{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/usenet/12",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "usenet",
  "thread": {
    "id": 12,
    "subject": "Gene Wolfe's PEACE",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1983-09-05T08:12:50+00:00",
    "last": "1983-09-05T08:12:50+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<852@sdchema.UUCP>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Donn Seeley",
        "address": "donn at sdchema.uucp"
      },
      "date": "1983-09-05T08:12:50+00:00",
      "subject": "Gene Wolfe's PEACE",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Nice to see that someone else (Tim Bray) liked this novel.  (Besides\nthe Chicago Foundation for Literature, which gave it its award in\n1977.) It is an extremely strange book, and the new paperback reprint\nof it has a cover by Gahan Wilson (another strange person).\n\nThe book is not really a novel in the normal sense.  Wolfe is obsessed\nby stories; every twist and turn in the book is designed to let him\ntell another story.  The book is narrated by one Alden Dennis Weer, a\nman in his sixties who lives alone who has had a stroke and is\nincapable of leaving his house to get a doctor to treat him.  So he\ntravels back into his past to find a doctor who can give him some\nadvice.  Going back into the past he finds many other things than just\na doctor, and he relives many of the experiences of his life.  Because\nof the stroke he has lost control over time (not unlike Billy Pilgrim)\nand he moves back and forth with very little warning, sometimes\nchanging times in the course of a single sentence.  This means that\nmany of the stories are continued across large gaps, or abruptly\nterminate.  (A few times we miss the climax of a story only to hear\nthe narrator mention the outcome offhandedly at a later time when\ntalking about something else.) Some of the more extended stories deal\nwith a birthday party where a boy dies accidentally, a ghost story\nabout carnies, a peculiar book called THE LUSTY LAWYER and its author,\nand a ghost story that takes place in a dried orange juice\nmanufacturing plant which Weer comes to own.  There are also a few\nbeautiful self-contained stories, about St. Brandon and Finn M'Cool, ben\nYahya and the marid, and the young man of Ch'in and the china pillow.\n\nThis book is really extremely deep and I have read and re-read the book\ntrying to understand it; I think I finally have an explanation for it.\n(And yes, there is one -- this is not one of those novels which is\nmeant to be annoying by cheating you of an explanation.) Of course I\nmay be awfully dense to have missed the point the first few times\nI read it; other people with better literary backgrounds may have\ncaught the trick right away.  I had to have some help:  there is a\nstory collected in GENE WOLFE'S BOOK OF DAYS entitled 'The Changeling'\nwhich is the key to the whole novel.  'The Changeling' is just a\nfantastically beautiful story and well worth reading if you can find it\n(it originally appeared one of Damon Knight's ORBIT anthologies).  The\ntrick is that the protagonist of this story makes an appearance in\nPEACE...  I won't give any more away than that.\n\nI would agree with Tim Bray that Wolfe's THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS is\n(at least) one of the best science fiction novels ever written in terms\nof both style and content; I am also ga-ga over Wolfe's four-volume\nfantasy novel THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN...  I'm obviously a rabid Wolfe\nfan.\n\nI know who comes after Number Five,"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}