Because this has been bothering me since Wiscon

[starlady]

Poll #7183 Greatest living SF writer?

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 35

View Respondents

Greatest living SF writer?

View Answers

Ted Chiang (source: owner of Dreamhaven Books)
0 (0.0%)

Samuel R. Delany (source: me)
2 (5.9%)

Ursula K. LeGuin (source: me)
28 (82.4%)

Gene Wolfe (source: Neil Gaiman)
0 (0.0%)

someone else I will name below
4 (11.8%)

Write-in candidate?

View Answers

I just can't believe someone would put Ted Chiang over the woman who coined the term 'ansible,' but maybe I shouldn't be all that surprised.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

If you bounce off Wolfe's New Sun books (as I did, several times), you might try The Fifth Head of Cerberus--that is, ideally the book-length work of that name, which consists of three novellas, the first of which is also titled "The Fifth Head of Cerberus." This thing. I find Wolfe much better at shorter lengths (the death/doctor/island stories are of interest as well), though I do appreciate Soldier of the Mist and the recentish Knight + Wizard duo.

And I am never gonna read any New Sun Long Sun Anyshaped Sun properly at this point, and I am okay with that. Life is not long enough.

[starlady]

Interesting! I got two chapters into The Knight (is that the first one?) and decided life was too short for its incomprehensible misogynist bullshit, but I've read The Book of the New Sun and its one-volume sequel (The Urth of the New Sun, I think?) and thought all of it was brilliant. I've hated his shorter length work almost without exception.

[thistleingrey]

:)) Agreed about Knight's misogyny. I appreciate its playing with Norse and farther-south Germanic bits, mostly; it reminds me of Þiðrekssaga.

It may be that the age when one meets Wolfe's work (as for some other writers I can think of) matters re: tolerance. I didn't try New Sun until my mid-twenties.

[starlady]

That's probably true--I was, I think, 14 when I first started The Book of the New Sun.