Talk:The Wind's Twelve Quarters/GA1

GA Review
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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.