The Distant Suns of Gene Wolfe

Matthew King · 28 May 2007, 18:28 · from 2007-May.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: automatthew at gmail.com (Matthew King)
Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 13:28:29 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Distant Suns of Gene Wolfe
Message-ID: <A133482C-B105-40C4-A6C4-4C72AD8354DC at gmail.com>

"The Distant Suns of Gene Wolfe", by John Farrell, is finally  
available in the online archives of First Things magazine.

Farrell makes the common mistake of identifying Jesus with the  
Conciliator, and he smears Gaiman and Stephenson by mentioning them  
in the same clause as Robert Jordan, but this is an otherwise worthy  
article.

--
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5466

Lots of novel readers?from the highest brow to the lowest?nod  
politely when the science-fiction writer Gene Wolfe is mentioned. But  
even among science-fiction fans, one gets the sense that they?re  
saying, ?Yes, yes, we know how good he is, but we?d rather talk about  
such bestselling authors as Neil Gaiman or Robert Jordan, Laurel  
Hamilton or Neal Stephenson.? As Glenn Reynolds, the inveterate  
science-fiction enthusiast and popular blogger of Instapundit.com,  
recently wrote, ?Gene Wolfe is a superb writer, but I?m not crazy  
about his storytelling.? I recently asked a veteran New York editor  
whether Wolfe could find a publisher today if he were just coming  
along as a young writer. ?Probably not,? she admitted. His writing is  
too religious, too difficult, and too strange.

Both the Soldier cycle and the Book of the New Sun series reveal the  
problem and the promise of Gene Wolfe. The New Sun series, for  
instance, takes place in a world more than a million years in the  
future, where artifacts of Christ still have healing power, while the  
Soldier novels chronicle the life of a mercenary bedeviled by gods  
and goddesses in the Mediterranean world a few centuries before the  
birth of Jesus.

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