Gene Wolfe

Albatross · 03 Apr 1992, 16:47 · from sf-lovers.1992.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: alberti at mudhoney.micro.umn.edu (Albatross)
Subject: Re: Gene Wolfe
Date: 3 Apr 92 16:47:31 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v17-160-6 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V17 #160
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-17a

>>> Someone actually wants _more_ Gene Wolfes?!?  What a painful thought!
>> Gene Wolfe is perhaps the best science fiction / fantasy author writing
>> today.  There is no kitsch or melodrama in Wolfe's prose.  His writing
>> is spare,
>
>I find this opinion hard to believe..."verbal diarrhea".  
>
>This certainly shows a massive difference in taste from the above
>comments.

   Well, at least I think we can agree that Gene Wolfe's works are
"arguably the best", with emphasis on "arguably".

   An important point is that Wolfe adhere's to a style of writing similar
to Sucharitkul, MacAvoy, or some of Tepper's earlier works: storytelling.
Wolfe is first a storyteller, and second a science-fiction/fantasy writer.
He is NOT a space-opera writer, adventure writer, or intrigue writer.
   Since storytelling is probably the least-common structure for a science
fiction novel, it will seem, well, alien to many science-fiction readers.
Thus the sharply different opinions as to whether or not his writing is
"good".

   Since my tastes have always run to strong characterization and clear
description, I enjoy Wolfe's works.  However, I always keep in mind the
distinction between his storytelling style and the style of most other
science fiction authors.  To do otherwise results in Wolfe being lumped in
with Heinlein, Card or Brin, resulting in absurd comparisons.

   Storytelling is storytelling, adventure is adventure.  Each can contain
elements of the other (each must, really), but to try to compare two
clearly different styles makes no sense.  Gene Wolfe his one of the best
storytellers we have, behind only Richard Adams (IMHO).  He does what he
does very well.

   You may simply not have a taste for that style.

Bob Alberti
Computer & Information Services 
U of MN

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