A Good Society

Jeff Wilson · 11 Jul 2008, 17:23 · from 2008-July.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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:23:32 -0500
Subject: (urth) A Good Society
In-Reply-To: <507061.55682.qm at web83701.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
References: <507061.55682.qm at web83701.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <48779714.8070705 at io.com>

John Smith wrote:
> Can any one think of a Wolfe novel or story in which
> he portrays a good society?   
> 
> When I re-read  The Fifth Head of Cerberus, I realized
> that on the first reading I had missed how brutal and
> nasty the planet of Sainte. Croix is.  Urth and the
> Whorl are also terrible places.    Stories like The
> Death of Dr. Island have a cruel or indifferent
> society in the background.
> 
> Wolfe doesn't seem to write about utopias.   But does
> he ever show even a decent world?

The Goddess' world in _There Are Doors_ is a pretty tranquil liberal 
democracy similar to 1950's Britain - She reigns with the lightest of 
hands and suffers Her people to govern themselves as long as Her worship 
and personal property are respected.


-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

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