Pandora/Gene Wolfe

R o d Johnson · 08 Feb 1991, 04:03 · 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: rjohnson at vela.acs.oakland.edu (R o d Johnson)
Subject: Re: Pandora/Gene Wolfe
Date: 8 Feb 91 04:03:18 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v16-50-5 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V16 #50
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-16a

CTEAGUE at uvmvm.BITNET (cynthia teague) writes:
>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.

I'm surprised that's the impression you've gotten from this
{newsgroup|list}, but let me try to correct it a little bit.  In my
opinion, Wolfe at his best is one of the most memorable of SF authors; "his
best" being "The Fifth Head of Cerberus", the Book of the New Sun tetralogy
and its appendix "The Urth of the New Sun", and various stories, many
collected in "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other
Stories."  Wolfe is really sui generis; the fact that he's been dabbling in
genre lately (and turning out fairly uninspired stuff, witness
"Castleview") shouldn't blind you to the considerable, and somewhat
uncategorizable, virtues of his Really Good Stuff.

(By the way, "Castleview" takes place somewhere around your hometown too.
I imagine it as out past Aurora somewhere.)

>Emma Bull makes Milwaukee vivid, even though I've never been there.

Neat trick, considering she writes about Minneapolis. :) Taking the War for
the Oaks tour of Mpls is pretty fun; you should do it if you ever get the
chance.

>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?

Wolfe is a tricky guy, and I think a restless one.  He seems to go through
phases of experimentation, which can produce failures, followed by
masterpieces.  Right now he seems to be putting out busy, chaotic, cryptic
novels.  Who knows what great work might follow from this?  Several
post-New Sun works have been failures, in my opinion - "There are Doors",
"Castleview", "Free Live Free" but, the successes are as original as
anything you could ever wish for, believe me.  Even if you *hate* "Soldier
of the Mist", for instance, it's difficult to see it as being imitative of
anything else in recent English fiction, I think.  Don't give up on him,
and *try* the New Sun books ("The Shadow of the Torturer" is where it
starts).

Rod Johnson

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