How would you rate Wolfe as a short story writer?

cilluff1 at optonline.net · 25 Jun 2003, 17:37 · from urth-v0306.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: "cilluff1 at optonline.net" <cilluff1 at optonline.net>
Subject: RE: (urth) How would you rate Wolfe as a short story writer?
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 13:37:36 -0400
Message-ID: <urth-v0306-3533 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0306/3533.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Anthony, we've had this debate before on the list and I agree with you (as=
=3D

did a few other listers, Alga I think began the discussion)=3D2E  I think W=
o=3D
lfe
is a superb novelist, particularly when he is writing a multi-volume work=
=3D2E=3D
=3D20
But his short stories IMHO have been good certainly but not up to the high=
=3D

standard set by his longer fiction=3D2E  Perhaps he is a victim of his own
success: his novels set the bar so high that anything less seems rather
ordinary=3D2E  Very few of Wolfe's short stories grab me the way, say, Ted
Chiang's do=3D2E =3D20

But in fairness to Mr=3D2E Wolfe I must admit I have not read The Island of
Doctor Death and Other Stories (and Other Stories), which is generally
considered to be his best work in the genre=3D2E I'm smack dab in the middl=
e=3D
 of
Alastair Reynold's "Chasm City" and Norman Spinrad's "The Void Captain's
Tale" right now, each of which is excellent in its own way=3D2E  TVCT strik=
e=3D
s
me, actually, as rather Woflean in style, perhaps because it is baroque an=
=3D
d
lyrical and filled with metaphors (although slightly more obvious than
Wolfe) a la TBOTNS=3D2E  Chasm City, on the other hand, although it certain=
l=3D
y
can be read on multiple levels is really just more of an excellent and ver=
=3D
y
well written page turner=3D2E

- Joe

--------------------------------------------------------------------
mail2web - Check your email from the web at
http://mail2web=3D2Ecom/ =3D2E



--=20

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