Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun

SRI-UNIX · 11 Dec 1982, 01:46 · from net.sf-lovers.1982.mbox

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: SRI-UNIX@sri-unix
Subject: Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun
Date: Sat Dec 11 01:46:36 1982
Message-ID: <bnews.sri-arpa.29>
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers

I have now twice read the first volume (THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER) in
a vain attempt to convince myself that it is the beginning of an
earth-shaking effort or "the best SF I've read all year (Le Guin)".  It
would appear to be the beginning of just another quest story and having
just finished LORD OF THE RINGS for the first time, I don't think I can
handle yet another of these.  Could someone out there who has read the
entire tetralogy and admires it please explain what he/she thinks is so
marvelous about it?  Mike "the Monk" Urban, are you listening?  I'll
admit that Wolfe handles his language better than most SF authors I've
read but the story itself seems extremely drawn out and the characters
don't catch my fancy.  Maybe it's just that I don't much care for sword
and sorcery and quests.

	Stuart

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