Gene Wolfe interview in Locus

Doug Merritt · 02 Jun 1991, 01:57 · from rec.arts.sf-lovers.1991.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: doug at netcom.COM (Doug Merritt)
Subject: Re: Gene Wolfe interview in Locus
Date: 2 Jun 91 01:57:34 GMT
Message-ID: <1991Jun2.015734.14702 at netcom.COM>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-lovers
References: <1991May30.233326.5041 at tc.fluke.COM>

In article <1991May30.233326.5041 at tc.fluke.COM> mce at tc.fluke.COM (Brian McElhinney) writes:
>	Book of the New Sun" he was also writing FREE LIVE FREE.  [Talk
>	about a contrast; my most and least favorites]
>
>	FREE LIVE FREE was an attempt to get away from "Severian, Severian,
>	Severian" and create "one character that everyone likes, but what I
>	actually seem to have done is give everybody one character to
>	dislike."

Yeah. He also said everyone complained it wasn't science fiction, but
he rebuts that by saying that he planted clues all the way along that
pointed towards the science fictional element in the end.

That really irked me; as if we dumb readers must not have seen those
clues, else we wouldn't say it wasn't SF. Wrong...I saw the clues all
the way along. They were pretty obvious, after all, and furthermore
about the only thing that kept some of us reading (albeit with a lot
of yawning and grimacing).

But he should know what every aspiring SF writer is lectured about in
the "how-to's" and in editorial columns & comments: a touch
of window dressing does *not* make a story science fiction. Only the
most extreme definitions of SF include things that just happen to have
a tiny bit of (completely non-essential!) SF background.

I don't blame him for wanting a change of pace, but I deplore the lack
of intellectual honesty that he displays in failing to call a spade
a spade. Or insisting that his screwdriver should be called a spade.
It means that I'll have to be on my guard about his books, instead of
just buying them on sight, as I was happily doing with him (and very
few other authors) for a while.

Doing that to your readers means an impact on sales. Tsk.
	Doug

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