Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Jack Vance or There are Doors?

Adam Stephanides · 21 Dec 2002, 03:17 · from urth-v0212.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) Jack Vance or There are Doors?
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 21:17:17 -0600
Message-ID: <urth-v0212-2505 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0212/2505.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

I think There Are Doors is Wolfe's most underrated book, but it's undeniably
a very strange reading experience.  It's probably his most somber book in
tone, if not in plot.  And if you're looking for the sort of intricately
detailed world found in the NS/LS/SS books, you won't find it here; you'd
probably be better off with the Soldier books (though it's been a long time
since I read them), or with The Dying Earth.

I'm not a huge Vance fan, but I'm probably in the minority in that respect
on this list.  Wolfe has praised The Dying Earth (the first book) very
highly; I suspect that if you asked him, he'd tell you to read that first.

--Adam



--=20




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