Anyone read Gene Wolfe: Free Live Free

Joan Frankel · 12 Jun 1990, 21:14 · from sf-lovers.1990.mbox

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jmf at abacus.uucp (Joan Frankel)
Subject: Re: Anyone read Gene Wolfe: Free Live Free
Date: 12 Jun 90 21:14:18 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v15-227-6 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V15 #227
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-15a

ericsa at microsoft.UUCP (Eric Sassaman) writes:
>Has anyone read Gene Wolfe's "Free Live Free"? I enjoyed his "There Are
>Doors" quite a bit. How would you rate "Free Live Free" on a 1-5 stars
>scale?

If 5 is the high end, I'd rate it a 2.  "Free" is an effort-ful and
apparently pointless try at doing what Vonnegut used to do effortlessly.
Note this is a "how good is it rating", not a "is it readable" rating.
Wolfe wrote it, of course it's literate, readable, etc.  It's just not very
good.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net