I remember the first time reading Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. It was a revelation. Someone wrote of alien worlds and alien cultures with as much seriousness as a Melville, or a Proust. This was something I could only have dreamt of, once, and not something I realized I had needed before I actually read an instance of such a writing.
Reading Gene Wolfe's novella had had a similar impact, but it also left me puzzled, as it has several readers for almost four decades now. I went back to it yesterday, and finished it today morning, and it is every bit of a masterpiece as my young mind had suspected it to be five years ago, but didn't have the necessary wherewithal to fathom.
Two alien planets, shape shifting natives, and a singularly unpleasant but intriguing villain with a Frankenstein complex comprise this marvelous tale. The language is what hits you first, though, and not the conventions. The language is one that belies the fact that it is a story of pure invention and imagination. It is intimate, memorable and respectful of the nature of memory.
I have simply one question I still haven't figured out: in the original novella, what is the role of the 'abos' and their knowledge to the central plot of the story? Is it merely a substrate in which the more pressing questions of identity and oedipal patricide are lodged, or was it always planned as an aspect needing to be fleshed out further? From what I'd read, Wolfe was asked to write two novellas as companion pieces to this one. If that is so, then one would think all the answers would lie there.
Who knows?
Rating: *****/5 stars
Bears comparison to: Proust, Dickens, Shelley's Frankenstein. But almost sui generis in conception.
Read in: The World Treasury of Science Fiction, ed. David Hartwell
Reading Gene Wolfe's novella had had a similar impact, but it also left me puzzled, as it has several readers for almost four decades now. I went back to it yesterday, and finished it today morning, and it is every bit of a masterpiece as my young mind had suspected it to be five years ago, but didn't have the necessary wherewithal to fathom.
Two alien planets, shape shifting natives, and a singularly unpleasant but intriguing villain with a Frankenstein complex comprise this marvelous tale. The language is what hits you first, though, and not the conventions. The language is one that belies the fact that it is a story of pure invention and imagination. It is intimate, memorable and respectful of the nature of memory.
I have simply one question I still haven't figured out: in the original novella, what is the role of the 'abos' and their knowledge to the central plot of the story? Is it merely a substrate in which the more pressing questions of identity and oedipal patricide are lodged, or was it always planned as an aspect needing to be fleshed out further? From what I'd read, Wolfe was asked to write two novellas as companion pieces to this one. If that is so, then one would think all the answers would lie there.
Who knows?
Rating: *****/5 stars
Bears comparison to: Proust, Dickens, Shelley's Frankenstein. But almost sui generis in conception.
Read in: The World Treasury of Science Fiction, ed. David Hartwell
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