Wolfe Wiki-Discuss-Contents

There are several stories set in the universe of the solar novels, or even fictitiously existing within that universe: The Cat, The Map, Empires of Foliage and Flower, The Waif, The Night Chough.... There's probably more. Might it be useful to list these in under a subheading under The "Solar Cycle" novels?

  • Hmm, or maybe there should be an umbrella "Solar Cycle" page which can hold this sort of thing? -- Mo 20070813
    • Yes, there definitely should; there is a lot of stuff about the cycle as-a-whole that could do with commentary also. --Sturgeons 20070813

This might be a good place to open a discussion on the license to use. I suggest the Gnu Free Document License, as used by Wikipedia. We should look it over carefully and see if what we have could be compliant with it. -- DaveTallman

  • Heh, I created the new page before seeing this suggestion. Oh well, no harm done -- Mo 20080810

I propose changing the heading of the The Book of the X Sun novels to "Sun Cycle" instead of "Solar Cycle". My reasoning is that, while the sun of Urth is Sol, and so perhaps is the Short Sun, the Long Sun is not. "Briahtic Novels" is another alternative, but perhaps a little too fancy. -- Matt January 11, 2009, at 11:56 PM

  • Hmm, I take your point, but Solar Cycle is pretty well established... (And Sun Cycle sounds to me like an advanced washing-machine program.) I don't feel strongly, so happy to go with the consensus -- Mo January 13, 2009, at 02:50 PM
  • A new Solar Cycle Book Club was just set up, so you're right that the name is well-established. The "Long Sun" is not even a sun, just a big artificial heat lamp. "The Heat-Source Cycle"? No... -- DaveTallman January 13, 2009
  • It was because the book club's name struck me as wrong that I proposed the change. I prefer "Sun Cycle" not because the Long Sun is a proper sun, but simply because each of the series titles includes the word "Sun." (And "Solar Cycle" sounds to me no less like washing machine ad jargon.) I can certainly learn to live with "Solar Cycle" if that's the consensus; the book club just set me itching over the misnomer. -- Matt January 13, 2009, at 05:32 PM

Mo et al.: Should we add a section for chapbooks? I know of Strange Birds and Christmas Inn. Are there others? -- DarthEd April 24, 2011, at 11:20 PM

  • Yes, good thought -- I suspect there are others. Underneath the Short Story Collections (on the main Contents page) might be a good place to add them? -- Mo April 26, 2011, at 08:43 AM
    • I found a partial list of Wolfe chapbooks at http://mysite.verizon.net/~vze2tmhh/bibliography.html, so I created a section listing those plus the ones I know about. I'll add entries for Strange Birds and Christmas Inn soon. (I have those two.) If anyone has other chapbooks or knows of any other Wolfe chapbooks, please fill them in. Thanks! -- DarthEd May 01, 2011, at 07:48 AM

Mo et al.: How do you think we should incorporate Marc Aramini's analysis on Wolfe's short stories that he's been posting to the Urth mailing list? Marc gave you (Mo) permission to incorporate what he's written, but how should we attribute his contributions if he's not posting them himself? So far, I've just added a link to his posts in the Urth mailing list archive. Maybe this is the way to go? -- DarthEd April 26, 2012, at 05:08 AM

  • Mm, I've been thinking about this a bit myself. My original idea had been to incorporate Marc's analysis (and interesting comments arising thence) wholesale, but seeing the level of detail and of speculation he's been going into, I thought maybe that wasn't really appropriate.
    I think now that perhaps the best idea is to link to it per story as you have been doing, and also to incorporate (with attribution, of course) any particularly interesting new theories that Marc raises, or comments he makes on theories that we already have on the wiki. -- Mo April 30, 2012, at 06:25 PM

Looking at the chapbooks I think there is a copy and paste error.

* Bibliomen: Twenty Characters Waiting for a Book (1984)
* Cheap Street (1984)
* The Boy Who Hooked the Sun (1985)

If you look at the original site (on archive.org): https://web.archive.org/web/20140902002940/http://mysite.verizon.net/~vze2tmhh/bibliography.html, I believe that Cheap Street is the name of the publisher, and belongs to the Bibliomen entry. If no one objects I am going to clean it up in the future. sprocket March, 3, 2023.

  • Yeah, I think you are correct, @sprocket. The isfdb doesn't list it either: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ch.cgi?171+None (They are the most likely to be complete, I think.) We are missing a couple chapbooks compared to their listing also (The Hero As Werwolf and Constipating Science Fiction). -- DarthEd March 07, 2023, at 05:27 AM UTC
    • For what it is worth Constipating Science Fiction is literally a folded piece of paper. I have seen a two others in the series and was surprised at what they actually were. Not even a staple for the binding. There are two printings of The Hero As Werwolf. One is paperback and the other is hardcover. I'll add them after I dig them out of storage. sprocket

So are we able to upload images? I have a number of chapbooks and zines that have Wolfe related material (letters, poems, reviews, etc.) in them. I'd like to take a photo of the cover, or sometimes the article, that way if someone is looking for the original they can compare. sprocket June, 30, 2023.

  • No, this wiki does not support file uploads. I recommend that you upload your files to archive.org for long-term archiving and then linking to them in the wiki here. --DarthEd July 03, 2023, at 07:46 AM
    • Okay, figured out how to upload a book to archive.org so it looks pretty and has the ocr. sprocket

I am tempted to move "Orbital Thoughts" and "Family Album" to the chapbooks section. They are booth small chapbooks. If no one objects I'll move them in the Contents index and then fill out the publishing information.

  • No objection to moving "Orbital Thoughts" to chapbooks. That makes sense, I think. I'm less sure about "A Wolfe Family Album". I see that almost as part of "Letters Home", tbh. They were always published together, right? So I think I'm inclined to keep them together under "Other". --DarthEd August 26, 2023, at 08:39 PM

I was tempted to hasten sprocket's work on making links to Archive.org and noticed that there are also entire novels and collections in there. Is it allowed to link the Archive.org resource to the book's respective wikipage? And if it's allowed are we going to do it? It would help make Wolfe's literature become more easy to access outside of US where his books aren't that common to find in a public library. — Papa_Into September 19, 2023

  • Can't speak for DarthEd, but I can comment. Archive.org is a non-profit digital library. There are issues with the way they sometimes do things (the Pandemic Library policies got them in trouble), and as a result there are various lawsuits making their way through the courts. Personally, I have scanned off several Wolfe related works and upload them to Archive.org. I have about 40 or 50 more that I will eventually get to. Old magazine articles, fanzines from the 70's and 80's. New York Review of Science Fiction and the like. Stuff that is rare, not well known and hard to come by decades later. If Wolfe's literature is hard to access outside the US, I imagine it must be even harder to access his published correspondence and nonfiction. That is my reasoning, and others may disagree. But Archive.org is legit, and they operate legally (and in some grey areas). All the main novels and short story collections you need an Archive.org account to view the pages. Then you can only check the books out in an hour chunk at a time. While you have it checked out, others can not check it out. So I think it would be fine to link to full novels. I just haven't done it yet because those are more well known and I get interested in less well known things. But, as DarthEd is the admin of the wiki, his policy goes. sprocket
    • I would prefer not to link to whole novels or short story collections on archive.org. If it's a short story that was published in a magazine, that's cool. Links to fanzines and interviews are also wonderful. Chapbooks too, if you can find them on archive.org. For books (unless they have been out of print for a very long time and are hard to find), I prefer to link to the publisher, and they usually have a web page for each book they publish, if it was published in post-web era. You don't need to remove any links that have already been added to the wiki. --DarthEd September 20, 2023, at 08:10 PM

After a small break I decided now's a good time to continue my project on making the contents on the pages visually similar. However I noticed that since a lot of people have given their page entries over the years, the page layouts are sometimes very different as well. Since I'm currently going through the short story collections I wanted to ask is there a specific page layout that you want to be used? For example "The Wolfe at the Door" has a different layout with the editions coming first and then contents while "Starwater Strains" has the contens first accompanied by the story's first publishing. Should I create a "Example pages" for the sole purpose of being example templates of what a short story collection's or a short story's or a novel's page should look like? This could be an easy way to show what kind of layout is preferred. And these example pages wouldn't be only for the page layout, but also for the way different editions or publishes should be referenced etc. Papa_Into October 08, 2023

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