(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Will No One Rid Me Of This Troublesome Writer?

[Jerry Friedman]

> From: Lane Haygood <lhaygood at gmail.com>

> 
> This is just demonstrably false to boot!  Vance's prose, his  diction,
> and his writing style are highly distinct from Wolfe's.  I  mean, the
> only line of intersection is that they each chose a certain  thematic
> motif (a dying world) for a few of their stories.  But Wolfe's  writing
> tends to be more dialogue-heavy and witty, whereas Vance  eschews
> dialogue in favor of lyricism and structured prose.

I must have missed the lyricism in the Dying Earth series, but I do remember a 
good deal of stylized dialogue.

> The "Dying  Earth"
> stories are lighter and more mythic (not to mention  fairly
> straightforward), whereas Wolfe's tend to be labyrinthine  and
> multi-layered.

And Wolfe brings in religion and philosophy, which are missing from the Dying 
Earth, and makes you feel that he's talking about a world instead of a sequence 
of stage sets.

But the most important difference to me is the characters.  Wolfe's characters 
are varied and have many resemblances to people (robots, aliens, etc.).  Almost 
all the characters in the Dying Earth books are simple mechanisms of selfishness 
distinguished, if at all, by their different obsessions.  That's why, when I 
tried to find out what people saw in those books, I had to force my way through 
them.

> I enjoy both, but to compare Wolfe to Vance is to  compare apples to oranges.
> 
> That said, aren't all writers at least  somewhat derivative?  Talk to
> any of them and they can list a whole line  of authors that influenced
> their development. But there's a clear difference  between, "Oh yeah,
> Borges was totally influential on my work" and "Hey guys,  I totally
> rewrote a Borges story with spaceships and  swords."

Yes, I think Vance owes something to Dunsany and Cabell and probably others I 
haven't read (A. Merritt?).

Jerry Friedman