Re-reading, hoping for some discussion ;-)

b sharp · 15 Aug 2006, 11:21 · from 2006-August.txt.gz

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: bsharporflat at hotmail.com (b sharp)
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 07:21:42 -0400
Subject: (urth) Re-reading, hoping for some discussion ;-)
Message-ID: <BAY103-F976B38D7A4B230606E736D74F0 at phx.gbl>

Jonathon McKitrick asks:

>... is there any reason to believe Gene Wolfe had this stuff planned out to 
>provide all these details >deliberately, and that he will take the final 
>explanation with him to his grave?

At the end of Citadel, I think,  Gene Wolfe makes some comment about BotNS 
being the culmination of seven years of writing, re-reading, re-writing.  So 
I think there are surely intentional mysteries in there.  In one interview, 
Gene Wolfe is asked about all the analyses and interpretations of BotNS and 
he answers saying something to the effect that he is surprised by the 
excessive attention to certain details he never considered important and to 
the scant attention paid to other details he considered very important.

We've seen that different people magnify different parts of the story, 
depending on the lens they use to view.  Might be a Catholic or Marxist or 
(in my case) anthropological bias which makes some parts of the text stand 
out and other parts diminish.  In reading Solar Labyrinth earlier this year, 
I wondered if Robert Borski might have a Jewish perspective (I don't know 
his religious persuasion).

Someone recently asked if Wolfe might have notes or journals which would be 
published after his death.  Some felt that might happen but they would be as 
impenetrable as his already published work.  I get the feeling he builds his 
stories on a solid, clear foundation then he obscures it, so his notes would 
solve many mysteries.  But I don't think any notes will be released since 
Wolfe  hopes his work has the enduring quality to last much longer than his 
lifetime.

In the past, people in here have wondered why BotNS hasn't become an 
enduring classic which penetrates the cultural consciouness at large, such 
as Lord of the Rings, or Dune or Jurassic Park.  I think it is partly 
because, since the 80's and the availability of the VCR and movie rentals, 
all Science Fiction/Fantasy classics are expected to be made into movies.  
It would be sad to think Gene Wolfe's work would fade into obscurity in the 
future.

But I have mixed feelings about a BotNS movie.  I'd like to see it, just 
because I love movies and I think current CGI technology could do it 
justice, visually.  But a movie which didn't capture the tone and feeling of 
BotNS could actually hurt the popularity of the books, as I think the Dune 
movies have done.

-bsharp

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