Mostly Spoiler Free Thoughts on Home Fires

Jeff Wilson · 03 Mar 2011, 03:20 · from 2011-March.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2011 21:20:51 -0600
Subject: (urth) Mostly Spoiler Free Thoughts on Home Fires
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Message-ID: <4D6F0913.6000501 at io.com>

On 3/2/2011 1:47 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> Jeff Wilson wrote:
>
>> There's also almost a total lack of technical detail of any kind, and the
>> SFnal elements are barely more than tokens.
>
> When you say technical detail I agree -- but there is a lot of stfnal
> content, it's just that that content is mostly social speculation
> shoved into the background.

hmm, not spoilery, so I'll just say that aside from the inherent Forever 
War premise in the promotion, I can't think of anything that has to be 
SFnally justified for things to progress the way they did, except maybe 
for one of the mistaken identities, which could be done with the usual 
devices though it would take a rather unwieldy pile of them.

Oh, and rather a lot of the detective work is Columbo-style. Skip 
becomes privy to a lot of the stuff that would be a deep dark mystery in 
other Wolfe books, but he (and the reader) have to really work on *why* 
such a thing was done, and how to catch or just stop the antagonists.

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

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