This Week in Google Alerts: Will No One Rid Me Of This Troublesome Writer?

James B. Jordan · 10 May 2011, 15:10 · from 2011-May.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: jbjordan4 at cox.net (James B. Jordan)
Date: Tue, 10 May 2011 10:10:31 -0500
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Will No One Rid Me Of This
 Troublesome Writer?
In-Reply-To: <BANLkTi=6Zz=aOifJ10usw74EweodbjWpCQ at mail.gmail.com>
References: <BANLkTi=dQua4Hvxh0YtYxFsTq0EE3P=D3g at mail.gmail.com>
	<BANLkTi=QFjx-ptyT=uf0ObA_4wxzSBobTA at mail.gmail.com>
	<BANLkTi=Fy_2h0LEXmmXwV3LfpXars=CZhw at mail.gmail.com>
	<BANLkTi=6Zz=aOifJ10usw74EweodbjWpCQ at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20110510151043.DUUC32426.eastrmfepo102.cox.net at eastrmimpo01.cox.net>

At 06:17 AM 5/10/2011, you wrote:
>Yeah, this just looks like a red herring to me.  Wolfe is the 
>'brilliant student' of far more writers than Vance, many of the 
>others being 'mainstream'.

Certes. In the New Sun, there is a lot of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

JBJordan (formerly Nutria)

>  Even if we were to only consider fantasy pre-cursors, just the 
> mere fact of mixing something of Vance with healthy doses of the 
> likes of Hodgson and Lovecraft already creates something 
> wonderfully new and fresh (something that some will far prefer to 
> Vance it has to be said).
>
>It's no secret that Wolfe almost never invents any new s.f/fantasy 
>scenario - his originality is all in the exquisite craft and 
>artistry of the prose itself, the utterly weird sleight-of-hand form 
>of storytelling, and the dense depth of psychology and narratology 
>(all of which have their derivations - but Wolfe truly sounds, in 
>the thick of his narrative, like no one else).
>
>Having said that, I actually agree that the oft-repeated 
>(re-bleated) blurbs can be rather misleading.  Gene Wolfe will live 
>up to his praise in a way that probably many (most?) people just 
>won't 'get'.  And I don't necessarily blame them.  It just depends 
>on your tastes and backgrounds.  I think the 'problem' is that some 
>of us have been willing to follow Wolfe into and through his 
>literary labyrinth and thereby been shown wonders that have 
>resonated so deeply and lastingly that we can't heap enough praise 
>on him.  This is understandable but perhaps unhelpful and misleading 
>to the non-initiate.  Wolfe needs blurbs that will perhaps rather 
>more cautiously entice readers into his rare brew if they they can 
>be convinced to pay the fee (because, frankly, reading Wolfe is 
>costly, as most of us will admit).
>
>Then again, all the outrageous praise from Gaiman and others totally 
>roped me in and I'm not the least unthankful!
>
>DOJP
>
>On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:47 AM, Jack Smith 
><<mailto:jack.smith.1946 at gmail.com>jack.smith.1946 at gmail.com> wrote:
>Wolfe is derivative?  Yes, but so is Shakespeare.
>
>
>On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 1:22 AM, Lane Haygood 
><<mailto:lhaygood at gmail.com>lhaygood at gmail.com> wrote:
>This is just demonstrably false to boot!  Vance's prose, his diction,
>and his writing style are highly distinct from Wolfe's.  I mean, the
>only line of intersection is that they each chose a certain thematic
>motif (a dying world) for a few of their stories.  But Wolfe's writing
>tends to be more dialogue-heavy and witty, whereas Vance eschews
>dialogue in favor of lyricism and structured prose.  The "Dying Earth"
>stories are lighter and more mythic (not to mention fairly
>straightforward), whereas Wolfe's tend to be labyrinthine and
>multi-layered.
>
>I enjoy both, but to compare Wolfe to Vance is to compare apples to oranges.
>
>That said, aren't all writers at least somewhat derivative?  Talk to
>any of them and they can list a whole line of authors that influenced
>their development. But there's a clear difference between, "Oh yeah,
>Borges was totally influential on my work" and "Hey guys, I totally
>rewrote a Borges story with spaceships and swords."
>
>LH
>
>On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 10:30 PM, Gwern Branwen 
><<mailto:gwern0 at gmail.com>gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Just in time for Gene's birthday celebrations:
> > 
> <http://foreverness.createforumhosting.com/what-to-do-about-gene-wolfe-t337.html>http://foreverness.createforumhosting.com/what-to-do-about-gene-wolfe-t337.html
> >
> >> This is driving me nuts. I'm far beyond my limit of tolerance 
> for cover-jacket blurbs declaring Gene Wolfe to be "... the 
> greatest writer in the English language alive today." and "... 
> there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of 
> prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning." That's Michael 
> Swanwick's embarrassing fawning, which has apparently become 
> required promotional jibber-jabber for every book Wolfe gets 
> published. Other literary critics who don't know anything about 
> science fiction take this at face value, and occasionally 
> regurgitate it with their own variations, completely oblivious to 
> Jack Vance's work. And, readers new to science fiction (or 
> speculative fiction if you prefer) are being grossly misled. 
> They're amazed by the pebble but aren't told about the mountain. 
> Don't get me wrong; I don't dislike Gene Wolfe's writing. I pounce 
> on every new chunk of fiction he comes up with. I'll go so far as 
> to say that his "The Book of the New Sun" i
> >  s required reading for anyone who believes that some sci-fi is 
> serious literature equal to the best in mainstream fiction. But, 
> Wolfe is derivative. He obviously used Vance as a starting point, 
> whereas Vance developed his literary voice independently. Vance is 
> authentic and original, and Wolfe is the brilliant student. It's 
> true that Wolfe's most recent work seems to be moving in a 
> direction that is more of Wolfe himself and less of Vance's style 
> and technique. Hopefully, Wolfe's future works will be ships with a 
> wind in their sails that flows from Wolfe's lungs alone. But we're 
> still being pounded over the head with the uninformed blather of 
> Swanwick, et al. What to do? Who will sound the trumpet for Vance? 
> Who will illuminate Vance's status as the progenitor?
> >
> > --
> > gwern
> > <http://www.gwern.net>http://www.gwern.net
> > _______________________________________________
> > Urth Mailing List
> > To post, write <mailto:urth at urth.net>urth at urth.net
> > Subscription/information: <http://www.urth.net>http://www.urth.net
> >
>_______________________________________________
>Urth Mailing List
>To post, write <mailto:urth at urth.net>urth at urth.net
>Subscription/information: <http://www.urth.net>http://www.urth.net
>
>
>
>
>--
>Best wishes,
>Jack
>
>_______________________________________________
>Urth Mailing List
>To post, write <mailto:urth at urth.net>urth at urth.net
>Subscription/information: <http://www.urth.net>http://www.urth.net
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Urth Mailing List
>To post, write urth at urth.net
>Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

James B. Jordan
Director, Biblical Horizons
Box 1096
Niceville, FL 32588
http://www.biblicalhorizons.com 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20110510/6c5222df/attachment-0001.htm>
An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net