Mostly Spoiler Free Thoughts on Home Fires

Well, first of all, there seems to be a complete lack of wolves. Not a one, unless I missed something. The "meditation" sections often seem to be lessons from Gene Wolfe about how to reason out the plot details of his novels. This is one of the most emotionally satisfying books GW has ever written. Kind of shapeless, plotwise.

It's boy meets girl overall, with pirates and spies and a whodunnit as the obstacles to overcome. There's also almost a total lack of technical detail of any kind, and the SFnal elements are barely more than tokens.

When you say technical detail I agree -- but there is a lot of stfnal content, it's just that that content is mostly social speculation shoved into the background.

Glad to hear. I've been waiting for a simple review like this.

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote: Well, first of all, there seems to be a complete lack of wolves. Not a one,

Chelle mentions that in the army they "ate like wolves and slept like babies." At one point there's a dog and a goat in the road. Skip thinks the goat looks Satanic. Does that mean the dog is like God?

hmm, not spoilery, so I'll just say that aside from the inherent Forever War premise in the promotion, I can't think of anything that has to be SFnally justified for things to progress the way they did, except maybe for one of the mistaken identities, which could be done with the usual devices though it would take a rather unwieldy pile of them. Oh, and rather a lot of the detective work is Columbo-style. Skip becomes privy to a lot of the stuff that would be a deep dark mystery in other Wolfe books, but he (and the reader) have to really work on why such a thing was done, and how to catch or just stop the antagonists.

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