Gene Wolfe

Peter Cash · 03 Apr 1992, 20:45 · 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: cash at convex.com (Peter Cash)
Subject: Re: Gene Wolfe
Date: 3 Apr 92 20:45:32 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v17-160-8 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V17 #160
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-17a

alberti at mudhoney.micro.umn.edu (Albatross) writes:
>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".
...
>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.

I find this hard to understand. I had always thought that the common thread
that runs through all science fiction and fantasy writing is
_story-telling_. Aren't these all stories? Isn't plot the decisive element
in this whole genre? And how can you say that writing about "adventure" is
not story-telling? I'm puzzled.

Peter Cash

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