(urth) S&S vs. SF in BotNS

[Jerry Friedman]

> From: Daniel Petersen <danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com>
>Actually, I should just paste it here for ease: 

Very interesting essay.  Of course Wolfe's world-building is the kind that Heinlein championed, "The door dilated", but taken much farther than Heinlein ever did, even in /The Moon is a Harsh Mistress/.
 
>' The other way Wolfe is generally different than Tolkien is that most of his world-building is in authentically science fictional terms (barring, of course, the Soldier series and the Wizard-Knight series). That is, in all twelve books of the Solar Cycle Wolfe is creating not 'alternate realms' of 'sword and sorcery' (oh yes, it sometimes looks and feels like this to a large degree so that he is often labeled 'science fantasy'), but genuine far-future, technologically advanced (so vastly advanced that it is in long forgotten decay), space-faring, interplanetary, alien ecospheres and economies. The Solar Cycle is indeed a subversive or alternative or 'punk' form of classic Heroic Fantasy, but it is in irreducibly science fictional terms. Of course, Wolfe also writes these books in a way that richly and readily includes the 'fantastic': the paranormal, the preternatural, the supernatural, the 'transcendant', the spiritual, the 'trans-dimensional'
(though curiously, nothing authentically 'magical' that I can see). 

How about the analept of the alzabo and the effect of drinking blook on the inhumi?  After a moment's thought, the only way I can understand these is as magic, specifically the principle of contagion (if I have it right).  Even if you believe in Lamarckian inheritance, the effect of memory and decisions on DNA or anything else located outside the brain is clearly very subtle--for instance, children aren't born knowing their biological parents' language--not what seems to happen to the inhumi or even to alzabo addicts.  Though actually I'm not clear on what happens to alzabo-heads who don't happen to be carrying the Claw.
 
> In this sense it is also fantasy literature but more in the vein of Lovecraft or Gaiman or Tim Powers or 'magic realism' or what have you. This kind of fantasy is neither Tolkien's Middle Earth on the one hand nor Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast on the other (though it includes a 'feel' from both). So when I call Wolfe's writing 'science fantasy' what I mean is something like 'science fiction fantasy', which I know is uncomfortable (not to say oxymoronic!) to some out there. But Wolfe's fiction is nothing if not uncomfortable, uncategorisable, and disturbing – but all, in my opinion, in ways that are ultimately enlightening and humanising.'

Certainly uncomfortable and disturbing in some ways, but genre confusions don't bother me.  Wolfe seems to care that what Decuman and Typhon do is hypnotism of some very strange sort, not magic, but I don't see why he cares.
 
Jerry Friedman