Urth Net

← back to the conversation

...sigh...

Michael Straight · 28 Jun 2001, 14:16 · from urth-v0030.mbox · original

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: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) ...sigh...
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 14:16:38
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0518 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0518.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

> > > > Maybe this is why some hard SF people can't stand Wolfe.
> =20
> > > That, and the fact that his stories aren't generally about=20
> > > problems to be solved by technological means.
>=20
> > Except maybe "Alien Stones."
>=20
> Do we have to argue about _everything_ around here?=20

Sorry I wasn't clear.  I mentioned that more as the exception that proves
your rule.  It's a nifty engineer's spin on "solved by technological
means" that I wouldn't have thought to describe that way if you hadn't
used that phrase.

And, of course, the story's about more than a problem to be solved by
technological means.

I didn't get the ending (particularly the bit about one's marital status
in the resurrection) until I reread it after the whole Clinton/Lewinsky
affair, which made me laugh when the aliens said "It depends on how you
define 'is'" -- which made me pay more attention to the comment and
realize what they were talking about.

-Rostrum


*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/




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