Review: Strange Travelers by Gene Wolfe

Aaron M. Renn · 19 Feb 2000, 18:54 · from sf-lovers.2000.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: "Aaron M. Renn" <arenn at urbanophile.com>
Subject: Review: Strange Travelers by Gene Wolfe
Date: 19 Feb 2000 13:54:11 -0500
Message-ID: <sflovers-v25-12-3 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V25 #12
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-25

Strange Travelers by Gene Wolfe
		    Review Copyright 2000 Aaron M. Renn

Conclusion: Recommended

This is a solid collection of Gene Wolfe short stories.  They are a diverse
lot, having only excellence in common.  I'll admit that I'm really not a
big fan of short fiction, but the recent collections I've read are starting
to convert me.

My readings of Wolfe consist of only this collection and the recent "On
Blue's Waters," so I obviously don't have a lot of experience upon which to
judge things.  However, I'm starting to get the impression that Wolfe has a
certain shall we say motif that is common to much of his work.  This
consists of a high tech setting, perhaps during or after some type of
societal fall, but one in which the characters do not fully comprehend the
true nature of things such that the technology appears almost magical.
This could be because the character is a child, or is living in a post-tech
future, or because the technology is so advanced that there is no need for
humans to really try to know it.  There also seems to be a certain
similarity in his lead characters, especially those who narrate their own
tales, though I've not really pinned this down exactly.  I don't suggest
that these similarities are bad, or make his stories seem like clones
because they don't.  I'm just speculating on things based on what I've read
to date and I needed something to say in this review besides "It's great!"

One interesting thing to note is that Wolfe does not give cutesy intros to
any of these stories.  They stand alone and unadorned, which I liked a lot.

The only real downside of this book is the high hardcover price.  This is
not something so good that I feel it must be purchased in hardcover, or
indeed at all.  So don't be afraid to wait for the paperback if money is a
constraint.

Author:     Wolfe, Gene
Title:      Strange Travelers
Publisher:  Tor
Date:       2000-01
Order Info: ISBN 0-312-87227-5
Pages:      383 pp.
Comments:   hardcover, US$25.95

Reviewed on 2000-02-13

Aaron M. Renn

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