Editors

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 10 Jun 2001, 11:40 · from whorl-v0012.mbox · original

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From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (whorl) Editors
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 11:40:34
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0803 at digest.urth.net>
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> The editors tell us in their afterword "These [Horn's narrative] we
> have left as he composed them, save for correction of obvious errors,
> division into chapters, and titling those chapters and his volumes."
> (409)  Which raises the (unanswerable) questions: what did the editors
> consider to be "obvious errors," and how frequent were they?

"Unanswerable" is, of course, moot; we can have no definitive=20
answers, but we can have answers which satisfy us, individually=20
if not collectively.=20

Actually, at least one question is raised prior to that: "do you=20
believe this statement (on the part of the editors)?" It's worth
noting that there are a few cases where they don't correct some
extremely obvious errors, or simply add a "[sic]" to them -- such=20
as "Horn and Hide."

So there's this spectrum of possibility, ranging from their having
made the whole thing up out of their heads to the possibility that
their statement of editorial principles is strictly accurate.=20
Neither of these extreme cases is either interesting or likely,=20
but they pretty much define the boundaries -- aside from the meta-
cases, like "someone else made the whole thing up" (well, of =20
coures, someone _did_, and his name is Gene Wolfe, but I mean=20
someone inside Wolfe's head), or "yes, this is a (more or less)
true statement on the editors' part, but what we're dealing with
here is an nth-generation hand-copied manuscript, with the usual
amount of error and editorial intrusion by later copyists" --=20
the latter case being, in fact, a very plausible description of
the ms we read in LONG SUN; the Narr several times in the course
of SHORT SUN mentions that the Book of Silk has been copied, not
always accurately, and dispersed far beyond New Viron.

I'm beginning to wonder just what Wolfe's _point_ is with all=20
this. "Time of Telling" is kind of fun in the LONG SUN and=20
SOLDIER books, vital to PEACE and NEW SUN, but with SHORT SUN
it's reached the point where it makes it bloody well difficult
to do the first-order reading thing and just "enjoy the story,"
because everything about the story tends to vanish under the
smoke and mirrors.

_______

Totally inapropos of which. I avoided Terry Pratchett for=20
years, then NYRSF gave me HOGFATHER to review -- for which I=20
was utterly unprepared, and which sent me out digging up old
copies of previous Pratchett books. Recently I picked up a
copy of his PYRAMIDS: lo and behold; part three is called,
of all things, THE BOOK OF THE NEW SON. No, it has nothing
else particularly Lupine about it, but I just thought it was
amusing.

--D

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