Subject: (urth) Mostly Spoiler Free Thoughts on Home Fires

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2011 17:55:26 +0000

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.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

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From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:01:09 +0000

> 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.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:47:02 +0000

Jeff Wilson wrote:

> 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.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

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From: Son of Witz <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:52:39 +0000

On Mar 2, 2011, at 11:01 AM, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 

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

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From: Dave Tallman <davetallman at msn.com>
Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:42:22 +0000

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

Well, first of all, there seems to be a complete lack of wolves. Not a one,
> unless I missed something.

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?
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From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2011 03:20:51 +0000

> shoved into the background.

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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From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2011 03:28:23 +0000

On 3/2/2011 1:52 PM, Son of Witz wrote:
>
>
> On Mar 2, 2011, at 11:01 AM, Jeff Wilson<jwilson at io.com>  wrote:
>

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