From: Michael Straight <straight@email.unc.edu>
Subject: (urth) Tale at the end of PEACE
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 09:29:58 

On Tue, 26 Oct 1999, [iso-8859-1] Nicholas Gevers wrote:

> 1) Someone (I think alga) states that "The Tale of the
> Student and His Son" would not work as a short story
> in a magazine, but is very effective in its NEW SUN
> context. This may well be true, but the "Tale" did in
> fact appear as an independent story, in THE MAGAZINE
> OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, October 1981.

Speaking of tales out of context.  The tale of the Sidhe at the end of
_Peace_ is still one of my favorite things Wolfe has written.  I tried to
tell it from memory to some friends recently and got it mostly right (I
couldn't remember the name of the hero whose arrows were plumed with the
flocks feathers), but I mistakenly said that that the three siblings grew
old and died at the end when Weer's narrative simply reveals that they had
grown extremely old and then moves on (sort of). 

The Sidhe are tied up symbolically with Weer, of course, but if you were
to try to abstract this story from Weer's like I did, how would you end
it?  Do the Sidhe die immediately, or are we to imagine them wandering
around for a bit in their old age after their baptism?  Or would you just
read it straight as Wolfe wrote it and let the listener cope with the
abrupt ending?

The ideal solution, of course, is to pass out copies of PEACE to all my
friends. 

-Rostrum


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