> Subterranean? It's a great small press, and I wouldn't mind seeing  
>> a Wolfe
>> volume from them.
>>
>> -Matt
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Urth Mailing List
>> To post, write urth at urth.net
>> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>>

The epigraph is from a sonnet:

Sonnet 144 Two loves I have, of comfort and despair

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend
Suspect I may, but not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell:
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

Copied from:  http://www.william-shakespeare.info/william-shakespeare- 
sonnet-144.htm

An analysis of the sonnet (take grain of salt before reading) can be  
found at:

http://www.nyptkd.com/cgi-bin/cgiproxy/nph-proxy.pl/000000A/http/ 
www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/144comm.htm

Kieran Mullen

------------------------------

Message: 9
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 11:35:33 -0700 (PDT)
From: don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com>
Subject: (urth) the elephant in the room
To: urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net
Message-ID: <57675.49628.qm at web32414.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

So . . .

Why has there not been any full blooded conversation
about Soldier of Sidon on the list? It's a "bigger"
book than Wizard Knight in terms of anticipation, but
it just sort of fizzled on the list. For myself, I
just don't have the time anymore to do the digging I
need to do to even create a fringe theory about it.
But what about everyone else? Did you hate it? Did it
seem too straightforward to talk about? Or is it just
blah? I'm just curious, and no answer I suppose is an
answer too. My biggest criticism is that I have
absolutely no idea what happened to Latro to get him
imprisoned in Nubia and really no clue as to what is
going on during that entire sequence. To the point
that I didn't care to find out. Other than that, I
really enjoyed it.

Don

The Evangelists: a Lesser Apocrypha                                                                        http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid8109961

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Message: 10
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 11:49:26 -0700
From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <danldo at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) the elephant in the room
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID:
    <1f7617370706271149s13cb71eche57e2077e9aa1091 at mail.gmail.com>
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Don,

Some personal thinks on "Soldier of Sidon."

1. I find the "Soldier" books the hardest to read of all Wolfe's
work. I don't know why this should be. Part of it, I suspect,
is that the artificiality of it is right on the surface; the conceit
of Latro's memory loss, while poignant and meaningful, also
creates a surface reason for Wolfe's usual lacunae, making
it harder to look for meaning in them (Latro isn't suppressing
unpleasant facts, he just doesn't know a lot of them), while
at the same time almost forcing a degree of repetition that is
totally un-Lupine. Because of this, the first two are my least
reread Wolfe novels, and I chose to reread them prior to
reading "Sidon," and so only got to "Sidon" this past month.

2. There was some discussion of "Sidon" after it came
out. I've saved it unread, and will get around to reading
it soon. Maybe I'll respond to some of it.

3. In many ways, I found "Sidon" an easier read than its
predecessors. Still quite difficult (something about Latro's
style just does *not* fit well into my parser) but easier:
possibly because I know Egyptian culture/history better
than Greek and had less trouble understanding what was
going on.

4. But I just don't find a great deal of meaning in these books.
Partly, I'm sure, because I struggle just to read them, and
because I've reread them so little; but partly because so
much *is* on the surface. There seems to be very little
"hidden stuff" going on, other than whatever is going on
with the gods of various lands bickering with each other.
But once you take them as literally existing beings, well,
that's what gods of that sort *do*.

On 6/27/07, don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com> wrote:
> So . . .
>
> Why has there not been any full blooded conversation
> about Soldier of Sidon on the list? It's a "bigger"
> book than Wizard Knight in terms of anticipation, but
> it just sort of fizzled on the list. For myself, I
> just don't have the time anymore to do the digging I
> need to do to even create a fringe theory about it.
> But what about everyone else? Did you hate it? Did it
> seem too straightforward to talk about? Or is it just
> blah? I'm just curious, and no answer I suppose is an
> answer too. My biggest criticism is that I have
> absolutely no idea what happened to Latro to get him
> imprisoned in Nubia and really no clue as to what is
> going on during that entire sequence. To the point
> that I didn't care to find out. Other than that, I
> really enjoyed it.
>
> Don
>
> The Evangelists: a Lesser Apocrypha                                                                        http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid8109961
>
>
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>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant
-----
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
http://www.danehyoakes.com
Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations,
inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire
salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards
reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful.

------------------------------

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From: Recursive Loop <recursive_loop at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2007 16:50:32 +0000

Just saw on Amazon (US) that "Shadows of the New Sun" is listed as a trade paperback for $27.50
and a hardcover for $75.00.

It's not (quite) out, with a publication date listed as 07/07/07 (and who was born on that day,
some years ago?).

I'm going to put it in my "shopping basket" in the hopes that it actually does come out then!

FPK3

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From: Nigel Price <nigelprice at onetel.net>
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2007 13:41:07 +0000

I got my copy of Peter's book from Amazon UK a couple of weeks ago.

It's a wonderful compendium of Wolfe interviews, many of which I'd read, but
it's great to have them bound into a book.

Essential reading - and if you order it through Ultan's Library at
http://www.ultan.org.uk/index.html we get a small commission from Amazon
towards the upkeep of the site.

Which reminds me: is there any information in Ultan's Library, such as the
lists of secondary sources on Wolfe, which would be of interest to the wiki
team?

Nigel

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