Watson and Wolfe

David Duffy · 20 Apr 2003, 04:51 · from urth-v0304.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: David Duffy <davidD at qimr.edu.au>
Subject: (urth) Watson and Wolfe
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2003 14:51:42 +1000 (EST)
Message-ID: <urth-v0304-3251 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0304/3251.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Sun, 20 Apr 2003 Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net> wrote:

>
> I've only read a little Ian Watson, and didn't like him, but there is a
> superficial similarity between him and Wolfe.=3DA0 They're both "cerebral"
> and "literary" authors, though my memory of Watson is that his stuff
> really is empty of emotion.=3DA0 Incidentally, I once read an article by
> Watson criticizing SotT because the protagonist was a torturer;
> something about making it seem that torturers weren't really so bad,
> iirc (but don't quote me).
>=3D20
Was it possibly a review in Foundation, comparing Donaldson's _The One
Tree_ with _The Sword of the Lictor_ (both out at that time)?  As I
remember that article, the reviewer found Wolfe impressive but cool,
while Donaldson semed to cared more about his characters and their
dilemmas and so moved more.  Despite shortcomings, Short Sun _is_ less=3D20
cool, I think. =3D20

I quite like Watson, but the main similarity with Wolfe is that his work
is intellectual and aimed at adults.  I would be curious to see what
Wolfe would have done with _The Gardens of Delight_ ;)



--=3D20
| David Duffy (MBBS PhD)                                         ,-_|\
| email: davidD at qimr.edu.au  ph: INT+61+7+3362-0217 fax: -0101  /     *
| Epidemiology Unit, Queensland Institute of Medical Research   \_,-._/
| 300 Herston Rd, Brisbane, Queensland 4029, Australia  GPG 4D0B994A v=3D20

--=20

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