Vancean influence on Wolfe

Michael Andre-Driussi · 20 May 2002, 17:57 · 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: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Subject: (urth) Vancean  influence on Wolfe
Date: Mon, 20 May 2002 10:57:47 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0205-1009 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0205/1009.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Blattid wrote:
>And that, really, is the See Below. For me, at least, the
>stories in TDE are very much individual stories. There are
>links, characters from one appear in another, but they are,
>I think, less unified than (say) Leiber's yarns of Fafhrd
>and the Gray Mouser. Episodes from a single and singular
>future world, but not, to me, producing anything larger as
>a group than the sum of the parts.

I would not argue too strenously with you.  If you want to see Gene Wolfe's
take on TDE, see his essay "The Living Earth" in JACK VANCE: CRITICAL
APPRECIATIONS AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY.

>So for the more dedicated Vanceans on the list, I suppose
>the obvious question would be whether I, as a rather casual
>reader, am missing anything here? This book is the one most
>often cited when recommending Vance to a Wolfe fan; other
>than the gross-scale influence on New Sun, the fundamental
>idea (which, actually, wasn't entirely new here either) of
>this incredibly ancient Earth, is there something deeper?

What Andy Robertson said. In addition, I think it is important to isolate
TDE from the other Vancean "Dying Earth" novels: TDE has an "earnest"
quality, maybe something like sombre-mode Dunsany, that is burlesqued in
the other novels in a way closer to that of joking-mode Clark Ashton Smith
(as opposed to decadent-mode, which is the voice CAS used in most of his
Zothique stories).

The isolation of TDE could be extended further, to separate it from nearly
all of Vance's work--it really is different.  But I've read nearly 100% of
Vance's fiction (I haven't read a few of the mysteries because I cannot
afford them--oh yes, Vance wrote mysteries, too. Even won an award.) and I
may be forgetting more than that.

=3Dmantis=3D

--=20

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