The Snootiness of Gene Wolfe

Richard Horton · 01 Mar 2004, 13:03 · from rec.arts.sf.written.2004.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: Richard Horton <rrhorton at prodigy.net>
Subject: Re: The Snootiness of Gene Wolfe
Date: Mon, 01 Mar 2004 13:03:43 GMT
Message-ID: <PwG0c.19519$vm6.8597 at newssvr31.news.prodigy.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
References: <Xns949D9FE6F929Difyouwanttoemailvisi at 199.45.49.11> <+tv*P4jeq at news.chiark.greenend.org.uk> <394d822b.0402291845.58775386 at posting.google.com> <unx0c.30233$473.16335 at newssvr16.news.prodigy.com> <n4e*D7leq at news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>

On 01 Mar 2004 08:59:33 +0000 (GMT), Thomas Womack
<twomack at chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>
>>For what it's worth, I prefer Dunnett's earlier series, which is
>>linked to the Niccolo books: The Chronicles of Lymond.  Beginning with
>>The Game of Kings.  (Which is not to say that the Niccolo books aren't
>>quite good themselves.)
>
>I gave up on the Game of Kings after getting totally frustrated with
>what felt like a plethora of asides in untranslated Norman French;

There are translations for all of them somewhere -- not sure if they
are on the web.  Elaine Thompson would know.

I was able to enjoy the book despite not being able to read any of the
asides. But, yeah, it's a bit offputting.

> I'm
>planning to try again after finishing the Niccolo books.  Merchants in
>Bruges are for me a much more appealing setting than feuding clans in
>Scotland, though (if only from titles) I'm aware that Lymond is likely
>to get out of Scotland at some point.

And it's not really a spoiler to mention that Niccolo ends up spending
some considerable time in Scotland.

(Dunnett, of course, was Scottish.)


-- 
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard.horton at sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.tangentonline.com)

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