Uncollected Wolfe

Adam Stephanides · 01 May 2002, 14:13 · from urth-v0205.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: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Uncollected Wolfe
Date: Wed, 01 May 2002 09:13:08 -0500
Message-ID: <urth-v0205-837 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0205/837.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

on 4/28/02 1:52 PM, Robert Borski at rborski at charter.net wrote:

> And those of you who have started to think of GW as a cranky
> old man may be less than pleased by the sermonette at the end. ("In the
> century we are just now closing out, we ordinary men and women have been =
in
> much greater danger from our own governments than from all the criminals =
in
> the world.")

I'm one of "those," but I have to admit Wolfe has a point here, at least if
you consider only death.  The number of people in the 20th century killed by
their own governments, or as a result of bad policies (i.e. famines) would
certainly be in the tens of millions, which might very well be greater than
the number of people killed by "ordinary criminals," though I have no idea
what the actual figure would be.

> "A Fish Story." Is the key to understanding this short short to be found =
in
> the name "Rob Salmon"? (Or something like that--can't find my F&SF with t=
he
> story at the moment) I.e., do ghosts return to the place they're "born" t=
oo?

I found this one pretty impenetrable myself.
=20
> "The Night Chough." Almost no one agreed with me that this story supported
> my early notion that Scylla was riding Oreb and several people nearly
> self-combusted insisting this could not be so. It will therefore be
> interesting to see how the story reads now that the Short Sun trilogy has
> concluded.

I didn't read this one until after Oreb's possession by Scylla had been
revealed, so I don't recall the arguments; but it seemed to me that the
story made it clear that *something* was "riding" Oreb.  Knowing that it was
Scylla didn't add anything to the story for me; but then I've never been
much taken by the possession stuff.

> "Petting Zoo." Agree with mantis to a point--the story does seem like a
> Calvin-comes-of-age fable, except that the last paragraph also ominously
> suggests that mankind no longer rules the Earth, robots do.

I only read this once, and not closely, but I took the last paragraph as
meaning that the Earth is now ruled by the nanny-state, which has tamed free
and "wild" men like the protagonist had been as a child.  (I'm speaking from
Wolfe's perspective, not my own.)

> "The Walking Sticks." Dave Hartwell, despite being kind enough to mention=
 me
> in the intro, gives away a plot element I would have preferred learning in
> the story itself.

Not that you don't see it coming a mile away.

> Otherwise agree with Dr. Nick, in that it's rather
> unoutstanding.

"Unoutstanding" is putting it mildly.

--Adam

--=20

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