AEG: Dr. Lao and Woldercan

don doggett · 22 Sep 2009, 04:56 · from 2009-September.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: kingwukong at yahoo.com (don doggett)
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:56:29 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) AEG: Dr. Lao and Woldercan
In-Reply-To: <001001ca3a7f$df731800$e6d34a0c@rclackey>
Message-ID: <803921.61451.qm at web32407.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- On Sun, 9/20/09, Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net> wrote: 
> Then I was reminded that Wolfe used references from the Oz
> movie in FLF, so
> I may have been wrong to dismiss the possibility of him
> using the movie
> version of Dr. Lao as a source in AEG. If there are
> duplictes of humans on
> Woldercan, it eliminates the need for hypothetical time
> travel and other
> problematic solutions.
> 
> What say you?

I'd say that Wolfe tends to appropriate and redefine any bit of literature and pop culture that appeals to him, and that he is of just the right generation to have been a fan of the movie as well as the book. On the other hand, he does mention Charles Finney (the author of the The Circus of Dr. Lao) by name in AEG, so that tends to skew things towards the book. I own a few copies of it and no, the townsfolk are not duplicated in the novel. It's a wonderful book, Roy, if you haven't read it, and it has influenced many great writers, most notably Ray Bradbury. It definitely belongs in the canon of classic fantastic fiction.

Don

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