Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

Gerry Quinn · 15 Dec 2011, 14:34 · from 2011-December.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: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:34:21 -0000
Subject: (urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W19F0448B0071FDE9EE535FCFA30 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W19F0448B0071FDE9EE535FCFA30 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <AF090B8029664A21BCF883AA293C7940@Rover>

From: Lee Berman 
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011 1:48 PM

> But, I was pleasantly surprised that with Severian's exile, his life and the story opened up 
> nicely. It was gradual, but I remember at some point realizing, "oh, a sword, a giant, a 
> sleeping beauty, magic, palaces..now I know what sort of story I'm in!". 

Certainly there are fairy-tale elements.  But we are also left in no doubt about the deep-future background against which these tropes must be interpreted.  The logic of fairy-tales will be of limited application. 

> Funnily,  the lack 
> of a point on the end of Terminus Est was an effective disguise. It seems more like a tool 
> than a weapon for so much of the story. The sorcery is likewise disguised, by scientific
> trappings.      

I didn?t feel the same way about the point.  The sword is as tall as Severian, after all, and very heavy ? it is not a sword to lunge with.  Few combat scenarios would be affected by the absence of a point.

However, that is by-the-by.  While genre categorisation arguments can get a bit silly, especially with a genre-mixing author like Wolfe, I would argue that BotNS is not really part of the ?swords and sorcery? genre, even though it does indeed contain swords* and sorcery, and indeed certain episodes (e.g. the mine with the man-apes) that would fit comfortably into the genre.  It?s not _about_ the swords and sorcery.

[*] Not all that many sword, thoughs.  Severian?s gets broken halfway through, and I don?t recall what weapon he uses in the war.  Vodalus also carries a sword.  I don?t remember any others, offhand.  Still, we can agree that the sword is prominent, and they must be reasonably commonplace even if there is never a true swordfight.

- Gerry Quinn
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20111215/6c7bcd44/attachment.htm>

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