(urth) Weekly blog links

[James Wynn]

> I mentioned Dozois and publishing because I think it shows that Wolfe
> achieved success* with a certain approach exemplified best by FHC and
> never seemed to abandon it fully, perhaps because of editorial and
> audience expectations. What MS did Dozois reject, for example? Maybe
> this is known.

I think I can explain this feeling.

Superman in his own comic has the feeling of a god and savior. However, put 
him in The Justice League, and he suddenly seems like a project manager in a 
cape (at worst) or a player manger on an athletic team (at best). You put a 
bunch of superheroes in the same room and they're all diminished. Have them 
talk on the street at 2 in the afternoon in front of a movie theater and 
you've got camp. (But I *like* camp!)

Wolfe's fiction is like that. FHoC? Great. Peace? Astounding. BotNS? 
Miraculous. But he keeps doing it, doesn't he? He keeps creating dense, 
occulted fiction that readers might never find the bottom of.  So some 
people (like Dozois) say, "Agh! It's a racket! He had *one* successful novel 
and and he's just repeating it over and over because that's what people 
want."   So, unique, intricately-crafted, difficult fiction is a racket?

(I realize Dozois doesn't put it quite that strongly. I've spoken with him 
and he considers Wolfe to be at least one of the best in SciFi)

The fact is that this is Wolfean fiction. He's often categorized with other 
New Science Fiction types like LeGuin and Tiptree and Dick but he's really 
nothing like them craftsman-wise. He had moderate success with FHoC, much 
less with Peace, far less with Devil in the Forest, and then he blew the 
doors off with New Sun. It's probably agreed that "Free Live Free" and 
"There Are Doors" and "Castleview" and "Pandora" are not as riveting as 
Soldier of the Mist and Solider of Arete. Solider of Sidon was less popular 
as well IMO because Wolfe was dealing with less popularly familiar mythology 
(African).  I haven't read Pirate Freedom, but based on the lack of 
discussion about it here, it probably doesn't have the universal appeal of 
some others.
"A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in 
thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times." Randall Jarrell

On the other hand, IMO, Wolfe's subtlety has unexpected effects on the 
reader. On first read, I thought AEG was a decent, but unspecial Wolfean 
novel in the style of SciFi pulp. I thought I understood it. It was only 
later that I realized that the puzzles themselves --let alone the answers--  
had gone right over my head.

Many people find Long Sun accessible and satisfying because they think it 
has a generally reliable narrator and the narrative is not so occulted. They 
are wrong. I think the most valid criticism of Short Sun (I don't agree with 
it) is that it's very well crafted but it's just tooooo Wolfean: It's a 
bridge too far. Yet, many of the puzzles in Long Sun that readers didn't 
know were puzzles are resolved in Short Sun--can ONLY be resolved in the 
Short Sun--and the answers go right over those readers heads because they 
weren't looking for answers. So is that a defect in the books?

J.