(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: more _Home Fires_

[Allan Anderson]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 5:25 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Wolfe weaves a melancholy love story through the action sequences: Skip
> has to grapple with the insecurities of being a younger woman's older man,
> while impulsive Chelle gets caught up in the physical and emotional traumas
> that result from interplanetary battle.
> >
> > Though elegant overall, Wolfe's laconic style feels overdone at times.
> Too many important plot points are revealed in dull, after-the-fact
> conversations, and the most incredible thing in the novel isn't its
> speculative vision of the future but the amount of detached reflection
> characters engage in during various catastrophes...But there's a lot of
> pleasure in the way Wolfe paints his dystopia, offering up murky little
> snatches that cohere into an uneasily familiar world.
>
>
> http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/spring-books-short-reviews/Content?oid=3640854
>
> > What Skip intended as a time of quiet romance is instead a progression of
> increasingly wild scenarios: a hallucinatory visit to a Caribbean island, a
> back and forth battle with a group of armed hijackers, and the unmasking of
> a treasonous conspiracy. Skip and Chelle spend more time apart than
> together, and learn more about themselves than each other.
> >
> > At the very beginning of Home Fires, Skip has difficulty distinguishing
> between his actual memories and false memories from a dream. After this
> explicit reference to dreams, the prose combines with Wolfe's typically
> labyrinthine storytelling to give the text a dreamlike quality. This quality
> was frequently observed in Wolfe's masterpiece, The Book of the New Sun
> (1983), but while the effect may be similar, in Home Fires it is achieved
> using the completely different style that has characterized the novels Wolfe
> has published since The Book of the Short Sun (2001). The prose is extremely
> lean, providing only a minimum of description. Although there are short
> first person interludes, the story is told mostly in a third person that is
> privy to Skip's thoughts but rarely takes advantage of this access. This
> style has the effect of focusing the reader's attention almost exclusively
> on dialogue. It's said that actions speak louder than words, but almost all
> the important actions i
>  n Home Fires have many different interpretations. Dialogue is therefore
> the best window into the characters' souls, and as a defense attorney, this
> is Skip's natural mode for interacting with the world.
> >
> > ...Every few pages in Home Fires something bizarre happens, and although
> there is a reasonable explanation five (or more often fifty) pages later, by
> the time the reader has learned it some other strange thing has happened. By
> doing this, Wolfe is able to inspire moods associated with magical realism
> while depicting a completely rational world.
> >
> > ...We learn about the novel's world through the smallest possible
> details. What emerges is a strange mishmash of popular tropes. Most notably,
> Home Fires is set in an energy-poor world reminiscent of Paolo Bacigalupi's
> fiction. Electricity is fiercely rationed, "bullet trains" reach the
> "incredible" speed of 70 kilometers per hour (twice as fast as a car, Skip
> notes), and ships of all sizes are powered by sails instead of engines.
> Politically, developed countries have merged into three Orwellian
> superstates controlling North America, Europe, and "Greater Eastasia" with
> the third world left in grinding poverty. Brains can be scanned, uploaded,
> and downloaded into other people's bodies, but this technology is rare and
> only available to the rich. One scene even has zombies in it, albeit in
> their traditional voodoo role as summoned creatures rather than the
> apocalyptic variety.
> >
> > Does it make sense that, in an energy-starved future, humanity would be
> fighting an interstellar war with aliens for colony planets? Surely not, but
> because the novel's world is revealed in such tiny increments, there's not
> enough substance for us to attack it as unrealistic...Likewise, many readers
> will roll their eyes when a character mentions that the novel's European
> Union follows Sharia law, but this huge departure from present circumstances
> is mentioned exactly once and how it came to pass is left to the reader to
> decide.
> >
> > ...Although this is a science fiction novel, readers of fantasy will
> recognize Skip's position in the world from the way other characters treat
> him. To them, he is someone with power over reality. If they have money, he
> can sue them and take it. If they have freedom, he can accuse them of a
> crime and have them imprisoned. If an enemy threatens them, he can protect
> that enemy from any repercussions. People know what this power makes Skip
> capable of, but its nature is too arcane for them to be sure of its
> limitations. Most of all, he has acquired this power by making
> accommodations to it that suggest he can't possibly be a truly good person.
> His knowledge of the law makes him a sorcerer, in other words, not a wizard.
> ...Completely mismatched romantic partners are another common element
> in Wolfe's novels, and while the power of love to bring people
> together is made clear, it's always ambiguous whether it's enough to
> *keep* them together. In the end, Home Fires leaves this for the
> reader to decide.
> >
> > Like all of Gene Wolfe's novels, Home Fires is unusual, complex, and a
> constant challenge to the reader, but it is more successful than much of his
> recent work at balancing accessibility and depth. There are still plenty of
> allusions, hints, and minor mysteries that are only detectable on a second
> reading, but unlike Wolfe's recent An Evil Guest (2008) and The Sorcerer's
> House (2010) the true novel does not lie hidden beneath an obfuscating
> surface narrative that requires rereading to properly excavate
>
> http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2011/04/home_fires_by_g.shtml
>
> On a side note, is anyone reading these emails? I can't tell; often
> there are no replies. Google Alerts doesn't take all that long to go
> through, nor picking out ones to link & excerpt, but it does take
> time.
>
>
I appreciate the Google Alerts; thanks for making them happen! This spurred
me to once again check my local library, which is pretty good about keeping
up with Wolfe stuff--and they've finally gotten a copy of Home Fires, which
is now on my reserve list.
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