Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

Daniel Petersen · 14 Dec 2011, 14:36 · from 2011-December.txt.gz

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From: danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com (Daniel Petersen)
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:36:50 +0000
Subject: (urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?
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2011/12/14 Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>

> Curious bit here: I've never got the 's&s' feeling from any of the Sun
> books, not even NS. Nor do I get much futuristic sense from tFHoC (I do get
> it from various of GW's short stories).
>
Hum on FHoC.  Not even the fact that they colonised these planets by space
travel and an intelligent robot is a central character?  If that's not
futuristic, what is?  Perhaps you mean the fact that these elements are
downplayed or background and the baroque mansion and aristocratic childhood
are the real focus of narrative?  Yeah, Wolfe pretty much always does
that.  I guess I'm just always keenly aware of that background.  So, for
example, in Long Sun, even though the whole thing is kind of a medieval or
ancient society, I can never forget that they're flying through space in a
mega generation starship!  So it comes across more overtly 'SF' to me than
New Sun (even though that too is replete with SF background - I'd have to
get more detailed to explain the difference to me).


> I don't disagree with you - but imo you can't really read tFHoC without
> being drowned in 'riddles'. They're just too many and everywhere and too
> complex for me to abstract myself and just 'enjoy the tale'. It's not that
> I want to 'solve' everything at every corner, rather the basic need to make
> _some_ sense of the events being told forces me to solve more than I can.
>

Yeah, I get you.  I guess I felt I could just generally make some sense of
it.  Probably poor reading!  But I'm the kind of guy who loves reading
Milton's Paradise Lost and people always ask me, 'but how do you understand
his language?' and I just reply that I don't always.  I just love letting
the epic-ness wash over me.  (But again, even there, I'm partly just being
self-effacing - it's not crazy hard to understand to me.  More poor
reading?)

-DOJP
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