The Snootiness of Gene Wolfe

Htn963 · 02 Mar 2004, 10:56 · 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: Htn963 at peoplepc.com (Htn963)
Subject: Re: The Snootiness of Gene Wolfe
Date: 2 Mar 2004 02:56:18 -0800
Message-ID: <bcef0661.0403020256.45bfd34e at posting.google.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
References: <Xns949D9FE6F929Difyouwanttoemailvisi at 199.45.49.11> <c21d3ba0.0402290659.37671483 at posting.google.com> <+tv*P4jeq at news.chiark.greenend.org.uk> <394d822b.0402291845.58775386 at posting.google.com> <pQg*U8leq at news.chiark.greenend.org.uk> <pBG0c.19521$vm6.9205 at newssvr31.news.prodigy.com> <404405d0$0$28274$cc9e4d1f at news.dial.pipex.com> <6ZT0c.20551$aH.16733 at newssvr31.news.prodigy.com>

Richard Horton <rrhorton at prodigy.net> wrote in message news:<6ZT0c.20551$aH.16733 at newssvr31.news.prodigy.com>...
> On 02 Mar 2004 03:56:00 GMT, David Kennedy <dave at dkennedy.org> wrote:
> 
> >Richard Horton <rrhorton at prodigy.net> wrote:
> >> [Cecelia] Holland [h]as also written one unambiguous SF novel: _Floating Worlds_,
> >> from 1975 or so, set in a future in which the Solar System is pretty
> >> much fully colonized, and Earth is something of a backwater.  An Earth
> >> woman gets involved in the rather gothic politics of some heavy planet
> >> folks.  I liked it a lot, thought it read very much like Historical
> >> Fiction.  It was nominated for a Nebula but Holland withdrew the
> >> nomination in favor of the paperback edition, with then did not get
> >> nominated.
> >
> >It's still in print as I bought the bright yellow Gollancz edition
> >just over a year ago.  I bounced off it hard. I gave it another
> >month or so, then had another go before deciding that while
> >many people like this novel, I'm not one of them.

    Hmm, coincidentally, I just got a copy today on a whim from a
clearance rack outside my local Half bookstore, never having heard of
it.  (And this happened to be the first newsgroup thread I read after
getting home from the bookstore.)
 
> I will say that I read it back then, when I was 16 or so, and not
> since.  A couple of years later, my then girlfriend, also an SF fan*,
> remarked only slightly caustically that much of my enjoyment probably
> stemmed from a certain scene towards the middle.  (The main character
> has been made a concubine of one of the heavy planet rulers.  (I can't
> remember which planet.)  She takes the opportunity to initiate another
> concubine into, well, the pleasures available to the concubines who
> aren't currently in their master's bed.)

    It'll probably take a bit more than just sex in heavy g's to get
me to enthusiastically crack this big sucker open. [Notice all the
double entendres]  But at least the author being a predominantly
historical novelist sounds interesting.

> *(This woman was a bookstore manager.  She used her authority to keep
> copies of Gene Wolfe's _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_ on the shelves of
> her bookstore, which happened to be quite close to Barrington, IL,
> well past the date when it should have been stripped.  One day she
> noticed a middle aged man browsing the book, with, as she put it,
> great emotion -- tears even.  The man was Gene Wolfe.)

    This better have happened when Wolfe was just starting out or
it'll be just maudlin rather than moving.

--
Ht

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