Free Live Free

Michael Straight · 23 Sep 1998, 10:45 · from urth-v0019.mbox · original

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: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) Free Live Free
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 10:45:10
Message-ID: <urth-v0019-0018 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0019/0018.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Wed, 23 Sep 1998, David Wells wrote:

> In terms of style/plot (and trying not to spoil too much)
> -	there is a Good Reason why Wolfe spends so much time in the first
> few hundred pages describing the rather sad and humdrum lives of some
> not-terribly appealing characters. The big question is whether having
> struggled through this, you think the payoff is worth it. As is probably
> apparent, I didn't.

While I agree that that the payoff at the end was not as satisfying as I'd
hoped (too abrupt: maybe I didn't understand everything, but I think Wolfe
has a tendency to wimp out by hinting at a happy ending instead of trying
to show us one--which is a lot harder to pull off), I enjoyed the book
overall.=20

I'm not usually a fan of humdrum, "realistic" characters, but somehow
Wolfe got me interested in these four. There are some good hooks in the
begining (What kind of story IS this?  Is she really a witch?) and I
thought the hijinks (there's no other word for it) in the middle of the
book were fun.=20

Somehow, the tone of the book reminds me a lot of _There Are Doors_.  Do
you it's just that they both have a contemporary setting?

> -	The whole book (and I don't think this is really a spoiler unless
> you've read it!) is essentially an allegory about the properties of
> composite materials. Yes, I do think this a weird thing to write a novel
> about ;-).

Ha!  I think you're joking, but it's a good joke.  Wolfe is an engineer,
after all.  Are you refering to anything besides the effects of Free's
device?  Tell us more with spoiler warnings!

-Rostrum

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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