Cloud Atlas and Typhon

David Duffy · 19 May 2014, 00:32 · from 2014-May.txt.gz

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From: David.Duffy at qimr.edu.au (David Duffy)
Date: Mon, 19 May 2014 10:32:22 +1000
Subject: (urth) Cloud Atlas and Typhon
In-Reply-To: <63D2F7D23DEF98438CC93DB3D023726C25B74645@g1gsn0bms013>
References: <63D2F7D23DEF98438CC93DB3D023726C25B74645@g1gsn0bms013>
Message-ID: <alpine.LMD.2.00.1405191011070.17199 at orpheus.qimr.edu.au>

On Sun, 18 May 2014, Carter, Nicholas (British Council) wrote:

> The extracts above are of course closer in voice to Riddley Walker than 
> Severian, and I've found no reference at all to Wolfe in Mitchell's 
> interviews. Mitchell freely confesses to pastiche in the novel, (Hoban, 
> William Gibson, Chandler, Isherwood, Melville etc ) and so I think it's 
> unlikely he's referencing BoTNS. He comes from the tradition of literary 
> authors dabbling in science fiction, anathema to many SF fans. However, 
> he does at least, in Borges, Lewis Carroll, Nabokov and others, share 
> some of the same influences as Wolfe. I wonder how the two authors' 
> separate paths led them to haunted mountain tops and the preserved 
> artefacts of a crumbled, self-defeating civilisation, presided over by 
> the preserved body of a hubristic 'king'.

I don't think, based on interviews and on reading _Ghostwritten_ and 
_Cloud Atlas_, that one can regard him as a dabbler, but his main 
interests lie in other directions...

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6034/the-art-of-fiction-no-204-david-mitchell

INTERVIEWER Did you, like Jason, write poetry under a pseudonym for the 
parish newsletter?

MITCHELL I did.

INTERVIEWER Was your pseudonym the same as Jason?s: Eliot Bolivar?

MITCHELL James Bolivar?after a character created by an American 
science-fiction  writer, Harry Harrison. I?ve never told anyone that 
before. You can see why.

Cheeres, David Duffy.

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