Wolfe at Readercon

JBarach at aol.com · 20 Jul 2009, 23:10 · from 2009-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: JBarach at aol.com (JBarach at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:10:38 EDT
Subject: (urth) Wolfe at Readercon
Message-ID: <c04.6495caeb.3796536e at aol.com>

Milton writes:

> I think Wolfe's done all he can do with Latro short of  killing
> the character off. Althought Soldier of Sidon can't  claim
> the level of writing its predecessors had, it still was a  fine
> book and, I believe, a great place to end the  story.

I haven't read Sidon yet, but ... surely the matter of his memory-problem  
has yet to be resolved.  That is, I assume Wolfe didn't intend it to be  
just some weird feature that plays no role in the plot but that allows Wolfe to 
 do some fun stuff with the narrative.  

Of course, that may have been how the idea originated ("What if I had a  
character who couldn't remember more than a day at a time?"), but it seems to 
me  that Wolfe usually DOES something with those sorts of ideas.  As he says 
in  one of his essays or interviews about writing, many people think they 
have a  great idea for a story when they come up with an idea for the premise 
of a story  or the opening of the story ("What if a guy couldn't remember 
more than a day at  a time?").  But what is important is knowing the *end* of 
the story and how  the story gets to it.  

So if Wolfe came up with this particular idea, it seems consistent to me to 
 think that Wolfe had some idea of where he wanted to go with the idea.   
It's not just a gimmick to allow, for instance, characters to deceive Latro  
because he can't remember that they were untrustworthy.  It's going  
somewhere.  The memory loss happened for a reason, and therefore it is  something 
that is both resolvable and needing resolution.  

Or so it seems to me.  Now you'll tell me that all that stuff was  cleared 
up in Sidon....

John

**************What's for dinner tonight?  Find quick and easy dinner ideas 
for any occasion. 
(http://food.aol.com/dinner-tonight?ncid=emlcntusfood00000008)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20090720/351e674e/attachment.html>

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