Swanwick on Wolfe

Marc Coleman · 03 Nov 1999, 13:21 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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From: Marc Coleman <marc.coleman at mwcia.org>
Subject: Re: (urth) Swanwick on Wolfe
Date: Wed, 03 Nov 1999 13:21:42
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I'd highly recommend Stations Of The Tide to anyone who has not read it.
																		marc
At 11:25 AM 11/3/1999 -0800, you wrote:
>In the course of an interview I've been conducting
>with him, Michael Swanwick has some interesting things
>to say about Wolfe:
>1) "he is, I honestly believe, the finest writer in
>the English language alive today."
>2) On how 5HC helped inspire Swanwick's Nebula-winning
>novel STATIONS OF THE TIDE:
>MS: "It would be hard to exaggerate the impact THE
>FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS, and particularly the title
>novella, had on me when I first read it. Not just the
>extraordinary beauty of the prose but the wit and
>economy of Wolfe's solutions to any number of
>technical problems. If I didn't know Gene was an
>engineer, I think I'd be able to guess from that work.
>It has the same lean elegance that really first-rate
>engineering has.
>
>"So there's definitely a debt. As I was writing, in
>fact, I thought of the bureaucrat [the novel's
>protagonist] as looking like Gene Wolfe. Gardner
>Dozois once compared Gene to Dashiell Hammett's
>Continental Op, a man so ordinary-looking that if you
>looked away for an instant he could disappear into a
>crowd without a trace. I wanted that sense of someone
>who's unremarkable superficially and yet, inside, he's
>... Gene Wolfe!"
>
>
>
>=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>
>__________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com
>
>*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/
>=20

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