Vellum

[coalescent]

My travel reading over the past week has been Hal Duncan's debut novel, Vellum. It's a book which has been attracting a fairly significant amount of attention in the sf world, and it's also getting a big marketing push from Pan Macmillan (the proof copies, from a limited run of 600, are things of beauty). You can read a very short extract here, and

Comments

[immortalradical]

I was thinking of reading Vellum. Now I'm not sure I'll bother. :\

[coalescent]

For some context, IIRC, my complaint about The Wizard-Knight was that by the end it seemed hermetically sealed. Entirely about itself, about the nature of the story it was telling--any relevance to the real world that its themes had was remote, at best. And my complain about Starwater Strains was that too many of the stories seemed clinical, dry and fussy. Whatever else you want to say about Vellum, it is always passionate, and often quite nakedly political.

Which is not to say that those Wolfe books don't have merits--they do. But they left me a bit cold, overall.

[grahamsleight]

Surely the point about The Wizard Knight is that it's a book in which everything's changed except human nature. It's about what-is-good-conduct in a context which is so radically changed (or stripped down to essentials) that it exposes what Wolfe wants to talk about (the absolute nature of virtue, and the difficulty in achieving it).

That, I guess, would be Wolfe's answer. As much as I admire his short fiction, I don't feel he's done much major work in that field since about 1980. (I think the SF Encyclopedia says something like, "Lately, Wolfe has tended at shorter lengths to restrict himself to oneiric jeux d'esprit" - which sounds an accurate but slightly more Clutean way to put things.)

I find Wolfe a very easy writer to admire, but a difficult one to love. And (pace David Hartwell), I think he's got significantly less interesting since the mid-80s.

[coalescent]

it's a book in which everything's changed except human nature

Er ... in what sense? Able doesn't seem remotely realistic as a human to me. He's almost pure archetype. The characters around him, well, more so, I guess, but they're still more defined by their roles than not.

I find Wolfe a very easy writer to admire, but a difficult one to love.

Definitely true. I can admire the technical skill that went into The Wizard-Knight, but it's not a book I feel an urge to return to, even though I know I can't possibly have got everything out of it first time around.

[grahamsleight]

Er ... in what sense? Able doesn't seem remotely realistic as a human to me. He's almost pure archetype.

I think you have to read Able as archetype-looking-back-on-when-he-was-human. The tone of voice is weird, but deliberately so. There are certainly some very human moments in there, as I remember - embarassment about sexuality, for instance.