George R. R. Martin on Gene Wolfe

Robin B. Smith · 28 Apr 2015, 17:08 · from 2015-April.txt.gz

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From: robinbsmith at gmail.com (Robin B. Smith)
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2015 12:08:18 -0500
Subject: (urth) George R. R. Martin on Gene Wolfe
In-Reply-To: <6djf9jkwrt92yn9eqo7qflcv.1430240286518 at email.android.com>
References: <6djf9jkwrt92yn9eqo7qflcv.1430240286518 at email.android.com>
Message-ID: <CAPrwg+wLgr7NLibFxHOLAsd1PTaT4shnwQmcNyQRWbKfxgZT-Q at mail.gmail.com>

since Pirate Freedom was brought up here, before I go off and start a new
email chain, I've been wondering: has it been discussed that Chris may be
Blackbeard? (I did some cursory searching previously, but found no
discussion of that point expressly)

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 11:58 AM, marcaramini <marcaramini at gmail.com> wrote:

> Home Fires is good once you realize Skip kills Zygment and is actually the
> person trying to sabotage everything, but it is too subtextual and subtle,
> and the voodoo section (in which the guns represent the people around
> chelle) way too unclear ... people cant follow what Wolfe is doing in that
> one on the surface level. ... seven american nights had more compelling
> overt action even though nobody knew what was going on for like 30 years...
> Home Fires has more ironic cross examination that for some reason is not as
> satisfying to our modern audience ...
>
>
> Sent via the Samsung Galaxy Alpha?, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Gwern Branwen <gwern at gwern.net>
> Date: 04/28/2015 9:31 AM (GMT-07:00)
> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Cc: urth <urth at urth.net>
> Subject: Re: (urth) George R. R. Martin on Gene Wolfe
>
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 11:30 AM, Nick Lee <starwaterstrain at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > They never bring up Wolfe, from what I've seen, and you would think he's
> the
> > perfect example. He's obviously Catholic and conservative, to a degree.
> See
> > arguments about this in the past of the List and recently on Reddit. He's
> > never won a Hugo despite numerous other accolades. You would think he'd
> be
> > their most damning evidence. So what gives?
>
> I saw this anti-Puppy argument previously brought up in, I think, a
> New Republic blog; they added on as another example R.A. Lafferty. It
> doesn't work because of the timing: the politicization of the Hugos
> and associated sites like Tor.com (still publishing a notorious
> cyberstalker because her politics & gender are correct, incidentally)
> only really starts hitting in force in the '90s and '00s.
>
> R.A. Lafferty wasn't even writing at that point, having given up until
> his unpublished stuff sold and then went to meet his maker, and Gene
> has still been writing but as much as I love his books, I would have a
> hard time making the case that any of _The Wizard Knight_, _Pirate
> Freedom_, _An Evil Guest_, _The Sorcerer's House_ or _Home Fires_
> *really* deserved to take home a Hugo for Best Novel. (Just compare
> the level of discussion on urth.net of any of those novels to that of,
> say, _Peace_ or even some of the short stories - having read through
> all of the hits for both, I think it's entirely possible that there
> has been more discussion here of the scant few paragraphs of "Suzanne
> Delage" than of the entirety of _Pirate Freedom_.)
> _The Long Sun_ was good and did manage to get some nominations, but
> also finished in '96 - or 19+ years ago now.
>
> Hence, Lafferty's and Wolfe's nominations and awards are uninformative
> since they either were in time periods where the Sad Puppies see
> minimal problems, or they are drawn from a time period where the
> relevant works did not exist / weren't clearly deserving of awards.
>
> --
> gwern
> http://www.gwern.net
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-- 
Robin B. Smith
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