5HC

António Pedro Marques · 03 Sep 2014, 13:45 · from 2014-September.txt.gz

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From: entonio at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gUGVkcm8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 14:45:11 +0100
Subject: (urth) 5HC
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Marc Aramini wrote (03-09-2014 14:28):
> Harkening back to Gerry's comment here ... Wolfe's very nature is so cryptic
> sometimes the final structural layer really is a trick.  Face to face at the
> 2013 Nebulas Kim Stanley Robinson told me Damon Knight loved "The
> Changeling" but could never get to the bottom of it after I explained some
> of the stuff going on in the story to him and the externally verifiable 1931
> birthday, etymology of the word oaf as an elfin changeling, etc.  He said he
> wished I could have explained it to Damon before he died, who knew he hadn't
> figured it out.
>
> Once you notice the unaging boy shows up when Maria is little it's just a
> logical step, but there are so many other possibilities no one noticed that
> detail for  more than 40 years. And Wolfe wouldn't even explain it to his
> friend and editor, the one responsible for his exposure to a wide reading
> public.
>
> Wolfe is quite simply an entertainer who is not quite forthright with all
> the stuff in his stories.

He's said he doesn't expect everyone to get to the bottom of everything. 
Maybe that's right. Why do we need to? It's great to know that there's still 
stuff there, unnoticed by us. He's also said sometimes his puzzles (I don't 
like to call them that, but...) are harder to crack than he expected. It 
doesn't mean he expects everything to be crackable, just that he thought 
some were easier than they then turned out to be.

And he's not the kind of writer, either, to put on some random stuff in his 
books about, say, colonialism, and leave it at that. It's the fad these days 
to obliquely touch on some subject and have the public take that as a 
statement (like when a painter puts some tree trunk on a corner, which is 
actually like a machine gun, and we're supposed to take that as itselkf as a 
statement about war, as if statements had only topics and needed no actual 
predicate). So I can't accept that FHC simply 'broaches' the thematic of 
colonialism, rather I expect it to make some concrete statements about it. 
Just what those are, is subject to debate, but the idea that they're not 
there and it's all just scenery, like the idea that Suzanne Delage doesn't 
actually say anything much, is, in my view, noxious.

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