|
02-6611-0142-1 posted:Some people just seem to react to TBotNS with vitriolic hate. I found your review amusing, but it reminds me of my friends. I think I've read about 2/3rds of Wolfe's stuff, and I respect him as a writer, but he's not a favorite of mine. Most writers people think of as "great fantasy writers" or "great SF writers" aren't really all that much when it comes to actual prose style, they're just great at plotting and pacing, sometimes with a some skill at writing characters and settings. Butcher's a great example of this -- he's a Book Barn favorite because he's got a few really good, likeable characters and he can tell a rip-snorting story that makes you shout "YEAH!" at climax, but he's never going to be known for his prose style. Wolfe's the opposite -- he's basically a professional writer's professional writer, technically expert and highly skilled, but he's not all that hot when it comes to things like narrative pacing or telling a story that makes sense. In a sense, that's part of the charm -- he's telling stories for people who enjoy stories that take a lot of work to read -- but there's a reason he's not popular with a lot of people who you'd expect to like him. For all his technical skill, he's just not in the first rank as a storyteller, and that's what counts for a lot of readers, especially fantasy/sf readers. Malazan's chaotic as all hell, but Erikson's just better at pacing and plotting than Wolfe is -- there's a sense of a story happening with Malazan that frankly Wolfe just doesn't have for long stretches of his work. For an example of what I'm talking about, see this clip from Mat Parker and Trey Stone: http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/09/07/arts/television/100000001039812/a-clip-from-stand-in.html%3Cbr%20/%3E quote:"Each individual scene has to work as a funny sketch," advises Parker. "If the words 'and then' belong between those beats, you're hosed. You want therefore or but." Basically, huge swathes of the Book of the New Sun are just "and then this happens" "and then this happens" "and then this happens" "and then Severian wanders across a mountain" "and then he meets an ancient dictator" "and then he climbs down a mountain" etc. It's paced poorly. For some readers that's not really a flaw, but for others it is, which is why it's hard to predict who'll like it and who won't.
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2011 17:12
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 18:02 |
|
|
Sargeant Biffalot posted:This is on the right track pointing to different expectations but the terminology is a bit misleading. Wolfe's stuff is in the pulp tradition so anything longer than a short story takes the form of a picaresque. Compared to the quest structure of the later doorstop fantasies it's a less coherent a plot structure, and Wolfe executes it less tightly than most pulp writers, but he's still no way near as ponderous as the average post-pulp fantasy writer. Martin's a good example, his stuff has a really well designed plot that requires many storylines to stall or go through holding pattern digressions while the slower one's catch up. Whereas even a dreamy picaresque like BoTNS never needs to spend longer on a setting or idea than it takes to develop it. It's a case of reading for what's happening on the page vs. reading for what's going to happen in the next chapter. Ok, this is a really good argument, and I'm still thinking about it, but if you'll allow me to indulge in a bit of genre criticism as a first response, I'd posit that the picaresque is a more "primitive" format than later narrative structures; there's a reason that the earliest novels follow that format. That doesn't mean it's "bad," of course, but I do think that modern readers tend to expect a greater degree of, for lack of a better term, narrative cohesion, than you might typically find in a picaresque. And of course the other side of this is that the Book of the New Sun isn't a "pure" one-thing-happened-then-another-happened picaresque -- all the parts do fit together into a whole, there are throughlines of theme and subject, etc. The problem is that you have to be an almost supernally competent reader to put it all together and follow those themes, and you run into the modernist/pomo tug-of-war between "reader is too dumb to understand my masterpiece" and "this writer is incompetent at communicating his ideas." Hrm. Anyway, I'm not sure any of that made sense, and your points probably deserve a better response. I'll think more on this. Thanks!
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2011 18:44
|
|
|
squashie posted:New Gene Wolfe novel coming soon "The Land Across" available November 26, 2013. Neurosis posted:If he finally goes off the rails and starts writing crazy political poo poo at 82 he'll have withstood the call of the elderly sci-fi writer longer than most. The only overtly political thing I have noticed so far was in An Evil Guest where he mentioned postpartum abortions. I didn't read Home Fires too closely though because I found it boring so I could have missed something there. Operation Ares might've had some crude political poo poo too but thankfully about 3 people have read that book. I got my copy from Amazon and read it last night. It's a neat book. It starts out as a sort of modern political thriller but, consistent with Wolfe's other work, it's more religious-themed than political. He's basically using (or at least appears to me to be using) politics as a metaphor for religion. I liked it overall more than I've liked a lot of his other stuff, perhaps because it might be the most accessible thing of his that I've read. It has the Gene Wolfe hallmarks -- unreliable narrators and characters who may be lying, odd references the reader is supposed to deduce on his own, etc. -- but ultimately it seems to be only about as hard to "figure out" as, say, John Gardner's Grendel, i.e., an intelligent college student with a grounding in literature could figure out the main themes on his own (as compared to, say, the Torturer books, which you basically have to spend a year reading obscure online theories in order to have any clue what's going on for most of the series). Not to say that there won't be obscure theories about this one but overall it seems relatively straightforward for a Wolfe novel. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Dec 5, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2013 17:48
|
|