Gene Wolfe Books

Ron Henry · 22 Nov 2005, 20:56 · 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: "Ron Henry" <ronhenry at clarityconnect.com>
Subject: Re: Gene Wolfe Books
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 15:56:15 -0500
Message-ID: <dm00ns$39l$2 at ruby.cit.cornell.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
References: <2dkgf.27307$rc7.1415 at fe12.lga> <dlslhc$rd$1 at reader2.panix.com> <rZkgf.1264$Jq4.1034 at fe09.lga>

"Evelyn C. Leeper" <eleeper at optonline.net> wrote in message 
news:rZkgf.1264$Jq4.1034 at fe09.lga...
> Nancy Lebovitz wrote:
>
>> In article <2dkgf.27307$rc7.1415 at fe12.lga>,
>> Evelyn C. Leeper <eleeper at optonline.net> wrote:
>>
>>>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.)
>>
>>
>> Do I gather you haven't read some or all of them so that you aren't sure
>> what you'd want to reread or refer to?
>
> Correct.  I think the only Wolfe I have read are short stories (those 
> collections I will keep).
>
> My initial implulse is to keep BotS and get rid of the rest.  (We have 
> reached a point when we are really trying to at least hold the line on the 
> book volume in the house.  This concept is, of course, a whole nother 
> thread.  As are infixes.)

Given only this list, I'd keep BotNS and Fifth Head of Cerberus; I'm 
assuming you won't be buying any additional books to fill out series (since 
Nightside the Long Sun is part of a 4-book series and Soldier of the Mist 
has a companion volume).

Urth of the New Sun is a more difficult-to-read (or perhaps 
differently-difficult to read?) sequel to the New Sun series, and some 
people don't like it; in any case it's not essential to the main story. The 
Devil in a Forest is (imho) a minor Wolfe novel.

Ron Henry

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