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The Lupiverse(es)

David Stockhoff · 16 Mar 2012, 01:39 · from 2012-March.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2012 21:39:43 -0400
Subject: (urth) The Lupiverse(es)
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W61546C723E912405FB28D5CF5F0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W61546C723E912405FB28D5CF5F0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4F6299DF.6030403 at verizon.net>

On 3/15/2012 8:42 PM, Lee Berman wrote:
>> After all, Milton came up earlier: people love PL because they think it's a profoundly
>> Christian work AND because they think it's secretly subversive of that.
>
>
> Hm, I think WOlfe's work resembles this. SF is a genre which has been a historic breeding
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> ground for atheistic thought. Good portions of it have been devoted to explaining away
>
> religious beliefs and God's creation using science.  Wolfe's work might be called profoundly
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> SF (he has certain collected enough SF awards) but I think he uses his work to secretly
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> subvert SF by explaining it away with religion.
>
>
>
> That overstates it of course. Wolfe seems to want science and religion to coexist in some
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> sort of simultaneous harmony. But in a literary world populated by Dr. Cranes, that could be
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> seen as a form of subversion.
>
>
Possibly. It's true that many of the Golden Age SF writers were Jewish. 
But look at how many fantasy writers were overtly Christian.

Perhaps there is more of an argument to be made that Wolfe subverts SF 
by bringing fantasy into it.

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