Gene Wolfe Books

Thomas Lindgren · 21 Nov 2005, 18:01 · from rec.arts.sf.written.2005.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: Thomas Lindgren <***********@*****.***>
Subject: Re: Gene Wolfe Books
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 18:01:36 GMT
Message-ID: <m3u0e5ojp5.fsf at localhost.localdomain>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
References: <2dkgf.27307$rc7.1415 at fe12.lga>

"Evelyn C. Leeper" <eleeper at optonline.net> writes:

> Assume one has the following books by Gene Wolfe and is trying to trim
> down one's collection:
> 	Book of the New Sun (4 vols.)
> 	Devil in a Forest
> 	Fifth Head of Cerberus
> 	Nightside the Long Sun
> 	Soldier of the Mist
> 	Urth of the New Sun
> 
> Which would people say are his major works and which could be gotten
> rid of?  (Yes, I know some will say "keep everything", but that way
> lies madness.)

A bit of triage, then? Keep Book of the New Sun, Fifth Head,
Soldier. I might keep the Long Sun there as well, but you only seem to
have the first volume and it doesn't sound like you want to buy
more. (Soldier isn't a solo volume either, of course, but why be
consistent?)

If space is at a premium, just keep a slim first edition Fifth Head
and snort or give a silent, unnerving hooded stare when people mention
his later work.

Best,
                        Thomas
-- 
Thomas Lindgren
"It's becoming popular? It must be in decline." -- Isaiah Berlin

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