Book of the New Sun-Should I keep going?

Kevin J. Maroney · 13 Dec 1996, 00:19 · from sf-lovers.1996.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: kmaroney at crossover.com (Kevin J. Maroney)
Subject: Re: Book of the New Sun-Should I keep going?
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 1996 00:19:28 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v21-516-16 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V21 #516
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-21b

Michael Wen <mswen at worldnet.att.net@postoffice.worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>What I would really like to know is why this series is so popular.  Does
>it get better in the later books?

There are maybe a hundred people in the world who respect Wolfe more than I
do; I certainly think he's the greatest living writer of f & sf, and one of
the greatest living writers period.

With that as a preamble, I would say, if you didn't enjoy _Shadow of the
Torturer_, odds are you won't enjoy the later volumes. It is possible that
Wolfe is not to your taste, or that this specific Wolfe is not to your
taste, or that the Wolfe is not to your taste right now.

My favorite bits are indeed in the later volumes: the meeting with Typhon
in _Sword_, the stories in _Claw_, _Sword_, and (especially) the story
contest in _Citadel_, and the encounter with Master Ash in the Last House
in _Citadel_, but if you find yourself wondering "why am I reading this",
it probably isn't the right book for you right now.

Wolfe demands a great deal of attention from his readers. Most writers
don't, and not paying close attention is a hard habit to break. I know that
I miss a great deal in Wolfe's work, especially on first reading.

Kevin Maroney

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