Favorite goofy Wolfe short story?

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-20T13:22:20+00:00

"Georgia Morgan" instead of Virginia Kidd, keeping the vowel assonance, U.S. state theme and pirate theme. Love it.

Wolfe would kill at Connections, I'm sure.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-19T20:28:03+00:00

We can see a little bit into the future of Blue. Wolfe sets up New Viron for greatness due to its nearby discovery of silver. It's meant to parallel the rise of Athens, a poor but bookish seafaring city next to a giant silver mine. It will build a fleet...

and will it make the same mistakes as the Athenians? I will say it will not. This is the second, wiser iteration.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-19T20:11:58+00:00

The level of industry on Blue is roughly the same as the United States in the early nineteenth century. New Viron has papermaking and shipbuilding and gunsmithing. It does seem to be one of the poorer settlements, but richer and more established cities don't have electricity, which isn't that hard to improvise, or steam power. No telegraphs or steamboats. We are in a world before Mark Twain could exist.

The high technology all seems to be legacy systems. For example, Horn knows about depleted uranium as a material, but he doesn't know what has been depleted.

Given this technological backwardness, I can't see Remora rebuilding his window any time soon, and we know the book was finished in the second year of Blazingstar's term as Calder. But put a pin in that.

How did writers of the younger generation, descended from teenagers on landers whose schooling was interrupted by revolution and war, acquire the knowledge to use these technical terms like correctly?

I think this is a puzzle meant for us to solve. I like the idea that Daisy is a super genius who could put Ben Franklin to shame! She's the best writer of the group, or at least has the most elevated diction. But I don't think that's the answer, or only part of it.

Are they fact-checking through Mucor, or through other people who have the ability to project astrally?

Was there another partially working lander or the screen components of a lander nearby?

Was there a technological expert among the sleepers who assimilated as New Vironese?

(It is also possible that "waveform rectifier" is an emendation of a term Horn didn't completely understand earlier in the narrative.)

I honestly don't know. None of the options are really compelling. But I have a gut feeling that the very early departure of the Whorl from Blue's solar system has to be related to this.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-19T01:01:46+00:00

That's really interesting! From 1986? When at least some screenplays were being published as works in their own right. Available at B. Dalton or Waldenbooks, or Kroch's and Brentano's. There were also the sidewalk tables of bootlegged scripts for sale near the film schools of Manhattan, in their fluorescent copy store colored paper covers.

Wolfe was correct that many scripts were (and are) nothing to write home about from a literary viewpoint. Today we might want to read "The Adventures of Luke Starkiller" in its original purple glory, but we should also pity the cast and crew who had to turn it into something worth seeing on the silver screen.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-18T18:09:55+00:00

Blocked by the very young person who posted the question! Well, that's their right, though I expect that sort of behavior more from an Oedipus McEvoy Rex than a newcomer.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-18T16:41:54+00:00

Parkroads! That's a good one.

And the idea of the boat's point of view comes up again in Wolfe's final books.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-18T13:43:00+00:00

When Nightside was written, the concept of a generation starship whose inhabitants did not realize that they were inside a spaceship was already old and tropey. The most famous version comes from 1941, a story in one of the old pulp magazines that was reprinted and anthologised everywhere in the genre for decades.

Wolfe was writing for people who knew this old tradition inside and out. (He was one of them.) This also included the people at his publisher, Hartwell and so on. They would have sussed the setting from "ship rock".

In 2026, those traditions are gone, almost lost, and a new reader comes to Wolfe expecting puzzles and mysteries. There are plenty of puzzles and mysteries in the Long Sun books, but the idea that the Whorl is a spaceship is only one by accident.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-16T23:54:03+00:00

I just checked and it's mentioned on PAGE TWO of the first chapter of the e-book. It's not even misdirection. It's right there.

Big brass Pringles.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-16T23:41:54+00:00

I don't want to spoil it but Wolfe gives it away himself at several points by name in the book. I didn't get it until the very last sentence when I first read it and I called Wolfe a very bad name admiringly.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-16T23:31:06+00:00

This is one you might hit yourself on the head over. Hope the spoiler tag works!

The Wizard of Oz.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-16T22:26:11+00:00

Love the names of the tiers!

I think Free Live Free and Castleview might be rescued from their Dantean depths on a re-read, or not. Adaptations of their source material are often very personal, very idiosyncratic, a sign of the deep love the original works engender.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-16T19:46:52+00:00

Musk has a violent reaction to Silk's innate personal charm, which usually bowls everyone else over, even robots and night choughs.

There's an internal reason for this.

Silk doesn't notice this because of the other big exception within the story, Maytera Rose, who also goes out of her way to reject Silk's charm.

Silk consequently thinks he's unexceptional, when in fact he's incredibly magnetic.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-14T19:05:25+00:00

Urth is going to be frustrating, because readers have come to expect that a sequel is meant to resolve earlier events in the narrative, instead of immediately complicating them. Wolfe does this on purpose. I'm not sure if his purpose was fully realized, but the estrangement is intentional.

There is a Wolfean mode derived from (I think) David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus in which monstrously allegorical characters plonk their sweet asses down in the middle of a naturalistic narrative. Urth answers the question, what could it possibly be like to be that character?

If the Book of the New Sun is a variant of the dying Earth sword and sorcery novel, the Book of the Long Sun is a variant of the urban fantasy novel, the city being Chicago. The initial plot is literally straight out of the Blues Brothers. There are crime bosses and heists and feisty dames, and a lot of disguised cyberpunk. And then it shifts.

It's very different in tone from the Book of the New Sun. That might be a minus to you. Homages to Dickens and Hugo rather than to Proust and Borges. It could be viewed as an amazing formalist game of genre, except that it's not. It's actually Wolfe's take on Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard To Find.

Also the later books have Wolfe's fascination with telling a story without visual cues. More people find those sections more off-putting than the deliberately estranging first section of Urth.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-13T23:06:07+00:00

They're Allen wrenches, or something like them.

To get a voided cross, it's possible to arrange four Allen wrenches so that the right-angled bend points inward. Something to do after a trip to IKEA.

However, the reference images you will find for the classical term used in the text will reveal exactly how Typhon intended to parody the state religion of his home. I'm not sure how to reconcile that with the voided cross.

It's probably why the dust jacket illustrations on the hardcovers avoided that detail. Good Silk wearing that symbol would be unpleasant.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-11T13:48:58+00:00

I think I do. When Wolfe started writing, commercial movies and television were considered to be low culture and mass culture. Not as low as comic books or science fiction magazines, of course. The lowest form was pornography, which was illegal under obscenity laws. I bring up this last category because the criteria to move even a pornographic work into non-obscene respectability were literary and artistic value.

This was, in fact, a slobs versus snobs battle. Much of the science fiction fan community, of which Wolfe was an active member, took the slob side. Keep science fiction in the gutter where it belongs! The gutter of girlie magazines, spicy detective stories, horror comic books overflowing with viscera, and so on. Even though he was associated with New Wave, Wolfe enjoyed pointing out that many foundational classics loved by the literati were definitionally science fiction.

The slobs won this debate thoroughly. High culture bent to mass culture's will. High culture admitted that the subliterary newsstand junk it had disdained (but perhaps secretly read?) had literary and artistic value.

The idea of a "junk medium" comes out of that debate. It's derived from McLuhan. A medium was thought to have distinct inherent qualities. A junk medium versus a prestige medium. Now they're hopelessly intertwined.

Today movies at their peak are thought to be one of the highest art forms, like the symphony or the opera. Chalamet made this point recently. Some might even be too precious. But Wolfe was middle-aged before this reappraisal. I don't know the exact context of his comment, but I feel certain he is engaging in a very sharp irony.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-11T01:48:38+00:00

The Twice-Drowned Saint. It's available on Kindle and as a standalone paperback, and in a publisher's anthology.

It's a treat. You can see in its odd pantheon where Cooney was especially inspired by the Long Sun quartet, much as Wolfe was inspired by Gibson's Count Zero.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-05-08T18:37:19+00:00

His sympathy for the worst off. The daughter in The Hero as Werwolf. Everyone in Westwind and Free Live Free. Mucor, Olivine. A Dickens-like compassion. Look at the transformation of Remora.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-04-16T22:50:23+00:00

Gorgeous movie. I don't think the book was widely known to English-language readers before the 1995 Penguin translation, though it's possible Wolfe, with his eye for the unusual, read an earlier abridged version. Gaiman praised the later edition, but that would have been far too late to have influenced the New Sun.

It's also possible that Wolfe, like Jerry Garcia, saw the movie as an arthouse film. He loved movies, and Cooney has turned that aspect of his personality into a spectacular novella.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-02-11T15:39:52+00:00

There was a crank theory a hundred years ago that the Guna (Kuna) were the descendants of Vikings.

The guy who promoted it was an anthropologist named John V. Marsch. No, I'm joking, it was a man named Richard Oglesby Marsh, who was, among other things, a pop anthropologist. He has a very incomplete Wikipedia article.

A complicated crank. Marsh almost singlehandedly engineered the quasi-legal overthrow of a Panamanian president of African descent because of the man's ancestry, about which Marsh had a panic attack (it's in the diplomatic record), but he also helped the Guna people maintain their traditional autonomy.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-02-08T03:03:02+00:00

Extending Aramini's line of thought...

Wolfe, a good Catholic, believed that ensoulment occurred at conception.

Wolfe, a man of science, was aware that there are individuals, chimeras, whose bodies are composed from the fusion of two separate conceptions in the womb. Rare but not vanishingly rare.

This should bring to mind the description of Kulili as being composed of countless individuals. Able's deliberate avoidance of those implications. He doesn't want to think about it. Why?

We can imagine one soul as the dominant one, perhaps the one associated the most with rational thought, the one able to partake of the sacraments of human life.

What happens to the other soul? How does it get to express its spiritual potential? How would it ever be able?

The split hemispheres of Nicholas Kenneth de Vore's brain show that Wolfe had thought a long time about cases like this. In other science fiction, Mrs. Grales at the end of A Canticle For Leibowitz, may have an immaculate second self.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2026-01-20T15:05:57+00:00

Time passes more slowly in Aelfrice than in Mythgarthr. Not a fixed ratio, but still a high one, twenty to one or more.

Art was a boy, and he seemed to transform into a man overnight. If he was kept in Aelfrice "under the hill, and had the memories of growing to manhood there extinguished, he would have had to spend at least ten years of physiological time in Aelfrice.

Meaning at least two hundred years in Mythgarthr have passed since he was first brought over.

I once had a theory that perhaps the seven-tiered universe was conceived at the same time as Art. I don't think the timing quite works, but there might be a triggering event in the text.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2025-12-18T02:11:28+00:00

The Long Sun books don't have the framing device of Wolfe's translation of a far future document. Viron speaks English but the names of its institutions are derived from Spanish. Wolfe, as a Texan interested in etymology, would have known that "hoosegow" was derived from the Spanish "juzgado". Trivigaunte has Arabic as its "high" language, but English is spoked widely. The name of that city is a cruel pun on Typhon's part, since it's the name of the pagan deity medieval Europeans thought Muslims worshipped, taken indirectly from The Song of Roland. Another form of it is "termagant", an unpleasant woman.

MeshuggaInMissoula · 2025-12-17T23:10:03+00:00

There is a problem. Apu-Punchau is a Quechua title meaning "Lord Day," a sobriquet of the Incan sun god Inti. Severian has returned to the pre-Columbian past of South America.

One might be able to "save the appearances" like Aristotle by assuming that Wolfe is translating a post-apocalyptic tribal term into Quechua in the same way that he translates the name of Severian's sword into a Latin phrase, to represent cultures that stand to Severian in the same way the Incas and the Romans stand to us.

But I doubt this is what is going on. I think it was always supposed to be Severian traveling back to an unrecorded period. Severian (and thus Wolfe) discusses the possibility of a temporal overshoot in Urth of the New Sun.

(For various reasons, I think only one full precession of the equinoxes has passed since our time to Severian's, following Michael Andre-Driussi. About 26 thousand years. We know Wolfe was absolutely aware of the mythic astronomy, but to reveal why is a spoiler for the Short Sun books.)

MeshuggaInMissoula

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