New Wolfe stories: comments

I've now read both of GW's newest stories, "The Dog of the Drops" (3SF, December 2002) and "Castaway" (Sci Fiction, February 2003). Both are good, if not his very best. "The Dog of the Drops" is under 1,000 words, and takes the form of a tale told in rustic dialect by an old man to an unnamed frame narrator who is visiting the countryside, perhaps on official duty. The time is after some great holocaust that has devastated civilization; a talking dog features (or, just possibly, a werewolf?) "Castaway" may particularly interest those preoccupied with Wolfe's vision of Mother Goddesses (Ocean, or, in this case, Earth.) Again, a tale is told to an anonymous narrator, this time by a shipwreck victim marooned for decades on a desolate world. Poignant, and unusually direct for GW. --Nick Gevers.

I thought "Castaway" quite good. One of his better recent stories. It reminded me of Tiptree's "Last Flight of Dr. Ain". so,=20 SPOILER Do you think the world was actually Earth? Or was the castaway remembering lost Earth somehow? --=20 Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard.horton at sff.net Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online = (http://www.tangentonline.com)