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From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Nicholas=20Gevers?= <vermoulian@yahoo.com> Subject: (urth) Swanwick on Wolfe Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 11:25:01 In the course of an interview I've been conducting with him, Michael Swanwick has some interesting things to say about Wolfe: 1) "he is, I honestly believe, the finest writer in the English language alive today." 2) On how 5HC helped inspire Swanwick's Nebula-winning novel STATIONS OF THE TIDE: MS: "It would be hard to exaggerate the impact THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS, and particularly the title novella, had on me when I first read it. Not just the extraordinary beauty of the prose but the wit and economy of Wolfe's solutions to any number of technical problems. If I didn't know Gene was an engineer, I think I'd be able to guess from that work. It has the same lean elegance that really first-rate engineering has. "So there's definitely a debt. As I was writing, in fact, I thought of the bureaucrat [the novel's protagonist] as looking like Gene Wolfe. Gardner Dozois once compared Gene to Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op, a man so ordinary-looking that if you looked away for an instant he could disappear into a crowd without a trace. I wanted that sense of someone who's unremarkable superficially and yet, inside, he's ... Gene Wolfe!" ===== __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com *More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/