[TCK]≡ Download Gratis Home Fires [tc] Gene Wolfe David Gentry 9781848631298 Books

Home Fires [tc] Gene Wolfe David Gentry 9781848631298 Books

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(100 Traycased Jacketed Hardcover Novel signed by Gene Wolfe & Alastair Reynolds) Gene Wolfe takes us to a future North America at once familiar and utterly strange. A young man and woman, Skip and Chelle, fall in love in college and marry, but she is enlisted in the military, there is a war on, and she must serve her tour of duty before they can settle down. But the military is fighting a war with aliens in distant solar systems, and her months in the service will be years in relative time on Earth. Chelle returns to recuperate from severe injuries, after months of service, still a young woman but not necessarily the same personwhile Skip is in his forties and a wealthy businessman, but eager for her return. Still in love (somewhat to his surprise and delight), they go on a Caribbean cruise to resume their marriage. Their vacation rapidly becomes a complex series of challenges, not the least of which are spies, aliens, and battles with pirates who capture the ship for ransom. There is no writer in SF like Gene Wolfe and no SF novel like Home Fires.

Home Fires [tc] Gene Wolfe David Gentry 9781848631298 Books

I liked this better than An Evil Guest, about as well as The Sorcerer's House, and not as well as Pirate Freedom, to name a few of Wolfe's more recent novels.

Any author worth his or her salt must really hate hearing that the new stuff isn't as good as the old stuff. But after reading all of Wolfe's novels, and rereading most of them, along with nearly all of his anthologized stories, I'm afraid I think it's largely true, with some important exceptions.

I don't know that I could pin down one and only one reason why I think this is so. But I can point to one thing that's increasingly been bothering me about Wolfe's work in recent years. To my ear, it seems as if he's forgetting how to write dialogue. He's lost none of his subtlety or wit, or his broad and exact vocabulary, or his moral seriousness, or his fondness for puzzles (intellectual, physical, or moral), and he remains a master of first-person narrative, but more and more, the way his characters talk in third-person narrative is starting to drive me up the wall.

For one thing, as another reviewer noted, a lot of the characters sound the same or nearly so. One might curse more than other, or another might have an accent, but in a given book, you might hear the same verbal tics or mannerisms from several unrelated characters. (Example: using "only" to start a sentence, in the sense of "but," "however," "except that.") And this without much variation in tone or style.

For another, many of the characters seem to spend a lot of time doing what I'd call "talking about talking," instead of just talking. Rather than just say something, they say what they think they're going to say; then they say what they're saying; then later, they remind someone else of what they said and announce that now they're going to say something else. It just doesn't sound like believable human conversation to me sometimes. Perhaps this is some obscure Wolfean trick, some post-postmodern alienating literary device, but I don't think so, and if I did, I still wouldn't think it worked.

I first started noticing this kind of problematic dialogue in the Book of the Long Sun, though, curiously, it didn't seem to be an issue in either the earlier Book of the New Sun or the later Book of the Short Sun. There was a fair bit of it in the Wizard Knight books, and way too much in An Evil Guest. It wasn't too bad in Home Fires, and the short first-person chapters in Skip's voice were free of it altogether. In fact, this seems to be something that Wolfe only does when he's writing in third person, and I guess that's one reason I love so many of his first-person books (New Sun, the Soldier series, etc.) and am often less enthusiastic about the others.

But of course this is all personal taste, and maybe it's only a small minority of cranks like me who are bothered by stuff like this. If it doesn't bother you, don't let my review put you off. I still consider Wolfe a major American novelist, and I still buy every Wolfe book when it's published; but as the ancients used to say, even Homer nods off now and then. Wolfe can do, and has done, better than this.

Product details Hardcover 278 pages Publisher PS Publishing; First edition (March 1, 2011) Language English ISBN-10 1848631294

Tags : Home Fires [tc] [Gene Wolfe, David Gentry] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. (100 Traycased Jacketed Hardcover Novel signed by Gene Wolfe & Alastair Reynolds) Gene Wolfe takes us to a future North America at once familiar and utterly strange. A young man and woman,Gene Wolfe, David Gentry,Home Fires [tc],PS Publishing,1848631294,Science Fiction,Science Fiction & Fantasy
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Home Fires [tc] Gene Wolfe David Gentry 9781848631298 Books Reviews

It is impossible to summarize a Wolfe novel. One always overlooks something, some key detail. Redhead and Stefen do a good job (though the Booklist review does not). I agree with almost all of what they have to say, though they leave mostly unmentioned the implications of the reanimation idea at work here (how much of her mother was there, for example, and with what changes) and fail to note what struck me as a sort of cheap trick at the very end. They might view it as a spoiler to tell, so I will not either. Agreeing allows me to keep this short. A Wolfe fan, and I am one (I think I've read everything he's ever written), will not and should not miss this tale. A reader new to Wolfe might not be sufficiently entranced by it, though, to go on to his many other, to my mind and heart better books, which I strongly urge them to do. Wolfe is an important, complex, always surprising, enchanting author who writes with great insight of large things in a unique, touching, and inimitable way.
I've read every one of Gene's published works (to my knowledge) with the exception of "Peace". I am definitely a fan, but was disappointed with "Home Fires". Even the title doesn't work for me.

Gene was obviously trying to write a mystery, and was trying to be witty, but I kept swearing I was going to gag if he ended one more scene where someone walks up, or the cell phone rings or something just before the main character was just going to reveal something important. This little ploy was so overused in the book, that I got to where I was so bored, I began skim reading to get through the monotony (which any loyal GW fan knows, you can't do that in a GW book).

It honestly made me wonder if Gene actually wrote the book. Does he have any kids?

The plot is boring as well, and no amount of clever twisting can help it.

The characters are unreal. They all act and talk the same, and who in this whole universe actually talks like that?

So...would I buy the book again, if I knew all this, and could do it all over? Yes I probably would, but only because it's Gene Wolfe, and not because of the book itself. and I will also buy "Peace" at some point in time.

However if you are new to Gene Wolfe, then DO NOT BUY THIS AS YOUR FIRST GENE WOLFE BOOK!!! Start with the Book Of The New Sun Series. I guarantee you will be impressed.

(sorry Gene...gotta call 'em as I see 'em)
Home Fires tells in science-fiction trappings the poignant story many military families must live of growing different and apart after a lengthy deployment by one of the spouses to a seemingly endless war far from the other. The primary characters are well fleshed and have great chemistry together, making their strained romance believable. The action is vivid and well described, and the first-person reflections by the characters between chapters make the onstage players more vivid to the reader than might otherwise be the case. Unfortunately at times, Wolfe seems to rush the action a bit more than necessary, and one character's repeated betrayal s of another seem somewhat slapdash. Nonetheless, despite these fairly minor flaws, Wolfe doesn't cheat his readers and offers a compelling read clearly more profound than most of his recent work. Recommended not only to Wolfe's extant fans but also to those seeking something representative of his corpus of work without wanting to get bogged down in a multibook series.
A veteran of alien wars returns home to a husband who has aged while she has not. His attempts to woo her again have many unintended consequences leading to an updated Murder on the Orient Express. The protagonist is very much in the tradition of Heinlein - pedantic older man attractive to younger women who can solve problems with a phone call. You keep reading waiting for the good stuff to come along, but everything happens sort of on the surface. Lots of good possibilities wasted make this ultimately and unsatisfying read.
I liked this better than An Evil Guest, about as well as The Sorcerer's House, and not as well as Pirate Freedom, to name a few of Wolfe's more recent novels.

Any author worth his or her salt must really hate hearing that the new stuff isn't as good as the old stuff. But after reading all of Wolfe's novels, and rereading most of them, along with nearly all of his anthologized stories, I'm afraid I think it's largely true, with some important exceptions.

I don't know that I could pin down one and only one reason why I think this is so. But I can point to one thing that's increasingly been bothering me about Wolfe's work in recent years. To my ear, it seems as if he's forgetting how to write dialogue. He's lost none of his subtlety or wit, or his broad and exact vocabulary, or his moral seriousness, or his fondness for puzzles (intellectual, physical, or moral), and he remains a master of first-person narrative, but more and more, the way his characters talk in third-person narrative is starting to drive me up the wall.

For one thing, as another reviewer noted, a lot of the characters sound the same or nearly so. One might curse more than other, or another might have an accent, but in a given book, you might hear the same verbal tics or mannerisms from several unrelated characters. (Example using "only" to start a sentence, in the sense of "but," "however," "except that.") And this without much variation in tone or style.

For another, many of the characters seem to spend a lot of time doing what I'd call "talking about talking," instead of just talking. Rather than just say something, they say what they think they're going to say; then they say what they're saying; then later, they remind someone else of what they said and announce that now they're going to say something else. It just doesn't sound like believable human conversation to me sometimes. Perhaps this is some obscure Wolfean trick, some post-postmodern alienating literary device, but I don't think so, and if I did, I still wouldn't think it worked.

I first started noticing this kind of problematic dialogue in the Book of the Long Sun, though, curiously, it didn't seem to be an issue in either the earlier Book of the New Sun or the later Book of the Short Sun. There was a fair bit of it in the Wizard Knight books, and way too much in An Evil Guest. It wasn't too bad in Home Fires, and the short first-person chapters in Skip's voice were free of it altogether. In fact, this seems to be something that Wolfe only does when he's writing in third person, and I guess that's one reason I love so many of his first-person books (New Sun, the Soldier series, etc.) and am often less enthusiastic about the others.

But of course this is all personal taste, and maybe it's only a small minority of cranks like me who are bothered by stuff like this. If it doesn't bother you, don't let my review put you off. I still consider Wolfe a major American novelist, and I still buy every Wolfe book when it's published; but as the ancients used to say, even Homer nods off now and then. Wolfe can do, and has done, better than this.