Wolfe's NEW SUN (was Rhialto the Marvellous - Jack Vance)

Mike Berro · 22 May 1998, 17:25 · from sf-lovers.1998.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: mikeb at massmedia.com (Mike Berro)
Subject: Wolfe's NEW SUN (was Rhialto the Marvellous - Jack Vance)
Date: Fri, 22 May 1998 17:25:25 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v23-106-7 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V23 #106
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-23

aleistra at leland.Stanford.EDU (Andrea Lynn Leistra) wrote:
>Advice: Never read the _Book of the New Sun_.  It's an amazingly wonderful
>piece of literature, but - gasp - you will not know all the words in it.
>And neither will your dictionary, unless your dictionary is the OED.
>(They *are* all real words, just very obscure ones).

  I am really upset that I did not like the New Sun books (I read the first
four.)  I was so sure that I would, based on the recommendations of people
who like Vance, that I spent large sums on the first editions (a fetish of
mine), giving me an even greater incentive.  It just didn't do it for me.

  The writing was very good, enough to get me through the four books, but
unlike Vance, who (in at least some of his novels) never makes a pretense
of telling a grand story, I felt in the SUN books that there was a subplot
(or twelve) that was kept hidden from me, and never resolved.  Perhaps they
are resolved in the sequels, but I don't enjoy being kept in the dark for
so long.  Perhaps I missed the resolution (although I did understand all of
the words.)  If I'm just imagining a subplot, then my opinion of the book
is even worse.  Overall, it seems a "portentious" book, with little
resolution of the portents.  With Vance, each chapter is a delight (even
when he is describing tortures), so that the payoffs are almost immediate.

Mike Berro

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