(urth) Weekly blog links

[Jerry Friedman]

--- On Tue, 4/14/09, Matthew Keeley <matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Matthew Keeley <matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: (urth) Weekly blog links
> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 10:38 PM
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 10:21 PM, John Watkins
> <john.watkins04 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > I think that Long Sun stands just fine on its own, but
> is certainly better
> > with Short Sun as well.  Short Sun is really
> Gene's treat for his biggest
> > fans, no one else could read it.

I'll go along with that.
...

> Short Sun frustrates me a bit; it has some wonderful
> moments like the
> sewers on Green, and it's nice to see certain returning
> characters,
> but I think Wolfe overdoes (or his characters overdo) some
> aspects of
> the book.

I think he overdid the returning characters, too.

> For example, did we really need all that
> Scottish-like dialect from Pig?

No.  Nor did we need the mechanical verb-at-the-end
sentences in Dorp.  Oreb and the catachrest in LS were
cute, but gimmicks like these strike me as going too far
to make your characters sound different.

And we didn't need LS to consist entirely of dramatic
scenes, in the sense of "The Cat in the Starfleet's
Attic".  I'm glad that in NS and SS, our narrators get to
ruminate occasionally.

> And I sometimes wish Wolfe would cut back on the
> long dialogues about How Things Work - Taluses, ships, etc.

Me too, whether I can have it or not. 

> Perhaps I should reread Short Sun - There are parts of it I
> like just
> as much if not more than New Sun, and that is very high
> praise from me.
...

For me, Horn's relationships with Sinew and Krait are among
the best things Wolfe has ever done.

Jerry Friedman