Wolfe and Gaiman

Jeff Wilson · 03 Jan 2011, 01:51 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2011 19:51:23 -0600
Subject: (urth) Wolfe and Gaiman
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTinkc5Zqa_Y9pmVZtLX5MAb7+Hq7MAUG_tNQ19K0 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <553051.35277.qm at web81408.mail.mud.yahoo.com>	<4D2105A6.1060904 at io.com>
	<AANLkTinkc5Zqa_Y9pmVZtLX5MAb7+Hq7MAUG_tNQ19K0 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4D212B9B.1010605 at io.com>

On 1/2/2011 5:29 PM, Daniel Petersen wrote:
> I think Gaiman is just a huge Wolfe fan like the rest of us and Wolfe is
> nice enough to return the compliment to a certain degree.  But I can
> easily see how Gaiman is influenced by Wolfe's handling of ancient gods
> and heroism.  Gaiman has his own take on these themes in his American
> Gods and Anansi Boys.  Gaiman is very much the lesser writer and I think
> he'd probably acknowledge it.  Gaiman is great.  Wolfe is genius.
>
> Incidentally, you can see the same asymmetric relationship between
> Gaiman and his other genius hero, R. A. Lafferty.  Interesting that two
> lesser known but critically acclaimed Catholic authors have had such a
> profound and even 'fan-boy' influence on perhaps the most popular
> contemporary fantasy author (who is himself some sort of religious
> pluralist?).

Born Jewish, raised Scientologist, schooled Anglican, currently mentions 
being Jewish but is otherwise unobservant judging by his blog.

Neil used to be part of the Wolfe topic on the old pre-internet GEnie 
network where Mantiss and I hung out and was one of the first IIRC to 
work out Number Five's name.

I would say that a typical Gaiman story is shorter and about 75% less 
cryptic than a typical Wolfe story; within those constraints, they are 
otherwise often similar to my eye.

You might be interested to follow Neil's testimony on his creative 
process from recent litigation, it is not entirely unlike Wolfe's:

http://www.maggiethompson.com/2010/06/june-15-in-madison-with-neil-gaiman.html

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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