The Snootiness of Gene Wolfe

Peter Shor · 02 Mar 2004, 23:49 · 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: peterwshor at aol.com (Peter Shor)
Subject: Re: The Snootiness of Gene Wolfe
Date: 2 Mar 2004 15:49:04 -0800
Message-ID: <9b2e17b4.0403021549.48d43d23 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> <yv7zeksbno1s.fsf at godzilla.acpub.duke.edu>

wthyde at godzilla.acpub.duke.edu wrote in message news:<yv7zeksbno1s.fsf at godzilla.acpub.duke.edu>...
> David Kennedy <dave at dkennedy.org> writes:
> 
> > 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.
> 
>         To me (way back in 1977) it seemed like an inferior
>         rewrite of her novel "Until the sun falls", about the
>         mongol empire (which I liked a great deal).
> 
>         I don't insist on radically hard SF, or, at all, on
>         realistic battle descriptions (whatever that means),
>         but I thought that with respect to the former
>         she had no concept of Newton's laws, and as
>         to the latter that Mongol battle plans couldn't
>         work in just the same way on a three dimensional
>         battlefield.
> 
>         I've always meant to give it another try, as I really
>         like her historical novels.  I may have been expecting
>         too much from FW, which was highly touted when it
>         was published.
> 
> 
> 
> William Hyde
> EOS Department
> Duke University

When I read it (many years ago) it seemed like a mirror image of 
Great Maria, which is my favorite of her novels.  The events are 
parallel, but the meaning is reversed.  

Peter Shor

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