(urth) grumble at wolfe comment made attached to guardian article

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Sun, 2/6/11, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:

>  
> Heh. I thought equating Wolfe with James Blish was the real
> insult ;- ).    


Yeah, that too.  His examples are just off the wall to me all around.  Picking out probably the most lyrical SF guy, comparing him to a guy who was never regarded for prose but for a few okay "idea" SF stories, and then saying they can't stand toe to toe with lit that is a thousand times more banal than anything Wolfe could produce even asleep kind of just threw me for a loop.  If he had never read Wolfe I could forgive it, but its like he just read Operation Ares or something.  Wolfe has so many poignant quotes in every medium imaginable I just can't imagine you would use his name as an example of how the genre doesn't match up in quality. 

Even simple meditations in Wolfe are often given a veneer of depth that I find sorely lacking in the form fiction literary novel.  Regular literature seems so flat and obvious after re-reading Wolfe's best stuff a few times.  And he rarely falls into the trap of Clute's Appleseed: some interesting referential and verbal pyrotechnics atop a story so shallow re-reading might possibly be a waste of time.  I do feel like Appleseed might have been the triumph of weirdness over substance to some degree, something Harrison's Light avoided, yet even a pretty good (IMO) work of SF like Light seems a bit flat to me in direct comparison with Wolfe.  Davidson, Lafferty, and Ellison are all great great writers, too, if a bit different than Wolfe, and the lack of effort given to their study when mostly repetitive dull drivel receives literary accolades and awards always buggered my mind.

I would never argue that Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Dostoyevsky and Faulkner and Nabokov and Mishima weren't great, but Wolfe certainly belongs in their echelon, without a doubt.  How many boring papers does there really have to be about Pamela?  Fielding already wrote everything worth writing about it in Shamela.  There was a list a few years ago that was something like 1001 books to read before you die, and it had multiple books by douglas adams, peake, ballard, updike, even that novel about masturbation Portnoy's complaint, but not ONE wolfe book.  It didn't have Shakespeare either, but come on, that just isn't right.