The Distant Suns of Gene Wolfe

don doggett · 02 Jun 2007, 16:50 · from 2007-June.txt.gz

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From: kingwukong at yahoo.com (don doggett)
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2007 09:50:06 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) The Distant Suns of Gene Wolfe
In-Reply-To: <001401c7a52e$92e1d1e0$41cb5a42 at rclackey.stic.net>
Message-ID: <950681.42159.qm at web32409.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- "Roy C. Lackey" <rclackey at stic.net> wrote:

 Most people
> who read fiction read for
> pleasure, and most people, I think, do not find
> reading Wolfe pleasurable.
> That, in a nut shell, is why Wolfe fans have so much
> trouble turning other
> people on to him. It is why his books do not sell
> particularly well even
> within the genre.

This is the second time this has come up, and it just
hasn't felt quite right. I couldn't figure out why, so
I've been thinking about it and I believe I've at
least pinched it between two fingers if I haven't
quite grasped the answer. I read fiction solely for
pleasure as well. If a novel doesn't grab my interest,
it doesn't even get 50 pages of my attention anymore.
I enjoy Wolfe; he draws me into his world and it's
pleasurable to go there. The work comes when I'm
finished and have to figure out what's "really" going
on. Now, of course I'm not an expert, but I have
worked on and off in bookstores for about 19 years,
and from what I've seen, people read for comfort, not
pleasure. They like consistency and repetition, and
they like the illusion of feeling like they know
what's going on even before the author does. Maybe
that's pleasurable. It's certainly safe, and it
accounts for 90% of SF, Mystery, and Lit, and all of
Romance. There's very little comfort in Wolfe, and
what there is is fairly cold, whether it's in  the
plot itself, or in his narrative style. That's at
least part of the problem I think, if you want to call
it a problem. My 2 cents.

Don

Don't cry, Theanthropos. I'm back to bottom posting now.

The Evangelists: a Lesser Apocrypha                                                                        http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=178109961

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