(urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Wed, 12/14/11, Daniel Petersen <danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com> wrote:


From: Daniel Petersen <danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Wednesday, December 14, 2011, 4:57 AM




Ah, well, here we do get into interesting reader-specific territory.  I did indeed read Fifth Head after the solar cycle, so I can't say for sure how I would have perceived it if I'd read it before that.  Still, I suspect it would have been a very good starting-point for me in the GW realm for these reader-specific reasons:  
 
1) I generally like traditional SF settings more than heroic fantasy settings (i.e. the futuristic planetary romance of FHoC vs. the prima facie sword and sorcery of BotNS).
 
2) I was hooked by FHoC first and foremost for the (to me) gorgeous writing *style*, the exquisitely crafted syntax and prose itself.  It stands out starkly in a sea of 'good-but-not-great-ness'.
 
3) All I need is wonderful storytelling and setting and complexity of themes and I'm deeply happy without needing to 'solve' various material 'riddles' the text throws up - the more philosophical or thematic questions of identity and alienness and cultural anthropology that the book explores (sometimes even by its very *form* - i.e. the second novella written in a totally different mythical or folktale sort of style) just blow my mind and I really don't *ever* need to discover for sure who's who or what's what in that tale.  
 
For other readers I know that indeterminacy would be maddening.  I'm fairly sure if I'd read Fifth Head first, I would have been in awe of what was clearly a brilliant writer and would've started hunting down all his stuff.  

I suppose all this just shows our individual intuitions about what to recommend as a first reading of Wolfe are always going to help some and hinder others.
 
-DOJP
 
 
I read The book of the new sun in the fourth grade and really liked it, but I would definitely have listed, say, something easier like Zelazny as my favorite at the time, but when I re-read it in the seventh grade I saw the beautiful beautiful structure of so many things, the mythic resonance.  But I was raised so very very Catholic that even in the fourth grade I saw Severian as a cool torturing kind of end times Jesus with a big sword, relaxed "destruction based" eschatological morals and uninhibited sexuality.  I used to draw pictures of him on my textbooks in school, sword raised and the sun highlighting it so that its shadow was a cross.  Probably get in big trouble for those drawings nowadays.  Didn't read the rest of Wolfe until a few years after that.  It is definitely the  perfect book of my childhood, though.
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