Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

António Pedro Marques · 14 Dec 2011, 11:28 · from 2011-December.txt.gz

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From: entonio at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gUGVkcm8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:28:56 +0000
Subject: (urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?
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Daniel Petersen wrote (14-12-2011 10:34):
> On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 10:12 PM, Larry Miller <decanus1284 at gmail.com
> <mailto:decanus1284 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Can you really spoil a Wolfe novel anyway?
>
> Ha, good point.  Although, I have to say, I for some reason read On Blue's
> Waters first and only then went back and read Long Sun before starting over
> and completing Short Sun.  As much as I/loved/ Long Sun in many ways, a bit
> of the oomph was taken out by my hazy familiarity with some of the
> characters and set up.

Is it that different from reading The Silmarillion after tLotR?

> I think if I'd gone into the first volume of Long
> Sun having NO IDEA what was coming, it would have just blown me away on the
> conceptual, framework level.  It still did, but without quite as much of the
> sense of mystery and surprise it probably would have without prior awareness.
> Then again, my first reading of On Blue's Waters will always remain an
> intensely magical moment for me as I was plunged into the midst of a richly
> dense storyworld already well-developed and a narrative far into its themes
> and trajectories.  The effect was utterly intriguing, delightful, and
> awe-inspiring.  I can still close my eyes and feel the strange, pleasantly
> baffled, open-spaced wonder of first contact with Blue's flora and fauna and
> the glimpses of interstellar back story.  To this day I don't know which is
> the better way to approach the whole thing.  (John Clute wondered in his
> review of OBW whether it was the best place to start with Wolfe.  I'm still
> wondering that.)

I think tIoDDaOSaOS or SftOH would be the best places to start, because you 
have smaller bits to chew before you go into a 12 (500 pages) volume series. 
But the 12 (500 pages) volume series should come next, and I honestly think 
the 'canonical' order is the right one.

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