silk, the dancing toy, gods in the tunnels

António Pedro Marques · 29 Aug 2013, 03:52 · from 2013-August.txt.gz

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From: entonio at gmail.com (=?utf-8?Q?Ant=C3=B3nio_Pedro_Marques?=)
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 04:52:43 +0100
Subject: (urth) silk, the dancing toy, gods in the tunnels
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No dia 28/08/2013, ?s 17:52, DAVID STOCKHOFF <dstockhoff at verizon.net> escreveu:

> It's puns all the way down.
> 
> If there is any one thing about the Solar Cycle that truly and persistently amazes me, it is that Wolfe does indeed deploy literal meanings (and any or all possible puns orthogonal to those meanings) just as you say, Marc---perhaps especially when they are so obvious as to be invisible. And yet he also relies on myth for deep narrative structure AND psychological and descriptive realism. His characters are indeed puppets, often openly and significantly so, and yet feel almost real. (Maybe because we all feel like puppets sometimes.)
> 
> Such complexity simply should not be possible. And yet bumblebees do fly!

I've felt this a lot from the first Wolfe I read. It's what I'd call physical layering, in parallel with the 'intellectual' layering we spend our time discussing here. It is one of the things that got me so much interested in him. And a lot of the nuance is lost on me as a foreigner!

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