Gene Wolfe Books

Will · 22 Nov 2005, 01:37 · 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: "Will" <wrbriggs at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Gene Wolfe Books
Date: 21 Nov 2005 17:37:03 -0800
Message-ID: <1132623423.827884.143420 at g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
References: <2dkgf.27307$rc7.1415 at fe12.lga>

Humm, where to begin...  I'll probably sound like a broken record after
the rest of the replies, but Book of the New Sun is most definitely a
keeper, as is Fifth Head of Cerberus.  If you are keeping New Sun, you
should keep Urth of the New Sun, for while it is not essential, it does
clarify a few things (and raise additional questions).

Ditch Nightside, since you don't have the rest of the Long Sun novels.
I've not read Devil in a Forest, so I'm not prepared to comment on that
one,  but it can probably go.

Now - I'm probably a minority, but I found the Soldier books to be
amongst Wolfe's finest, probably because I have a weakness for Greek
mythology.  If you don't intend to acquire the sequel, then you can
dispose of it, but it really would be a shame.

As an aside, if you're disposing of many books, most of them are
probably far below Wolfe's caliber, in which case you can safely retain
the Wolfe books and still considerably pare down your collection.

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