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How is the book Hot Sleep different from the Worthing Chronicles and/or the Capitol stories? I have Hot Sleep and The Worthing Saga, am I missing anything from the stories or are they all covered in those two books?
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The Worthing Chronicle is contained entirely in The Worthing Saga, so you're not missing anything there. Capitol includes some short stories not found in Saga.
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Okay, I've done a bit of research. There are 4 different Worthing books. Hot Sleep, Capitol, The Worthing Chronicle, and The Worthing Saga. I reread Saga this weekend and I definitely like Hot Sleep better. I bought Capitol and Chronicle from ebay.
Posts: 1042 | Registered: Jan 2001
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The stories in Worthing Chronicle are not exactly the same as the version in Worthing Saga. There was editing and retelling in the newer book. OSC goes into this in his forward.
Posts: 1346 | Registered: Jun 1999
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Oh, right, break my heart. Hot Sleep was my first novel; Capitol my first story collection. Hot Sleep was fragmented, with wrenching changes of point of view. After I learned more about how to structure a novel as something other than a bunch of related short stories strung together, I wrote The Worthing Chronicle, which replaced Hot Sleep. It is a far better structured book.
At the same time, it's more distant and more literary - that is, everything is filtered through "later" characters and we are constantly switching back and forth through time. This can be just as offputting, ultimately, as the jumpy fragmentation of the original version. C'est la vie.
That's why I'm willing to have both versions coexist. Same story, same author, different stages in his career. If I were writing it today, it would be three times as long (at least) and have a lot more characters and ... I'm not going to do it. Writing the same novel twice is quite enough, don't you think? <grin>.
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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Personally, there's something about reading the stories in a fragmented, multi point of view manner. It reads more like a history that way. What I didn't like about the Saga is, as you said, it seems filtered and far off. A lot of the details of the original stories are skipped, in favor of Lared's story. And it's certainly your right to rewrite and revisit, but I find the details of the early life on Worthing and that history more interesting than Lared and his family. Plus, I'm a huge short story fan, and I kinda like that format of using the smaller stories to tell the whole. And it's interesting to me to see how the tale evolved several times.
I've got 3 or 4 of your old books that I bought from used bookstores, and they are yellowed and smell old, and I love that. Hot Sleep, Wyrms and Treason to name a few. Because the books are old, the stories seem old, and not quite polished, and remind me of the way we read books when I was growing up. It's not like today where you get websites from authors and publishers and insiders and you know intricately when every new story will come out and there is no guess work. It used to be you read a book, and pined for the next new work to show up at the library, or you cut out the coupon in the back of the book and sent away for the next in the series. There's a certain charm to that which is lost today, imo. Sometimes it's better not to know what the next story is or when it's coming, it adds to the story a bit, I think.
Or maybe it's just me.
Either way, thanks!
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You can find all those books on ebay, and amazon has some as well from their marketplace sellers.
Posts: 1042 | Registered: Jan 2001
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I got and read my Capitol book yesterday. I loved the first story about the discovery of somec and brain taping. And I was happy to find A Thousand Deaths in there, never realized that was a Capitol story, or put 2 and 2 together that Crove founded Crove, later to be Capitol.
Question, though. Was the USSR over USA motif just a response to the times, or part of a bigger pattern of doubts about the resolve and character of the US?
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