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

James Wynn · 10 May 2011, 15:59 · 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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Tue, 10 May 2011 10:59:34 -0500
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Will No One Rid Me Of This
 Troublesome Writer?
In-Reply-To: <4DC953B9.3040308 at irit.fr>
References: <BANLkTi=dQua4Hvxh0YtYxFsTq0EE3P=D3g at mail.gmail.com>	<4DC9242B.8010703 at verizon.net>
	<4DC953B9.3040308 at irit.fr>
Message-ID: <4DC960E6.6050509 at gmail.com>

Pleasure I get from The Dying Urth stories is the irony and subtle humor.
It's the way that whenever Cugel is about to be outsmarted, he refers to 
himself as "Cugel the Clever". It's the way certain plot details are 
described rather than explained.//////
Terry Pratchett owes as much to Vance as Wolfe, but I can see that Wolfe 
learned more from Vance than the plot element of a dying sun.

J.

On 5/10/2011 10:03 AM, Sergei SOLOVIEV wrote:
> I read Vance partly because he was mentioned with great respect by 
> Gene Wolfe
> as one of the writers who influenced the New Sun series (with his 
> "Dying Earth").
> Honestly, I was disappointed by literary quality of his work. The 
> characters are
> in general very schematic, the language is sometimes interesting but 
> dialogues
> are extremely artificial, nobody does speak like this, the composition 
> very linear
> (Vance does use most of the time "travelogue" plan - "Ports of call" 
> and travels
> of Cugel are typical examples). It doesn't mean that there is no 
> impressive episodes/ideas -
> and great deal of intelligent irony that I like. I liked "Guyal of 
> Sphere" for example.
>
> Best
>
> Sergei
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20110510/eb386c79/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net