Subject: (urth) Linked short stories

From: adam louis stephanides <astephan at students.uiuc.edu>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 11:01:31 +0000

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

On Thu, 16 Apr 1998 William H. Ansley wrote:

> One may excuse Wolfe (and I am well aware that he needs no excuse from me)
> by saying that his stories hold up by themselves and the references to
> other of his works are a reward for careful readers. This is certainly
> true, but Wolfe seems to have mastered writing a set of related pieces that
> complement each other so well that their whole is very much greater than
> the sum of their parts better than any other writer I can think of. (In
> fact, does anyone else know of *any* other writer who does this?) It seems
> a shame then that these stories or novellas are first published separately.
> _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_ is a perfect example of this at its best. The
> novellas all work separately quite well but together they form a most
> remarkable work.

A recent example of this (though on a lesser aesthetic plane than Fifth
Head) is two short stories, "Bluesberry Jam" and "Ain't You Most Done?"
The first of these appeared in an anthology whose title I forget, whose
theme was music in science fiction IIRC; the second appeared in an anth-
ology of Sandman (the Neil Gaiman comic character) prose stories, entitled
"The Sandman: Book of Dreams" or something like that.  The two stories
depict, in part, the same events from the perspective of two different
characters; but they give quite different pictures of what is "really"
going on.

--Adam

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