Gollancz list (was: Re: Book of the New Sun won thecontest!)

David Duffy · 07 Aug 2011, 03:23 · from 2011-August.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: davidD at qimr.edu.au (David Duffy)
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2011 13:23:55 +1000 (EST)
Subject: (urth) Gollancz list (was: Re: Book of the New Sun won
	thecontest!)
In-Reply-To: <CAFk60+czGEp9iGnzFSn_L+BeosyinvRc5PWmRNTn5ELaVsWRiQ at mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAGB0RZ6tVPbcOZA=88yj0UhAuNJSXmHbvE1-063-F+BkiJLvxQ at mail.gmail.com><CAM0v-i4SReOT1-ZO2e6wH_O1=OXucVAyBdivwfNSdxSanOiwKg at mail.gmail.com><CAJ8=rti3bG7ELC79KDqmkAaWgfYiEK29FGAg4bK=KrYTOhgxzg at mail.gmail.com><4E3DDF73.8070604 at sky.com>
	<CAFk60+czGEp9iGnzFSn_L+BeosyinvRc5PWmRNTn5ELaVsWRiQ at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.1108071256260.26129 at orpheus.qimr.edu.au>

On Sat, 6 Aug 2011, Greg Bates wrote:

> Have you not read The Left Hand of Darkness? I completely agree with you on
> The Dispossessed but I definitely think LHoD is worth your time.
>
> On Sat, Aug 6, 2011 at 8:42 PM, Jane Delawney <jane_delawney at sky.com> wrote:
>
>> Le Guin is ... well I don't know what to say. I did not manage to read more
>> than 1 chapter of The Disposessed; she was so intent on banging her drum and
>> drilling into our heads the contrast between her idyllic but backward
>> egalitarians and the technologically advanced sexist b*****ds. Hated the
>> sheer manipulative lameness. Hated every sentence of it.
>>
>

This reaction always interests me (esp. since if you didn't read more than 
one chapter, I can't see how you can know much about the Urrasti :)).  It 
also ties into the ongoing "villains" thread, in that the society of the 
"technologically advanced sexist b*****ds" is villainous, but many 
individuals from it don't come across as personally vindictive, cf Sabul, 
the Annarasti physicist who likes being top dog.  I mean if our hero was 
visiting Saudi Arabia, I presume you wouldn't have thought it was 
maniipulative lameness to comment on the absence of women driving cars...

Anyway, I am circling back to Wolfe's politics, which although slightly to 
the right of, maybe, Charlemagne, never seem obtrusive to me as a more 
left leaning reader.  _And_ gun control, as alluded to in _Home Fires_ and 
a few others, which never has seemed so much of an issue down here in 
Australia.  Wolfe frequently has obnoxious totalitarian US governments (eg 
_the Eyeflash Miracles_), which I presume no-one here found offensively 
preachy.

Just 2c... David Duffy.

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