This week in Google Alerts: review of _The Knight_

Lane Haygood · 08 Dec 2010, 04:59 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

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From: lhaygood at gmail.com (Lane Haygood)
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2010 22:59:12 -0600
Subject: (urth) This week in Google Alerts: review of _The Knight_
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	<4CFEF686.8060101 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <FEBA9C08-F21B-4FCE-814D-56419855EC6D at gmail.com>

The most annoying thing is how patronizing the guy is about sf literature. He doesn't examine why sf is not "respected" literary fiction, but rather assumes the imposed hierarchy is entirely natural, and lists the accolades given to literary writers, and thus asserts that no sf writer has received one because genre writing is necessarily inferior. Circular logic aside, he forgets that the awards of things like Nobel prizes are political, and with sf's place among the pop and outsider art traditions, it is little wonder it has received the oh-so-special treatment of literary fiction. 

I wonder if he is aware that a few hundred years ago all prose was considered so inferior to poetry. 

And to complete my rant, I didn't like Able as a narrator either, especially not compared to Severian, but I at least realize my dislike was not in how Able was written, but how Able writes. If the blogger cannot understand the artistry involved in such a flawed narrator, well, I wish him the best of his Cormac McCarthy. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 7, 2010, at 9:07 PM, James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
>> http://weaponsgradeennui.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/the-knight/
> 
> It appears he hasn't read anything else by Wolfe. Granted, "The Wizard Knight" is probably not the novel anyone one would chose as the fulcrum of his body of work...but mostly because it is _too_ sterotypically Wolfe rather than because it falls short of some baseline. But based on what the guy says about Wolfe's ambiguity, perhaps Wolfe is not his sort of author. On the other hand, maybe he should try some of his short stories.
> 
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