Gene Wolfe

Geoffrey A. Coulter · 29 Mar 1992, 02:28 · from sf-lovers.1992.mbox

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From: gac2 at ellis.uchicago.edu (Geoffrey A. Coulter)
Subject: Re: Gene Wolfe
Date: 29 Mar 92 02:28:29 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v17-148-5 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V17 #148
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-17a

doug at netcom.com (Doug Merritt) writes:
>It's a mood piece, it's about the psychology of a very odd man, by way of
>contrast it's about the psychology of the common man, it's a thoughtful
>work about ethics and mores (a torturer as hero??? Even Donaldson used an
>anti-hero for what little point he had to make in book 1), and there

Yes, but Donaldson was at least enjoyable.  Indeed, so was Wolfe...at
first.  His premise held a lot of promise, but he crippled his efforts by
making the series into a set of increasingly bizarre vignettes.  When I
started the series, I had a lot of hope for it, but as it progressed I came
to feel that Wolfe felt he had to write of stranger and stranger scenes to
hold the interest of the audience.  This really turned me off.

>There were also some spots where I found it a bit slow paced even so, but
>given the rest, I decided that he was probably doing that on purpose in
>order to maintain the rhythm and pace (they were noticeably regular) in
>precisely the intended way.

I don't question his intentions, but I personally didn't like the result.

>Now, if you're in the mood for bang-'em-up adventure (which I sometimes
>am, I don't mean that as a flame), then this is going to be a dreary and
>dull set of books.

Ironically, I thought the books had _too_ much `bang-'em up adventure.'  It
distracted from the character development; much of it seemed gratuitous.
Almost every conflict the aliens could have been done away with with little
loss.

>If you take them on their own merits, you can discover that Wolfe has
>created something so different that it's pretty much in a class by itself.
>It's not quite like anything ever done before.

I agree, and was a litle surprised when a came across a comparision with
Mercedes Lackey in the first post on this sub-thread.  The two writers
simply cannot be compared (No, I'm not saying one is better than the other,
necessarily :-) ).

>This is not to say I want to see people imitate this series. I probably
>wouldn't like the results. I'm sure I wouldn't have liked the original
>series if anyone but Wolfe had done it. It wasn't what he did, but *how*
>he did it that was great.
>
>It *is* possible to say, "He did a great job at doing it, but that sort of
>thing just isn't to my tastes," you know. Saying that it's "dreck" just
>exposes that you don't pay attention to those aspects of books that you
>don't personally care for no matter how well done they may be, surely the
>very definition of provincialism.

It comes down to what a reader sees him as trying to do/doing.  I'm not
sure he did a great job because I think he let his ideas run away from him.
As I said earlier, I liked his premise, but he seems to have lost control.
Perhaps if he had used some of his subsequent ideas in _different_ works, I
would not have felt I was reading a long series of non sequiters.

>Or to be more charitable, I could assume you're simply taking a
>Humpty-Dumpty stance in meaning "dreck" to say "I *really* didn't like
>it."

Bingo.

>>It was a collection of images which went from unusual to completely
>>whacked-out.  Why anyone would seek out more of this dreck is completely
>>beyond me.
>
>As usual it's important to separate personal taste from questions of
>craftsmanship.

As I just said, however, I question the craftsmanship.

Geoffrey Coulter

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