Wolfe ebooks & stories

jeff · 24 Mar 2010, 03:42 · from 2010-March.txt.gz

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From: killbabykill2000 at yahoo.com (jeff)
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:42:01 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Wolfe ebooks & stories
Message-ID: <160328.31079.qm at web50605.mail.re2.yahoo.com>

Gwern Branwen wrote:
>Checking the PDF leads me to
>http://www.revolutionsf.com/fiction/eastersunday/01.html

>Which definitely puts itself forth as by Gene Wolfe. The style is
>similar, but the twist strikes me as not particularly in Wolfe's vein,
>but also not implausible enough that I could confidently say it wasn't
>Wolfe.

>But are you/Wolfe *sure* he didn't write it?

Reading this story sparked a major deja-vu moment for me. I read a story decades ago in Isaac Asimov's "100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories" that follows this story almost exactly. After some digging around on the net (I don't have the book anymore) I found that the story I remembered is "Displaced Person" by Eric Frank Russell, originally written for Weird Tales in 1948.

I can't find it posted anywhere online. As I recall in the Russell story it wasn't a priest who sits down next to the exile, and in keeping with the time it was written, the man at first mistakes the stranger for a refugee from Europe. The twist was exactly the same, except the stranger just says who he really is. I remember it as better written than "Easter Sunday", which I actually hope now *wasn't* written by Wolfe.

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