First sight of An Evil Guest

aaron · 18 Mar 2008, 18:21 · from 2008-March.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: aaronsingleton at gmail.com (aaron)
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:21:01 -0500
Subject: (urth) First sight of *An Evil Guest*
In-Reply-To: <44fb53d10803180919t584afa33wc3c36d6943714bfc at mail.gmail.com>
References: <405686.44463.qm at web32106.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
	<401601.80449.qm at web50105.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
	<ecbb2eb0803180549x467262b8q8e419bc2bb69e19d at mail.gmail.com>
	<44fb53d10803180919t584afa33wc3c36d6943714bfc at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <ecbb2eb0803181121g2664ca3dmf78874df2048f652 at mail.gmail.com>

Indeed Vance is dictating his auto-biography into tape recorder and his new
live-in caregiver is transcribing these tapes to paper.  I for one cannot
wait for the end result.  Vance has led an interesting life, from working as
a Naval electrician in Pearl Harbor just two weeks before the disaster there
to writing scripts for 20th Century Fox's Captain Video TV show in the 50's.

I have read everything Vance has published with the exception of one of the
mysteries.  To me, other than The Dying Earth series, his best work has to
be the four book series called Tschai (aka Planet of Adventure-not Vance's
title)  consisting of  City of the Chasch,  Servants of the Wankh, The
Dirdir, and The Pnume.   Kind of like Wolfe's 'four book trilogy'.  But
really, you won't go wrong with any Vance written from the 60's onward.

As far as Latro goes, I am unsure about whether or not this is the final
book, but I THINK not.  I have yet to read it myself.

I hope Wolfe will continue to write into his late eighties as Vance did, but
who can say?  I guess we should all treasure each and every piece of work we
get from him from now on.

Aaron Singleton

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 11:19 AM, Matthew Keeley <matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Vance is dictating an autobiography? Didn't know that, but I imagine that
> would be fascinating - judging from a brief "autobiographical sketch" of
> his, he's had a fascinating life. I'm going to have to start a Vance thread
> here one of these days... I've been reading a good deal of his stuff lately
> and I'm fishing for recommendations on his best work.
>
> It seems to me Wolfe's books have had simpler prose styles these past few
> years - perhaps this is Wolfe's "late style?" Then again, Castleview was
> years and years ago and that was written in a less-than-ornate style too...
> And while Wolfe may not write as fast as King, he's still happily prolific
> (And much more re-readable).
>
> -Matt
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20080318/9cda4e4e/attachment-0001.html

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