Talk:The Wind's Twelve Quarters/GA1

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 11:37, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Comments

Well this has gone from ten-years-a-virtual-stub to a good-looking article, nice work!

Thanks! And thank you for picking this up so quickly. My first time writing about a single-author collection in detail, it was an interesting process.

• Content and analysis (hmm, not a great section heading, btw): please introduce Reid and Wood at their first mentions.

  Agreed about the heading: gone with just "contents", which is underselling the section but isn't inaccurate as such. Added glosses also.

• It may be worth saying that Vaster than Empires... has a forest setting, like the later novel. (Indeed Le Guin described her fiction as "arboreal"...)

  Agreed, done.

• "germs of novels": I think we should say this is Le Guin's own usage: Guynes states this directly, and makes use of this in his word "germinative" in Reception, so it would help to have the link made explicit (perhaps that will need a gloss in Reception, actually).

  Done in contents; it has a gloss in reception, no? "four "germinative" stories that grew into novels..."

• List of stories: the Summary field awkwardly combines summary/plot with details of publication firsts ("The first piece of Hainish Cycle fiction...") and commentary on genre ("A light-hearted story..."). It might be best to limit the column to Plot, and have a separate column for Commentary.

  I'm not sure about this split. There is some juxtaposition, it is true, but a good bit of content straddles the line between summary and commentary; anything about tone, anything about setting. Much of the material that isn't plot summary helps the reader understand said summary; the bit about Left Hand, for instance. Unless you feel very strongly, I think I'd like to leave it as is. Indeed I only made it a table to sort by title; if I'd made this a bulleted list, which would be more traditional, there wouldn't be any way to split it at all.

Reception

• "Suzanne Reid" -> "Reid".

  Done

• Maybe a separate paragraph for Sean Guynes?

  I wrote it this way initially, but it felt like undue weight; so I've reworked more thematically. It is the most detailed source, but far from the weightiest source; I don't want to give it a privileged position, as it were.

• I do wonder whether we shouldn't have dates for each review, as readers may view what was said back in the 1970s differently from more recent critical analysis?

  I feel like a reader would assume a review is contemporaneous unless told otherwise. I've tried to note the date whenever a review isn't contemporaneous, except with Wood (Wood is an interesting case; there's two relevant sources by her, one from 1975 and another from 1986; but the latter is clearly expanding on the ideas of the former, and so I've treated her as a single source). Let me know if any others aren't clear.

• The Awards paragraph is rather different from Reception and might be better as its own section. It might actually be better as a list or table (and the Guynes note can go up to the paragraph above).

  Now split into a subsection.

Images

• The cover image is the usual NFUR job; the pic of Le Guin is properly licensed.

Sources

• All the sources are relevant, indeed specific, and of the best quality.

• Spot checks:
  • not sure what [22] Nicholls is doing with Semley's Necklace - article gives date as 1964, ref says 1975?
    • Yeah this is complicated...it was published in 1964 as "The Dowry of Angyar", then in 1975 (in this volume) as "Semley's Necklace". Nicholls's bibliography notes the 1975 publication correctly, but without making the link to the earlier story. My copy of Bucknall is currently behind an impregnable wall of packing boxes, so going off the top of my head, I believe Bucknall summarizes the story, and notes the alternative title, but doesn't provide the full bibliographic detail. To do both, I've needed to use both sources.
  • [58] (1972 Hugo awards) covers Vaster... but not 1970 award for Winter's King.
    • Not sure how I missed that, thanks. Ref now added.

Super, that seems to be everything! It's a GA. Chiswick Chap (talk) 03:01, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.