Anyone read Gene Wolfe: Free Live Free

R o d Johnson · 13 Jun 1990, 17:15 · from sf-lovers.1990.mbox

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From: johnsonr at thor.acc.stolaf.edu (R o d Johnson)
Subject: Re: Anyone read Gene Wolfe: Free Live Free
Date: 13 Jun 90 17:15:44 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v15-227-8 at digest.sf-lovers>
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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?

I've read both.  I don't know quite what to say, though, if you enjoyed
"There Are Doors".  The two are similar in some ways - they both have
complex plots (overly so, in my opinion, to the point of being contrived)
and characters that are sort of flat.  "There Are Doors" is an interesting
attempt to write a character who is much less intelligent than his author,
not easy to do but, still sympathetic.  I don't know if it works, though; I
found it hard to really care what happens to our guy once he gets back to
his own world.  It felt like an exercise more than a novel.

"Free Live Free" probably works better for me, but the plot machinations
get *so* ornate (it's one of those time-travel stories where everything
causes everything else) and it takes so much energy keeping up with who did
what to whom when, that some of the "pleasure of the text" is lost, and the
eventual outcome is kind of an anticlimax.

I would say neither of these is up to Wolfe's best work ("The Fifth head of
Cerberus", the New Sun books).  They remind me, as I say, of exercises,
much as "Peace" seems to me to be an exercise that eventually bore fruit in
the New Sun books.  They may eventually bear the same kind of fruit in
another great Wolfe work, and then again they may not.  My sense is that
Wolfe is a little lost, looking for something to follow up the success to
the New Sun books, a hard act to follow, and he's marking time.

Of course, neither is *nearly* as bad as Wolfe's worst work - "Operation
Ares".  They're just Generic Wolfe - inventive, exuberant, playful,
complex but, not much fun, for me at least.

Rod Johnson
U Michigan Linguistics

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