Anyone read Gene Wolfe: Free Live Free

R o d Johnson · 13 Jun 1990, 17:15 · from rec.arts.sf-lovers.1990.mbox

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From: johnsonr at thor.acc.stolaf.edu (R o d Johnson)
Subject: Re: Anyone read Gene Wolfe: Free Live Free
Date: 13 Jun 90 17:15:44 GMT
Message-ID: <649 at nic.stolaf.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-lovers
References: <55160 at microsoft.UUCP>

In article <55160 at microsoft.UUCP> ericsa at microsoft.UUCP (Eric Sassaman) writes:
>
>Has anyone read Gene Wolfe's "Free Live Free"? I enjoyed his "There
>Are Doors" quite a bit. How would you rate "Free Live Free" on a 1-5
>stars scale?

I've read both.  I don't know quite what to say, though, if you
enjoyed "There Are Doors".  The two are similar in some ways--they
both have complex plots (overly so, in my opinion, to the point of
being contrived) and characters that are sort of flat.  "There Are
Doors" is an interesting attempt to write a character who is much less
intelligent than his author--not easy to do--but still sympathetic.  I
don't know if it works, though; I found it hard to really care what
happens to our guy once he gets back to his own world.  It felt like
an exercise more than a novel.

"Free Live Free" probably works better for me, but the plot
machinations get *so* ornate (it's one of those time-travel stories
where everything causes everything else) and it takes so much energy
keeping up with who did what to whom when, that some of the "pleasure
of the text" is lost, and the eventual outcome is kind of an
anticlimax.

I would say neither of these is up to Wolfe's best work ("The Fifth
head of Cerberus", the New Sun books).  They remind me, as I say, of
exercises, much as "Peace" seems to me to be an exercise that
eventually bore fruit in the New Sun books.  They may eventually bear
the same kind of fruit in another great Wolfe work, and then again
they may not.  My sense is that Wolfe is a little lost, looking for
something to follow up the success to the New Sun books--a hard act to
follow--and he's marking time.

Of course, neither is *nearly* as bad as Wolfe's worst
work--"Operation Ares".  They're just Generic Wolfe--inventive,
exuberant, playful, complex--but not much fun, for me at least.

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