Swanwick and others

dunnaaa . · 21 Jun 2014, 01:01 · from 2014-June.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: bahamut0 at gmail.com (dunnaaa .)
Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2014 02:01:23 +0100
Subject: (urth) Swanwick and others
In-Reply-To: <CAM3O41LbEwKiW7vSnaX-Gg3SN8X8Tfh3ySf8jcaieMnp7GRzqg at mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAM3O41LbEwKiW7vSnaX-Gg3SN8X8Tfh3ySf8jcaieMnp7GRzqg at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CADybFHrmSd8OZAw6VBnCHjB8si2k16hM_hqaPu5Nwv0TrkdQpQ at mail.gmail.com>

The world-building is very similar - we are aware that there is a lot going
on out there, but we are only teased brief details which let us attempt to
construct the larger picture.

I definitely got a BotNS vibe off of Anathem - mostly for this reason. I
think the difference lies in the explanations that we are given by the
authors - for instance, I would have been perfectly happy reading the first
half of Anathem and then leaving it be, with all my questions unanswered,
but the possibilities I could create still out there. Whereas with Wolfe, I
am much happier with the world and the answers that he provides.

So I guess I'm saying that Wolfe is the better writer, but I can definitely
get that Anathem evokes some of the feelings that I got when reading BotNS.

Cheers,
Sean
On Jun 17, 2014 10:05 PM, "Andrew Mason" <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com>
wrote:

> Michael Thayer wrote:
>
>>
>> I am a big fan of Anathem, but I just don't see the New Sun
>> parallels/connection -- what specifically do you see as the similarities?
>>  I'm intrigued.
>>
>
>
> Set on an Earth-like planet in the far 'future' (though not as far, nor as
> blatantly Earth-like)
>
> Lots of unusual words (in Wolfe real words: in Stephenson made-up ones,
> though not too mysterious if you know Latin; but the effect is similar).
>
> The hero begins in an enclosed community and then goes on a journey.
>
> And, most importantly, the idea of alternative worlds and a choice between
> them.
>
> Well, it may not add up to much, but Stephenson was rather absurdly
> accused of plagiarism (with the mistaken claim that the planet is called
> Orth), so clearly others besides me have noticed a similarity.
>
> As I mentioned a little while ago, Paul Witcover's _The Emperor of All
> Things_ seems to acknowledge a debt to Wolfe, though perhaps a negative
> one, as the character Wolfe is a villain; (but then, Umberto Eco made
> Borges a villain, and I don't think that was meant in a wholly hostile
> way).
>
>
> --
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20140621/77203ab0/attachment.htm>

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