TBOTSS as fantasy

James Jordan · 21 Feb 2001, 08:56 · from whorl-v0012.mbox · original

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: James Jordan <jbjordan at gnt.net>
Subject: Re: (whorl) TBOTSS as fantasy
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 08:56:29
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0318 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0318.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

This is not really a "fair" question. Wolfe is on record as saying he=20
believe in ghosts, that he believes that gods (angels) ran the world before=20
Christ came, etc. Thus, for him, the "fantasy" elements in his SF novels=20
are just part of reality. He's sticking with reality, as he comprehends=20
reality. It's not a case of Arthur Clarke's dictum that any highly advanced=20
science will look like magic to the uninitiated, though that's surely part=20
of it. It's also that Wolfe believe that some kinds of "magic" are real.

Patera Nutria

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com

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