a personal tangent in praise of Gene

Spectacled Bear · 09 Jan 2002, 10:10 · from whorl-v0013.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: Spectacled Bear <spectacled.bear at pobox.com>
Subject: Re: (whorl) a personal tangent in praise of Gene
Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2002 10:10:21 +0000
Message-ID: <whorl-v0013-whorl.v012.n186.4 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0013/whorl.v012.n186.4.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 06:23 2002-01-09, maa32 wrote:
...

>I think=20
>that there was a ton more to The Book of the Short Sun than any of us have=
 as=20
>yet realized, and I think it is one of his greatest creations, whether I'm=20
>wrong about my individual theories or not.  I think he's gotten a bad rap =
by a=20
>lot of people on this one, and that his talents exceed understanding and=20
>especially exceed SIMPLIFICATION.

That's certainly true. There appear to be so many loose ends, like the
whole business of who the Mother is and what she intends, and the link
between her and the Scylla on Urth. Someone on this list once said that
you know you're starting to understand a Wolfe book when the ending feels
like an ending and not just an abrupt halt in the narrative, and that was
spot on. There's a real feeling of all those plot points joining up to form
a solid arc of story, if that makes any sense.

...

>(whatever happened to Borski?  He had great ideas comparable in obscurity =
to=20
>most of mine, often with as little textual evidence as I have, too!)

And - why do we never see the two of you at the same time?

Actually, I think you are on firmer ground, mostly. All the things about
trees and plant genetics and the repeated motifs like the salt and the
wall are very telling; they must mean *something*, because that's how
things work with Wolfe. And the speculation about Horn and Babbie too
- that was always one of the most mystifying passages. Whether your
theories are right or not, you have certainly found some very interesting
things to think about and debate. Thanks!

Spectacled Bear.

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