Gene Wolfe, _On Blue's Waters_

David Kennedy · 20 Oct 1999, 10:52 · from sf-lovers.1999.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: David Kennedy <kennedyd at bireh010.europe.nortel.com>
Subject: Gene Wolfe, _On Blue's Waters_
Date: 20 Oct 1999 10:52:30 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v24-147-2 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V24 #147
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-24

If anyone else but Gene Wolfe had embarked on their third trilogy in the
same fantasy sequence there'd be cries of complaint at the crass
commercialisation. However, it's a new set of books by Wolfe and I for one
will happily read anything he writes!

No spoilers other than general comments. Spoiler for the Long Sun series.

I was irritated by the end of the Long Sun books, I felt that the
appearance of the inhumi (spelling?) as they approached Green and Blue
didn't fit with the rest of the series and was something of a slapped on
ending.

Since then I have read, er, memory failure, _The Fifth Head of Cerebus_?
(The one with the three interlinked stories of shapeshifters.) This
established some context for the ending of the Long Sun books, but I still
didn't like it.

I'm happier now. Wolfe addresses this issue directly in the new book,
having the protagonist Horn (the youngster Silk knew in the Long Sun
trilogy) wonder about the events at the exodus from the Whorl. It looks
like this will be a central story element in this series.

The style is quite different from the Short Sun or Long Sun books. As you
would expect the narrative isn't linear and straightforward but he doesn't
play too many games with the reader. The writing is more transparent than
before, with less of the layered imagery of the Short Sun books for
example. This is due in part to the story being told by Horn I suppose. He
has a markedly different view of the world from Silk (or so he tells us)
despite being hugely influenced by him. Once I started to dis-entangle
events I enjoyed this book hugely.

Anyway, I'll reserve judgement until I read the rest of the series, but I
always find other people's reading of Wolfe's books to be much more
incisive than my own!

Anyone want to tell me what they though was worth remarking on? Please?  (I
_want_ something to look for when I reread it)

David Kennedy

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