The Long and the Short of It

James Crossley · 03 Nov 2006, 21:12 · from 2006-November.txt.gz

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From: ishmael at drizzle.com (James Crossley)
Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2006 13:12:49 -0800
Subject: (urth) The Long and the Short of It
In-Reply-To: <000c01c6ff7f$b5ea52c0$ab3ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>
Message-ID: <C170F0D1.4913%ishmael at drizzle.com>

On 11/3/06 11:38 AM, "Roy C. Lackey" <rclackey at stic.net> wrote:

> Mo Holkar wrote:
>> Has anyone read the recent Robert Borski, The Long and the Short of
>> It? -- Amazon are offering it to me a an ideal companion for Soldier
>> of Sidon. I've read Solar Labyrinth, which I found kind of a mix of
>> interesting ideas with some rather tiresome (eg. the cryoptnymics).
> 
> Only one of the essays really touches on the first two SOLDIER books, if
> that's what you wanted to know. The rest is similar to SL, but isn't
> concentrated on the Urth Cycle.
> 
In a way, I find Borski's second book more interesting.  By the end of SL,
it being all about Urth, I felt that the presentation of some interesting
ideas was turning into theory-flogging.  <The Long & the Short> covers many
more texts, so there's less time for the reader to feel that there's a
unified field Wolfe theory to be oversold.

I'm just glad, really, that there's some Wolfe-related criticism in print.
Not that the online discussions are less valid, but it's tremendously
pleasing to see some actual books on Wolfe sitting on my LitCrit shelf near
names like Melville and Perec.

James

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