Pandora/Gene Wolfe

cynthia teague · 07 Feb 1991, 01:31 · from sf-lovers.1991.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: CTEAGUE at uvmvm.bitnet (cynthia teague)
Subject: Pandora/Gene Wolfe
Date: 7 Feb 91 01:31:15 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v16-50-3 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V16 #50
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-16a

I have just finished *Pandora by Holly Hollander* by Gene Wolfe.  This is a
mystery, not sf, but since I read it because I had seen his name here, I'm
posting my comments to this list.  It was an okay book, neither memorable
nor unpleasant, which is the overall impression of him I've gotten from
this list.  What really threw me, though, is that the book is set in my
home town.  Wolfe has taken the town, made some transparent and
funny-sounding name changes, and used it as is.  For example, Barrington
becomes Barton, which is surrounded by Barton Hills (the rich part of town)
and South Barton (still fairly rural); their counterparts surround
Barrington.  A nearby town is called Palestine instead of Palatine.  The
Chicago & Northwestern railway (CNW) becomes the Chicago, Wisconsin and
Northern (CWN).  A store called Catchpenny is transformed into Snatchpenny.
Lake County is renamed Pool County.  A local newscaster named Walter
Jacobson shows up as Ben Jacobs.  And the scene of the crime, the Barton
Antiques and Art Fair, really exists as the Barrington Art dFair, though
it's much less elaborate and snooty than Wolfe describes it.  The high
school really is as big as he says, though.  What bothers me is not that he
used my home town, but that he was so unimaginative about it.  Pool County,
indeed!  (And I'm pretty sure that the town he calls Dawn is really
Halfday, a much more plausible name, though I haven't compared distances on
the map.)  Sara Peretsky's books make me nostalgic for my old neighborhood
in Chicago (several blocks north of and somewhat seedier than hers), and
Emma Bull makes Milwaukee vivid, even though I've never been there.  But
Wolfe seems to have taken a city plan and gone through it like a high
school plagiarist, changing a name here and there to avoid coming up with
something original.  It really makes me wonder about the originality of his
science fiction.  Any comments?

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