gene wolfe's book of the NEWSUN!!!!! reading club

i'm reading chapter one of shadow of the torturer starting now

i could get behind this, if i can find it for kindle

i'm not ready to read them yet. this year though. definitely.

i'd do them over the summer, but i'm not sure i'll get past the first one

i mean the gimmick with them is that they are just a meandering, unreliable narrator a la casanova, right?

I can't find these, actually. I picked up a short story collection.

remy - nope!

read the first one, kinda stalled on the 2nd one now and taking a break to read a robert b parker novel.
i will be happy to discuss this with you cuz it is... intersting. i think i like it. but somehow i go stalled on the 2nd cuz i felt it was becoming too generic? idk.

I'm in for summer, either way

transient random-noise bursts. . . was in heavy rotation when i first read this and is now forever associated with it in my mind

awesome books, I can't commit to a re-read but I'm looking forward to this thread

i was going to read 'island of doctor death' and then go to this but island of dr death is triggering both the literary-prose and genre-fiction versions of my 'i just can't be bothered' button, and as such has been parked next to the toilet for something like a week

i just noticed this is on the noise board, i forget the noise board exists

http://static.gamebattles.com/gb/arenas/teams/11/297/695/logo204125248421311954103.png

http://content.internetvideoarchive.com/content/photos/371/015590_12.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_8P4B1WPzN1Q/SAxCbtY4szI/AAAAAAAAAFg/aIZMQhNUXWY/S660/A20POW-MIA20NEVER20FORGET_neverforget3.jpg

pardon my cornell notes

"a thousand ages in they sight / are like an evening gone / short as the watch that ends the night / before the rising-sun" <- is this about god? is it about severian and his photographic memory, ruminating on mortality even though his life seems like a thousand ages to him? is it about the experience of reading this book? is it about the resurrection of the righteous? is it about the long decline of man before the destruction of earth?

it is a paraphrase of psalm 90, which in the king james version goes (SPOILER ALERT RE: URTH OF THE NEW SUN)

" For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up."

"resurrection and death" <- why inverted? especially when the first chapter skips the resurrection entirely and begins in the "and" section. is it normal to go swimming on foggy nights? damn, these kids must have had some crazy goosebumps.

why does severian imagine cutting

haha actually SPOILER ART RE: corridors of time!!!

er SPOILER ALERT

whoops that got "cut off" if you will

why does severian imagine cutting off vodalus' head? does he secretly hate vodalus? is he afraid of one day having to betray vodalus?

http://butdoesitfloat.com/This-was-the-first-time-that-he-had-ever-looked-into-the-labyrinth-of

^^ this is what i imagine nessus looking like

wow awesome thread! i am almost done with the last book, so very timely for me. these books are amazing.

I am gonna reread along with this thread.

actually i guess the resurrection might refer to the grave robbery

book one just arrived to my kindle.

or his exile is the resurrection? but that doesn't make sense, resurrection's not like exile.

xpost with the scifi fantasy thread - here's wayne barlowe's illustration of an alzabo. i pictured them looking far more canine for some reason, but i love this illustration.
http://lcart1.narod.ru/image/fantasy/wayne_barlowe/gtf/Wayne_Barlowe_Alzabo.jpg
i have a lot i want to talk about but you are all just getting started and i don't want to spoil anything! so i'll wait til you're done to join the discussion.

lol i have read this twice and remember remarkably little of it

That thing looks like a fanged rhino crossed with Dumb Donald.

I always pictured a large hyena. Are those its eyes in its jowls?

http://www.paintingsilove.com/uploads/18/18616/the-alzabo.jpg

transient random-noise bursts. . . was in heavy rotation when i first read this and is now forever associated with it in my mind

― mookieproof, Thursday, May 17, 2012 7:42 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

might do this and this

picked this up again as i wanted to take a break from the country music bio i was reading. and

SPOILER

the part where they 34t th34cla and he somehow gets her memories is the kind of stuff i like about this series.

finished chapters 2 and 3, not sure what to say about them quite yet ... thinking

findin this v hard to get into

why?

keep fallin asleep after every paragraph, tbh. it's dense.

it is dense. i suggest reading aloud in a foppish voice.

^^^ lol.

i find it a bit of a hard read too, because the action moves a lot slower than a lot of what i have been reading lately, and i also fall asleep reading it. but.. i am keeping on. it's a strangely episodic book and i think some of the episodes are more engaging than others tbh.

If you can find the audio version, read by Roy Avers for the National Library Service for the Blind, it's a nice version.

Spent the last 5 minutes looking for an old photo I remember, of Roy Avers in his big glasses, but can't find it.

read that as Roy Ayers and got excited.

you should read this book and get excited

i'm gonna. but not now. i have all three in hardcover.

i am on chapter 3 now

Everybody Loves the New Sunshine

lolllllll

the one thing I completely remember skipping when I read this a long time ago was that lengthy play at the end

ah you missed the whole point of the series then

i'm glad i'm learning more about jonas.
it seemed like between the end of book 1 and the beginning of book 2 he became severian's best buddy without much explanation. i guess there is a lot that goes unexplained in these books tho.

there is a gap of a few weeks or even a couple months between shadow and claw i think

i do think severian does explain why he likes jonas so much

guys i am reading gene wolfe's wiki and:

After returning to the United States he earned a degree from the University of Houston and became an industrial engineer. He edited the journal Plant Engineering for many years before retiring to write full-time, but his most famous professional engineering achievement is a contribution to the machine used to make Pringles potato chips.[5]

HOLY SHIT!!

you people are lame

i'm not posting again until at least one other person finished chapter one and gets back to me about it

lol linds, that is like the most commonly known trivia fact about gene wolfe! that and he's some weird branch of catholic.

i am almost done with book two, and fully back on board with this series btw. finished the play at the end of book two last night, ordered books three/four.
it is VERY strangely paced, that's for sure.

btw i have been getting tons of kinda marginal, vintage SF paperbacks from the dollar rack at a local bookstore--leinster, leigh brackett, some doc smith and the occasional good title. a couple days ago i got a whole box of edgar rice burroughs books--complete tarzan, complete mars & venus stories, nearly complete pelllucidar & a bio & a big stack of one-offs. if anyone wants my doubles and/or stuff i am going to get rid of let me know. interesting trades considered.

i was gonna start a new thread on ILB to give away my crap but i decided this makes as much sense as anywhere.

haha well i didn't know anything about gene wolfe until now and that blew my mind.
if you find any octavia butler let me know. i've been looking for her stuff in used book stores with no luck. or anyone else i might like. also wondering if the book of the long sun or other gene wolfe is worth reading.

i started the book of the long sun a long time ago -- it was both less dense and less interesting iirc

i have an octavia butler book or two somewhere unless i sold 'em already.
i tried w her but it didn't work. her description of these aliens as masses of hair/tendrils kept grossing me out.

ah you missed the whole point of the series then

― the late great, Thursday, May 24, 2012 11:03 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ah fuck

V, I've read as far as the greenhouse/garden scenes in the first book. I like it so far! I'm intrigued! My favorite bits are the nested stories, and the very elliptical way that older Sev omits certain pertinent-ish facts. F'rinstnace, I realized after far too long that creepy Dorcas is 'Cas,' the dead wife the older boatman's mourning for a few chapters prior.

ok here's one of my favorite parts

"it struck me that his face was not only that of a fox but a stuffed fox. i have heard those who dig for their livelihood say there is no land anywhere in which they can trench without turning up the shards of the past. no matter where the spade turns the soil, it uncovers broken pavements and corroding metal; and scholars write that the kind of sand that artists call polychrome (because flecks of every color are mixed with its whiteness) is actually not sand at all, but the glass of the past, now pounded to powder by aeons of tumbling in the clamorous sea. if there are layers of reality beneath the reality we see, even as there are layers of history beneath the ground we walk upon, then in one of those more profound realities, his face was a fox's mask on a wall, and i marveled to see it turn and bend now toward the woman, achieving by those motions, which made expression and thought appear to play across it with the shadows of the nose and brows, an amazing and realistic appearance of vivacity"

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llugdvAsG31qdkmano1_r2_1280.jpg

do we know if book of the newsun directly inspired the boredoms in any way?

Does Frederik Pohl read this thread? He just blogged the Pringles factoid.

frederick pohl if you are reading this thread i <3 u for gateway

by the way ian, it is absolutely true, in fact the covers of various boredoms albums are actually references to certain characters and places in the books

vision creation newsun depicts book 3, little [ ] touching the [ ] on the [ ] of typhon.

the inside illustrations depict the feast of vodalus when viewed in this manner ... note severian and vodalus seated at left and the food heaped on the right, the lines moving upward depict both the trees in the forest and the elevation of consciousness into visions including the new sun at the top, illustrated in black and white

there are several references in this boxset as well. from the top: 1) the tower of [ ] viewed looking upside down from the very top of the ship of the hierodules. the second image depicts the antechamber of the house absolute. the third cover shows the citadel of nessus or perhaps just one tower.

there are other references as well particularly in the super roots series of releases. onanie bomb depicts a masked severian, while super roots 3 depicts an executed criminal carved into five deaths (representing also severian's five deaths in the series = five caskets in the tomb). super roots five shows a hierogrammate as glimpsed in the house absolute, while super roots 7 shows an avern or perhaps the salamander elemental and super roots 8 depicts apheta's planet from book five. finally there is super are with the story represented schematically (severian and the new sun inside of himself)

iirc there's also an iron-cross shaped one in light greenish-blue that is carved into many radial segments, i believe that is a map of nessus or the house absolute, i forget which release that is though.

i think that's it though, obviously not everything they did was a reference to gene wolfe, especially the side projects

Finished the first book. Liked it a lot. Curious about how he'll bring a 'satisfying' conclusion abt. w/ only 3/4 to go, and very little plot movement thus far. (Or am I a savage for wanting more plot?)

how are you liking book two, remy?

i want severian's dog to come back :(

he does ;-)

i bought the first three books over the weekend, and started the shadow of the torturer yesterday. this is my second attempt, as i tried many years ago to read the omnibus collection of the first two volumes, but for whatever reason, i find that i now remember only the part about triskele (lol), severian's three-legged dog. at first, wolfe's prose seemed distressingly dense and even somewhat comically pretentious, but the elevated, archaic language becomes familiar quite rapidly, and the initial torrent of obscure terms slows to a trickle after the first few chapters. i'm only a hundred pages deep, but have the hang of it, and don't find it at all oppressive.

i'm moving slowly not because the writing is difficult to decipher, but because i got sidetracked taking notes and compiling a glossary of unfamiliar terms. fifty pages in, i had twelve pages of transcribed passages and a list of nearly 100 terms with definitions. this turned 90 minutes reading time into about six hours of computer work. that was clearly a ridiculous way to go about things, so now i'm limiting myself to the use of a highlighter.

anyway, i'm struck by how comprehensively gothic the novel is. so elevated, enervated, aestheticized and death-obsessed. everything seems turned in on itself, the outward dream of classic science fiction grounded in ruin, wealth straying to poverty, ambition to servitude, sex to cruel fetish, ordered systems to suffocating ritual. severian even seems to make the gothic agenda explicit in suggesting that "our necropolis" was intentionally designed to resemble a mountain forest.

i'm also strongly reminded of michael moorcock's elric novels, which feature a similarly pitiless protagonist, a torturer's guild, a dying kingdom tyrannically ruled by bloodthirsty and long-limbed aristocrats, decadence curling into perversion, and a generally gothic tone.

looking forward to see where this all goes...

i think parts of it are meant to be comically pretentious, or at least comically high-flown. there is a lot of humor in these books that is not immediately obvious.

it is comprehensively gothic, and yes, similar to elric, but unlike elric characters develop

halfway through the second one. w/out spoilering, what I assume to be a PKDish turn (whale?) has got me interested.

there is a lot of humor in these books that is not immediately obvious.

yeah, it's getting funnier as it goes. i especially enjoyed severian's assessment of master gurloes' failings, "he mispronounced quite common words: urticate, salpinx, bordereau."

and there's something suggestively almost-meta about passages like this: "we have books whose pages are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams."

some of the commentary on gender is weird (men are to women as clients are to torturers, women are too cruel to make good torturers, etc.), but i'm assuming/hoping that's more a product of severian and his society than of wolfe himself.

there is a fair amount of meta stuff about writing which i think to some extent springs from broader issues of autobiography and memory, but yeah, if you thought that was something, there are books-within-books to come

i would like to say that it's a product of severian as far as gender goes, but even then things are not particularly great on that front. virgins, whores, mamas, crones and not much in between.

SPOILERS UP THROUGH END OF #2.

Finished the second one. I'm reading slowly, and I took a break. I'm loving the twisty-turny narrative, and the meandering exposition w/r/t Sev.'s journeys, but I'm finding a lot of the writing pretty vague and poetic.

As one example, I grew confused about the physical structure of the cell, during the chapters about Sevarian's imprisonment under the autarch's palace. I had been lead to believe in a deep cavelike structure that trailed into Lovecrafty darkness and unlit grottoes. As the chapter progressed, though, he begain detailing neat corridors and metal walls – it seemed more like a military prison, or a submerged battleship. This isn't the first time this has happened – I wonder about the extent to which GW's changing tack is deliberate, and the extent to which it is (/might be) sloppy.

I'm confused about some other things as well:

– The second palace (i.e. are their two palaces coexisiting in the same physical location, linked by tricksy doors,
trompe-l'œil passages, and false walls? Or are there two palaces that /seem/ to exist in the same location, but are remote, a la the greenhouse/gardens with portal to other sides of the planet?).

– The witches. I am very, very confused by their resurrection of the stone city at the end of Claw of the Conciliator. My understanding is: Hildegrin, Jolenta, Dorcas, Sevarian, and some witches help the lead 'sleekly reptilian' witch-lady to commune with somebody on a distant star, who lets them roll back (?) time to resurrect an ancient city. The ancient city's ruler, Apu somebodyorother, spies the witches and attacks Hildegrin. Sevarian comes to Hildegrin's aid and gets conked on the head. When he awakes, he's with Jolenta (revealed as the waitress from book 1), and Dorcas, surrounded by 'wind-lashed grass and tumbled stones.' I assume this means the city was /not/ resurrected?

- The significance of Dr. Talos's play. I assume it is later revealed to be prophetic?

it's not vague, the detail is just buried. the place where severian is imprisoned is actually a luxurious converted ballroom or large drawing room of some sort in a versailles style. it might sound ostentatious but the series is really written as much for re-reading as it is for reading and a lot of details jump out at you the second or third time.

the "second house" is a series of hidden rooms and passageways in the house absolute. i think practically every room in the house is connected to the "second house" in some way, so that every room can be spied on or secretly accessed. there are magic mirrors in the second house but no colocated rooms ... that we know of, anyway.

the witches (and the cumean, who is a cacogen) have power over time the same way father inire has power over space. they don't so much travel in time as bring the two times into simultaneous existence. it is a confusing episode and severian spends chunks of three and four and five trying to figure it out. there are clues but the big reveal is at the end of the fourth book. if you want a hint, there is a connection between apu-punchau and the face in the tomb. btw, the cumean actually is a snake-like creature, not a humanoid.

dr talos' play is one of the most complicated parts of the book. it foreshadows the explication of past events, i.e. the history of old urth. it also explains the prophecies and teachings of the conciliator (which otherwise are not really explained) ... in one part of the book it mentions that talos' play is based on a book called "eschatology & genesis" which is the authoritative text on the conciliator.

it also foreshadows events in book 5 (the coming of the new sun) and reflects on the personalities of the main characters, particularly talos, dorcas and jolenta. i don't really think it directly signposts any particular events in books three and four but like i said it is a really deep section of the book and i haven't sussed out all of the threads yet.

when i say it "foreshadows past events" i mean that it is a metaphorical / allegorical explanation of the history of old urth (for example, what happened before the autarchal system was established. what happened to the sun?) which is then explained in a much more concrete way in the third book (and slightly in the fourth)

started book three yesterday, will post thoughts as they come to me

just about to finish book one. afraid to read this thread b/c everyone's ahead of me, but i'm really, really enjoying it. i thought it was a little hard to get into until the interaction between thecla and severian started, but ever since then i've been into it.

I've started three, too. It's my favorite so far. Might have spoilered myself on some stuff. Thx for clearing ^ up, late great

i always forget that severian is running around barechested.. then they mention it. and i lol.

just finished book three last night. started book four.

things got pretty weird!
but i still have a problem with some of the filler chapters/adventures. the pace can be very plodding when some of the events recounted by severian seem relatively... inconsequential? idk. i'm sure it will all come together.

any events in particular?

these books would be a lot better with more dragons

that's like saying dune would be better with ornithopter dogfights

anyway the undines are the dragons, and this is low fantasy, so no, you can't battle dragons no matter how big your tool is

gene wolfey knows to reserve his big sword for the ladeez

the pace can be very plodding when some of the events recounted by severian seem relatively... inconsequential?

it's been a while but iirc some of the seemingly inconsequential events turn out to not be?

every event relates to the plot though not every event advances the plot, if that makes sense

I've finished book three as well. I was digging the Big Bad of the Mountain Autarch, and his Window-Eyes of Doom and Jodorowskyan Psycho-Fuckwithery, but he was dispensed quickly and nothing really came of it? Same as * spoiler * little Sevarian? I liked the direction in which the plot was moving but then *zap* and kapow and the Giant fell and ... uhh... here I am, in a sick ward in the first third of the fourth book.

I guess I had trouble w/ li'l Sev's death and the ensuing one page of 'ooh, that's sad' before 'back to my quest I go.' I've got to admit, I dislike this book as much as I like it, but I have no desire to stop reading it. It is good? And bad?

what did you expect to happen when he fought baldanders?

It just seems that Baldanders was a weird callback? He wasn't anticipated (to me) as a villain; he didn't figure in my comprehension of the narrative structure of the book. He was a colorful Guildenstern to Talos's Rosencrantz, a B-lister who got called up unexpectedly. I didn't have any investment in him – nor in the continuation of his character. I don't know how much i buy the progression from 'big Queequeg guy who sleeps in S.'s bed and has weird dreams --> guy that acts crazy onstage --> guy who actually goes crazy and attacks an audience at the autarch's palace --> enormous superstrength monster who keeps a foggy castle full of genetic experiments that turn on him, with the aid of extraterrestrial creeps --> guy that appears to die but probably doesn't.

I'll admit how much I'm glad to have read this far, and that the story is a decidedly new type for me. I'm still flummoxed, tho.

kinda gotta agree w Remy in that the baldanders thing at the end of book three was a surprise & seemed to come out of the blue. also the revelation that dr. talos was a homonculus.

the drawn out fight with the alzabo that kills little severian's family seemed a bit unnecessary to me. likewise the incident with the salamander.

i'm sure something is going to happen with dorcas but going through most of Sword of the Lictor without any advancement of her plot (except the explicit statement that she used to be dead) was a bit of a drag. i understand there is only one character given the privilege of narrating the story and so we see things only through his eyes, and of course that is just the consequence of the way Wolfe chose to write the book, but its challenge because if you get bored there is no knowledge that something else is gonna happen? idk. it actually reads a bit like a D&D campaign to me where monsters randomly attack and magical experiences are had in a seemingly endless stream without much rhyme or reason?

i do like that in this book you saw much more of severian as a scheming, cold and self-serving guy instead of just a man beset by trials and tribulations with which he must contend.

tbh i thought the idea of the moving islands of roots was one of the best images i've had in my head in a while. A+

both baldanders and typhon represent the folly of scientific materialism. they are both mountains of men yet both are dependent on leaser beings: baldanders on a physical midget and typhon on a mental midget (contrast to the relationship between severian and little sev). actually they mirror each other: a silent giant with a smaller, more talkative companion. both see things others do not (typhon's eyes, the cloud chambers), both live unnaturally extended lives, both are betrayed by a tool, both seek to bargain with the hierodules and both are betrayed

are they both worth the same # of xps tho?

feel like you guys maybe read books for different reasons than i do

maybe that's why i can't watch tv, it's like this never ending stream of *things happening* w/o much reflection

also when you say you "expected something to happen w dorcas" does realizing she's been resurrected and then not only is she not grateful to severian but she literally dumps him and goes back to the city of the dead?

i'd say "something happened"!

the late great why do you read books?

to suspend the flow of time, to meditate, to be places i haven't been, to commune with other minds, to engage w ideas

i like digressive and atmospheric stuff, things like stanislaw lem and borges

~hero~

honestly i mostly read nonfiction history and cultural books though so maybe that's why wolfe appeals to me?

I dont read nonfiction history but read things like stanislaw lem and borges

late great have you read the rings of saturn

read that even lamp wont talk shit about that

is that sebald? no but i like stuff like that a lot.

i am going to reread these i think, i want to talk about books but i read these like three maybe four summers ago and found them kinda obscurantist and gross, like there were a lot of words but not very many ideas. and the ideas he does have are the same ugly ones lots of these books have about the solitary male but i dont really remember much except the part where they fight the monsters army that lives in the ocean, ever growing, and how its troops can only communicate in stock phrases, i liked that a lot

yeah read rings of saturn as soon as you can xp

there are lots of ideas, a lot of them are about christianity though

the army doesn't live in the ocean, but they are allies w/ the creatures in the ocean

i've only read austerlitz and vertigo

rings of saturn is best imho but that is mho so who knows

i like sebald but i like thomas bernhard more, that's a different conversation though and probably not related much to wolfe

read that even lamp wont talk shit about that

sebald is dope it think we talked about this once on ilx? i feel like i tired to get you to read 'memories of the future' and/or 'letter killers club' but maybe that was someone else/another conversation...

the army doesn't live in the ocean, but they are allies w/ the creatures in the ocean

no i know that i thought the creatures controlled them or something? its also p vague but i thought only one of the creatures lived in the ocean and it was always growing or something?

i like sebald but i like thomas bernhard more, that's a different conversation though and probably not related much to wolfe

― the late great, Tuesday, July 10, 2012 9:21 PM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is 100% reasonable, I agree w/ this, but rings of saturn is a completely different beast I think, also read war and war by krasznahorkai if you haven't, sorry about hijacking the wolfe thread, I'll back off now

read that even lamp wont talk shit about that

sebald is dope it think we talked about this once on ilx? i feel like i tired to get you to read 'memories of the future' and/or 'letter killers club' but maybe that was someone else/another conversation...

― Lamp, Tuesday, July 10, 2012 9:21 PM (36 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah someone else but I'll check that shit out

it's very vague and it's never clear if abaia is one creature, many creatures, a culture, a race or what.

the creatures in the ocean make a deal with the army from the north, but the hierodules - and the undines - both make clear that they're not manipulating human events even though they're somewhat involved in them

in the end it turns out that undines and the hierodules want the same thing anyway but i'm not going to spoil that one

sorry but you guys sound like roman in that one ep of party down

y'all should read p. mckillip's riddlemaster series imo

it is briefer and less convoluted and similarly awesome

who's roman?? what's party down? what did he sound like?

i don't actually think this wolfe book is meant to be a mystery, if you read all four carefully i think almost all of the plot threads are pretty clear, it's just the subtle ways in which they're tied together which is obscure

i think one of my favorite parts of book three is when he's wandering in the mountains after escaping thrax but before finding the cottage in the mountains, and he's delirious and just experiencing looking at the stars in the mountains on a clear night and seeing clouds from above and the sunrise and what not, it's just beautiful and evocative and captures something that i've also felt when looking at mountains and stars and clouds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnYoyCgFKSI&feature=related

oh he looks like a pretty chiil dude

he bones that chick, right?

no he forgot to carry around his badass sword

maybe next episode

both baldanders and typhon represent the folly of scientific materialism

y'know i think i hate books where something REPRESENTS something else. or maybe i just hate this book and there's a dozen counterexamples i can't think of.

late great -- don't get me wrong -- i do not dislike these books, and i will continue to read them and may even read the book of the long sun or w/e.

I do find the structure & flow of these books a bit difficult tho -- I understand that it's written as Sev's memoir and so of course there is a lot Wolfe can do with that and does do quite well w/r/t omission of detail etc but i still find it a bit tough to wade thru some of the less compelling adventures. Whether you want to blame that on Sev's lack of narrative skills or something else is up to the individual i guess.

I read books primarily for entertainment, though I do read a lot of biography as well. I also read books to stimulate my own thoughts and to become engaged in another world or a scenario that otherwise I would be unable to experience. I do not find Wolfe to be all that engaging--there are plenty of episodes in the books that are neat-o (stuff with Jonas I liked a lot, the botanical garden of crazy dimensions, the floating islands, the consumption of Thecla) but I also find long stretches where I am just waiting for something to happen. Idk.

re: Dorcas -- it just seems strange when you build someone up as one of the only other major characters in the book only for her to disappear for almost the entirety of one of the books. I think she was a good foil for Severian and their conversations were good reading, for me.

^ well, wolfe writes in such a way that there are a lot of stubs in sevarian's story. dorcas: she's a savior! she's a lover! she's sickly! she's resentful! she's just ... gone! she was the dead boatman's wife! is a nice little progression of events, but they don't feel like they add up to anything. it seems to me that there's an episodic quality to the novels' structure that undermines the carefulness of the presentation and the cogency of the world-building. what i mean to say is: there's no objective correlative for sevarian's internal issue, whatever it is. there isn't really an internal issue at all, that i can tell. robert penn warren talks eloquently of the 'yearn' at the heart of every great character, the inarticulable, inchoate, desire for some (x) that motivates the character like the virgin mary's immaculately burning heart and is expressed or denied in terms of the outside action in the narrative. but with sevarian....

now, not every story need follow so strict a path as warren says –– but sevarian's story is clearly, one about growth and an expanding understanding of the world, and the slow drip of information about humankind's fall and afterlife. but why? is sevarian especially curious? no – not based on anything i've read. in some chapters, as ian alludes to, he's a hollow shirtless navigator bumbling around and seeing A Thing and engaging The Thing and moving on. But, for many of the chapters, there's no thrill or contribution to the meaning. the village of mages? the fire salamander? the green man? they're interludes, but on the way to what? you can make an argument that together they are all blips in a pointillist painting that will make sense only upon completing the novel, but i'm not buying it. at least not now. many of the incidents don't contribute to the story (i.e. sevarian's journey; education; growth) nor the plot (his physical steps to becoming Whatever He Becomes), which, ideally, are entwined ends. they're just 'a funny thing happened on the way to return the claw'

like ian, i'll continue reading. and i'll continue enjoying. but i'm reserving my right to be critical.

also nobody seems to have a body, a la george martin

you're not reading carefully enough

severian's yearning is to bring things back to life

maybe that becomes clear later on, and he is always 'thinking about trying to use the claw' but tbh a much more motivating factor for him seems to be sex? with thecla and cyriaca especially, his lust causes him all sorts of problems and seems to motivate a lot of the major action in the book.

fwiw i just stumbled upon genewolfebookclub.com and it is pretty neat stuff i guess..

i would say the sex thing is fairly true to life ;-)

but then there's also triskele, and his childhood experiences in the crypt watching nature come to life, and his ambitions as a child to bring the new sun back to life and to restore humanity, etc etc

you're not reading carefully enough

is kind of ridiculous, v.

sorry :-(

hard to read closely when it's hard to tell what's gonna be relevant and what's just stage dressing imo. also tough to read closely when i am half in the bag and going to sleep.

tbf the book does end w/ severian telling you to go back and re-read again

how many times have you read this, TLG?

front to back four times over the last year

but i often dip back in and read a few chapters at a time

wow, four times in a year. that is impressive in some way.

eh, not really

i tend to get obsessed with a few books and read them over and over again rather than reading a broad range of stuff

some other ones i keep re-reading are engine summer, the cornelius chronicles (moorcock), stars in my pocket like grains of sand (delany), lovecraft's stories, etc

this is probably the first time in my adult life though i've got caught up in a multi-volume epic, it's kind of surprising because i really don't care for like tolkien or george martin

i think maybe i just relate very strongly to severian?

that is true actually, i feel a very strong kinship to severian

severian is kinda bipolar i guess in that he swings from feeling like an outcast, a traitor and a failure and feeling like king of the whole world and jesus' son

i can relate to that

interesting that stars in my pocket is on your reread list, late great. of all the delaney i've read (and i've read all of it except the nevèrÿon stuff, hogg, phallos, and mad men), it is the least fulfilling title in the catalogue. what do you like about it? if i think about it, i can see some tonal/formal similarities b/w it and newsun... and they're kind of evenly sprinkled on the attractor/repulsor matrix.

i think the main character in stars in my pocket (marq dyeth, not rat korga) has a very believable interior voice and i find it easy to relate to his thoughts and feelings ... for example, at the beginning, when he remembers a human hand and alien hand linked together in the dappled sunshine of a tree-shaded playground. i have memories and feelings like that too.

i also found the world (and universe) very believable, it felt three-dimensional and solid to me, like there are all sorts of little idiosyncrasies and bits of alien-ness but they don't feel alien, they just feel like a natural part of an alien world, not like classic sci-fi "oh here's a bit of futurism or theoretical physics and let me explain it to you", something a bit more whole and rounded than that.

i guess lovecraft is the same way? i relate pretty strongly to most of lovecraft's narrators (i guess because i'm an indoors-y neurotic bookworm too?) and the world he sketches is very atmospheric, with the fantastic details more often obscured than explained

i dunno though, none of what i'm writing here feels exactly right or like i'm doing justice to it

i promise i'll get back to this

front to back four times over the last year

wau

late great, have you read any clark ashton smith? king of atmospheric Weird Tales writers

a tiny sliver, only "white worm" and "out of space and time"

what else is good?

i often confuse august derleth and clark ashton smith. i know i am not crazy about derleth but i am pretty sure that's why i always pass on them, then later i remember he's lovecraft's friend, not his publisher.

but didn't he help w/ the dreamlands? and the king in yellow? or am i just super confused?

nope that's robert t. chambers

er w. chambers

maybe we should have a wyrd fiction thread.

^ yes

Dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial? Don't mind if I do (a weird fiction thread)

awesome

k so i've been thinking about what you guys said and i am going to make an admission

for awhile the third book was definitely my least favorite and i agree i was also taken aback by the sudden downshifting, so much so that i totally skimmed a lot of the thrax stuff. it was also one of the books that i found most improved by rereading. now i feel kind of silly for being so badly thrown by the transition because the same thing happened at the beginning of the second book.

so here's how i look at the books so far

shadow of the torturer - so the shadow stretches out before severian because it's the beginning of his journey, poisoning the things it falls across (thecla, agia / agilus, nessus, severian himself). at the same time his shadow falls across things more or less by chance. there is also the intimation of a shadow falling across him. there's the story about the angel that alludes to either doom or invincibility, baldanders, the atrium of time, malrubius' ghost, etc.

claw of the conciliator - after having caused so much misfortune in the first book, severian takes up his religious and mystical calling. he gives counsel to agilus, frees the man in green, tames the man-apes, turns the other cheek to agia, takes mass, nurses jonas, meets caesar, glimpses cacogens, nurses jolenta, meets witches and resurrects apu punchau. at this point it becomes clear that carrying the claw is a bit like carrying a cross or a crown of thorns. in contrast to this charity, he's actually abandoned by his companions more than once (jonas and talos)

sword of the lictor - so now the claw has lengthened into a big long sword and he has to learn to deal with the burden (remember the sword is actually described as looking like a cross) of heroism and authority. there's this strong contrast between traditional fantasy heroism and christian heroism. on both levels he is harshly tested. he succumbs to temptation with cyriaca. his faith is tested when he learns humanity is controlled by cacogens. he has another vision of hell. he does manage to resurrect a child but realizes he can't do anything about the squalor. dorcas doesn't accept her rebirth and leaves. he baptises the prisoners but can't save them. he can't save the family from the alzabo. he gets his adopted son killed. typhon is interesting because to defeat typhon he performs a mercy killing of an innocent. he meets the cacogens but barely understands their reassurances that they - the hierodules, anyway - treasure free will. he fights baldanders to a draw.

so i think also part of sword of the lictor is that it reflects a lot on the lengthening story and a lot of these episodes reflect back on the events of the first two books.

thrax is like an inversion of nessus, and now he is in charge of his own citadel. he descends into and back out of thrax as he does nessus. this whole bit reminded me a lot of proust taking the carriage down in the valley, etc etc. unlike severian at the nessus river, dorcas at the river rejects her rebirth. he leaves in exile again after repeating the whole thecla debacle with cyriaca. the alzabo thing is like a meditation on the thecla thing. he duels baldanders as he dueled agilus and again there's a miracle and his opponent flees. again, this is a bit of a debacle. there's a whole lot of mercy-killing going on here too. speaking of which, the baldanders thing completes the story that talos and baldanders have been telling since severian ran into them and severian is left again questioning what exactly being a hero is accomplishing.

anyway i'm kind of losing my train of thought.

hey LGG thanx for that post.
midway thru book 4 now and it seems like severian is trying himself to put perspective on all the things that have happened to him which is sort of a 'big moment' in terms of understanding the earlier books.

oh yeah, did that make sense?

i'm way, way behind because i, uh, lost the shadow of the torturer for a while there. i looked and looked but couldn't find it, so i read other things instead (amelia gray's threats is wonderful, btw, if crushingly sad). turns out it was in an old grocery bag. so...

i'm midway through the claw of the conciliator. i'm not sure i really like these books, tbh, but at least volume two has a bit more momentum than the first. my problem is that i don't find the prose, characters or plotting particularly engaging, and i'm not yet sure what i'm supposed to be reading for. i gather that the ostensible appeal, as the late great says, is that digression and atmosphere, but the writing only occasionally hooks me on that level (despite my love of both borges and lem). for instance, i was giddy with happiness of the suggestion, at the beginning of book two, that nessus' wall divides the world "as the mere line between their covers does two books." easy basket, maybe, but wonderful nonetheless. unfortunately, such moments are rare, at least so far.

have had the suspicion from the beginning that the series will resemble borges' "the approach to al-mu'tasim", attar's "the conference of the birds" and pamuk's the black book, with the seeker eventually becoming the thing he seeks. we'll see...

i also like how severian piously warns that if you're looking for gore, death and suffering, you won't find it here. then launches into a bunch more gore, death and suffering than the first book held. that sounds snarky, but i really do enjoy the occasional suggestions of unreliability in his narration.

oh i don't think it's too similar to lem.

it is similar to some borges, but not other stuff. for example, apu punchau vs circular ruins, sign of the compass vs the whole agia/autarch thing, etc.

the seeker eventually becoming the thing he seeks

no, i don't think so. severian is not the new sun, severian is the "white fountain" (hint hint) that cancels the black worm at the center of the sun.

severian's symbol is not the sun or the cross, it's the rose, the thorn (claw) and the fountain

thy sweet rose survived
while shone the morning sun, then drooped and died.

E. C. B.

now the rose symbolizes blood and martyrdom in a lot of cultures, but i'm going to argue that in christianity it is the thorn that symbolizes sacrifice (no one is martyred by the torturers)

the messianic male leader over every nation, serving as the only suitable replacement sacrifice to God in the place of all humanity, which had been sentenced to eternal death for their disobedience in the Garden of Eden... thus forshadowing the crown of thorns.

note though that he only carries one thorn. the real messianic leaders is ... the one character who gets martyred again and again, the autarch (not the same as severian)

so what about the rose, then?

i would argue it's the rosy cross

"the cross represents the human body and the rose represents the individual's unfolding consciousness ... to prepare a new phase ... to be used during the coming age now at hand, for as the world and man evolve so also must religion change"

severian is a sort of rrosicrrucian

according to eckert rosicrucians are "children of light, are opposed to darkness. They dislike mystification and secrecy; they are open and frank, have nothing to do with secret societies and with external ceremonies. They possess a spiritual temple, in which God is presiding"

from wikipedia

"As regeneration is the key to spiritual existence, they therefore founded their symbolism upon the rose and the cross, which typify the redemption of man through the union of his lower temporal nature with his higher eternal nature ... the rose female and the cross male, both universal phallic [...] As generation is the key to material existence"

albert pike

"But [the cross's] peculiar meaning is that given to it by the Ancient Egyptians ... represented on the oldest monuments ... it is the symbol of Life ... The ROSE, was anciently sacred to Aurora and the Sun. It is a symbol of Dawn, of the resurrection of Light and the renewal of life, and therefore of the dawn of the first day, and more particularly of the resurrection: and the Cross and Rose together are therefore hieroglyphically to be read, the Dawn of Eternal Life which all Nations have hoped for by the advent of a Redeemer."[20]"

severian is tested by four elemental beasts (salamander, slug, notules ... ascians?)

The four arms of the cross belong to the four elements and are colored accordingly. The white portion belongs to the Holy Spirit and the planets.

and this sounds like the magic mirrors of father inire

The petals of the rose refer to the twenty-two paths on the Tree of Life and the Twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. It is the cross in Tiphareth, the receptacle and the center of the forces of the Sephiroth and the paths. The extreme center of the rose is white, the reflected spiritual brightness of Kether, bearing upon it the Red Rose of Five Petals and the Golden Cross of Six Squares; four green rays issue from around the angles of the cross. Upon the white portion of the lamen, below the rose, is placed the hexagram, with the planets.

five petals = five severians

six squares = oannes, eata, autarch, dorcas, thecla, sun

four green rays = green man, jonas, tzadkiel ... severian?

the planets would be:

- hierodules (barbatus, famulimus, ossipago, cumaen, inire, ?)

- sephirot (tzadkiel)

- undines and abaia (green man?!)

- arioch, scylla and the alzabo (the spice must flow)

- time (hethor, jonas, psychics, witches, torturers, baldanders, man-apes etc)

- mirror universe (where hethor and jonas and malrubius and triskele come back from)

not sure what the cross is, i think there are six caskets in the open tomb?

severian is not jesus, he's jesus' son

i'll take your word for it, i think

these guys are the six leftover gods

oannes - severian, death, dawn
dorcas - mother, life, moon
thecla - temptress, sex, moon
odilo - father, autarch, sun
the sun - god, life, sun
eata - atheist

i guess the six caskets are the five severians + the open casket of TIME

i like the way you think.
if i had any knowledge of the new testament at all (lol jews) would this stuff seem more apparent to me? because i wouldn't say much of this stuff is obvious on the surface to me.

yeah i have some knowledge of this stuff

there are a lot of hints in lexicon urthus, also remember i've reread it a bunch of times!

finished. sorting thoughts. ending improves sequence significantly. but still doesn't explain away episodic narrative. something about teleology and dr. talos.

word

now ... reread!

oannes - severian, death
atheist - eata, nihilism

just realized that the aspects here are equinox (severian) and eclipse (eata)

a lot of the mystical stuff that's hinted at in the first four books (for example, what happens when the sun comes back and what kind of godz humanity has in the age of new sun) are fully explicated in "urth of the new sun"

actually that's backwards, apu punchau causes the eclipse, the equinox is when they're in eata's boat

*crickets*

who are people's favorite characters?

put me down for palaemon and malrubius, jonas and the archivist

to suspend the flow of time, to meditate, to be places i haven't been, to commune with other minds, to engage w ideas
--the late great

I like Jonas! I didn't realize how much I liked him until he was gone. And I didn't realize the extent to which he was a humanizing influence on Sev (ironically, I guess...). And I liked sad Jolenta. I think I missed some of her story? She was the waitress who served Talos, all glamoured up by the good doctor homunculus. Then she died. In between, she may have been raped by Sevarian. Yes?

you got it

severian def has sex w passed-out jolenta but it's not clear how she feels about it (i don't recall her bringing it up but when they get back they're embarrassed)

Time to list Father Inire's numerous appearances?

no no no wat a few days.
i am almost done.

ultimately glad i read these, not planning on a re-read at least for a few months. i have too much other stuff to read. like the "new" ed sanders book and a stack of charles williams paperbacks and that byrds bio i stalled on 4 months back.

lg: is inire a hierodule?

yes, as is the cumaean

who are people's favorite characters?

there are no characters in this book, thats part of the reason its so annoying

i am trying to reread this but its p stultifying and sort of empty, like i get excited about the book reading the late greats posts but i dont think the novels really bear him out they dont really seem to about anything even while signifying so much, like how much of this stuff matters?

so what book do you think i'm reading?

in search of lost time?

needs more elric

finished this last night, finally.
good book.
should re-read. will re-read. but not right now.
picked up in the last four-five chapters, but i still would not consider this to be like, one of the best things i've ever read or anything. gene wolfe must've been real proud of himself for crafting such a fine puzzle so full of references to itself and to science and etc but i still find the structure of the book and its pacing to be v problematic for me personally.

i spent enough time thinking 'maybe i will reread this' that i could probably have read another, smaller book in that time

i read three other books during my reading of the book of the new sun. whenever i would get bored or feel like it was going nowhere i would read a nice short detective story full of action and adventure

you know, there is a sort of tradition in writing of "the encyclopedic novel", starting w/ don quixote, where the author attempts to include, well, everything!

i think book of the new sun falls in there

now whenever you feel bored of whatever you're reading though you can dip in to one chapter of book of the new sun

:)

have you read book of the long sun/short sun etc? what do you think

i keep starting long sun and i can't get farther than a few chapters. i am not sure if there's problems with the OCR in the ebook i got or if there's just weird language and formatting issues going on. it has a very different feel to book of the new sun, i'll tell you that. much lighter, i think. i guess it seems more like a standard sci-fi story and less of a weird, elegaic meditation on humanity and its executioner

also short sun looks like bog-standard sci fi stuff but i still plan to read it

i think a major part of the book is just that theme of how much of "everything" is in the particular event. are all events linked? is it all part of god's plan? is the design of the rose, of the whole rosebush, hidden in the thorn? what things are part of severian's destiny and what things are accidents? what details are illuminating, yes in the sense of medieval illuminations?

i think of it actually as a novel of religious and philosophical ideas. my parents have always been into christian history and apologetics and my sister is a prof of medieval art, so i mainly enjoy it on that level rather than the mystery. i think after a few readings this is what the mystery becomes about, not whether that was father inire we glimpsed or just a hunchback in a cowl.

i mean the book even includes a book-inside-the-book that purportedly holds the sum of human wisdom (orange catholic bible?) but every time severian opens it's totally obscure what it's getting at and very ambiguous about how it relates to the present i think that's the real mystery of book of the new sun. is oannes a loving god or a cruel god? which characters in tale of frog and fish are human and which are cacogens? what does the parable of fechin represent. what does it say about art and reproduction that the fechin story is the last story dude tells in his life - and then the alzabo shows up!

i appreciate your insight into this, i want you to know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqY0dCmAyNM

awesome!!!

:-D

lol

shredding guitar kills ms every time

what does it say about art and reproduction that the fechin story is the last story dude tells in his life - and then the alzabo shows up!

nothing ever really dies, i guess

i wonder if i will re-read this.
i want to
but i have so much to read.

you have time

Read Book of the New Sun in chunks over a couple of years, and loved it. One of those books that is too huge to really take in at once, but it wins on language and weirdness and the satisfaction of piecing together some of its mysteries. Now just d/l Shadow and Claw onto my ereader, and after going thru this thread, sorely tempted to have a second go at the series.

also, the late great should totally write a reader's guide to these books, IMO

aw thanks but there's already a very good one called "lexicon urthus"

read 70% of the first of these today (lol kindle measures). i like the style, found it tough to get into a few months back but it's flowing for me now.

is the endless war of ascia vs the commonwealth actually a secret plot to depopulate the earth?

woah interesting idea!!!!!

MASSIVE SPOILERS

was thinking about abaia, erebus, scylla and how they apparently control all of the autarchs except the free autarch of the commonwealth (who is in league w/ the hierodules as opposed to "actual" cacogens like abaia, erebus, scylla, undines, etc)

it's clear abaia at least sort of wants severian to be autarch, and at the end sort of revealed that it's because they're working to the same ends as the hierodules all along - finish the old urth, so a new, better one can take its place

severian pretty much accomplishes the depopulation of the earth and the rebirth of the human race and the undines seem happy about it - so perhaps part of the idea is to prepare the old urth for the new earth by creating conditions of endless war and deprivation to clear out space for the undines, pale warriors, etc

This thread has made me revisit the series again, finished Shadow of the Torturer a couple of days ago. Much much much better the second read through. Good value for money, these books...

cool

While Baur was the true inventor of the Pringles crisp, according to the patent, Liepa was the inventor of Pringles.[9] Gene Wolfe, a mechanical engineer-author known for science fiction and fantasy novels, developed the machine that cooks them.[10]

well, as usual, i'm sorta with it because i'm reading through these (just finished the citadel of the autarch aka BOOK TWO) and at the same time not with it all, because i'm like a year too late for you all.

so far, i think my favorite part may have been the botanical garden chapters in the first book. honestly, i could read an entire tetralogy based on that concept alone - entering different sections of the building, dripping in and out of time and space. i'm hoping that they return there for some reason during the last half of the book of the newsuuuuuuuuuun.

i was really thrown off at the beginning of the second book (citadel) because gene apparently skipped forward a decent amount of time in the narrative without explaining why. suddenly, jonas is tight with him, and dorcas is his sex porpoise. speaking of, major lols at the part where he's like "i love dorcas. she is the best and i love her so much. she is my porpoise. <3" and then literally 2 paragraphs later he's somehow alone with jolenta and he's like "her breasts were like giant melons that i wanted to slurp left and right, i freed her perfect thighs and steamed up the boat in public. 2 hours later we returned to the campsite with melon juice all over us and for some reason dorcas was angry. i love dorcas so much."

i also enjoyed the weird witch/town resurrection thing at the end of book 2, although i didn't really understand what happened. i started to read the part of this thread that dealt with that but quit because i don't want to ruin anything.

anyone else still in the middle of this thing? are you all reading book of the old sun now? "where are they now?"

keep reading

i read "urth of the new sun" (book five) and loved it

then i tried the long sun series, found it boring, abandoned it in the middle of book one

lol me too

keep reading!
i bought urth of the new sun, but i still haven't read it. it is next to my bad in a pile.

i finished a book last night so maybe i will read it... now.

'next to my bad'

;_;

I'm pausing briefly so that I can read Desert Solitaire before my Utah vacation in a couple weeks, but then I will be back in the thick of it. Can't wait!

it is next to my bad self

urth of the new sun is crammed with so many WTF moments

you know that bit about sufficiently advanced tech seeming like magic? urth of the new sun pulls off that trick better than any book i've ever read

btw if you really love BoTNS and plan on multiple rereadings I'd highly recommend you pick up "lexicon urthus"

I'm sort of addicted, have done five rereadings and just reread citadel of the autarch again

I think I'm going to start a religion based on BoTNS, engine summer and delany's triton, i just keep rereading those instead of new books

I got to echo lamp upthread, i really wish i had found these books as engaging as i find reading late great's summaries and theories of them. Reading them was a grey and flat experience and i cant remember a thing nor even how far i got, two or three books.

But thread makes me want to try again.

The ones i compulsively re-read are the six robin hobb ones, decent thread idea imo

Reading them was a grey and flat experience

i would describe it as morose and dry, but very very funny and genuinely stirring.

No doubt that you're gettin something from it i'm not, i wish tbh.

it's because i read it out loud in a comedy voice

ysi?

i'm with darragh but want to believe that the fault lies with me and not the text. i mean, i wouldn't describe them as "flat and dry", but the central character and his quest didn't engage my interest. midway through the second novel, i realized that i was reading only for the islands of strangeness (often quite beguiling). also, i became obsessed to a debilitating degree with researching and documenting the definition & etymology of every single unfamiliar word. stopping was a medical intervention basically.

just started reading for second time. enjoying clues to things i know about from first time, e.g. talos. also things that seemed mystifying/tangential -- e.g. jungle hut in botanical gardens - now have a relevance. was expecting to have missed stuff but surprised by exactly what. totally missed that the citadel is like a launch site or space port, and the towers are disused rockets, even though it is explicit said, at least of the torturer's tower. of course, i have as many unanswered new questions as i had first time, if not more.

one thing that i really love above these books is how wolfe uses language that 1) creates a setting both familiar and strange, appropriate to a world we know but far distant in time; 2) dislocates the narrative in time, which is obv important thematically

what are your thoughts on the jungle hut?

i think first time i conceived of the jungle room as an exhibit, artificially constructed. now knowing elements that are introduced later, it is clear that they enter a physical space that exists in the past, early 20th c with the prop plane i guess.

one thing i noticed is that the shaman guy talks like someone from severian's present. i don't know if there is anything that suggests whether that is from exposure to visitors or if he is actually from that present. i had looked up his name and it is a general term for a shaman from south africa. with nessus seemingly located in south america, i don't know if this supports the idea that he is from that present arrived from africa (more likely than he'd traveled from 20th c africa). the africa thing could be a total red herring though, the name could just be one of the translation quirks.

probably the big question to answer is why does the woman not see sev and agia. this has me stumped. are the shaman and the guy just 'sensitive' as suggested? something, maybe the vibrations of the hut, made me think it was more that she was not seeing them for some reason. it feels like there is something more significant to it, but i wonder if part of wolfe's genius isn't just suggesting significance where it doesn't really exist.

and overall there is the question of why, why are the botanic gardens there at all. it seems like a big production on part of inire. do these windows serve a practical purpose for him; is there some resource he is accessing? the idea of people getting trapped in the rooms is intriguing and possibly a clue to their purpose. is there a motivation to trap 'sensitive' people. is there specifically a motivation to waylay sev?

anyway, even as i think and type i feel like i am either missing some key elements revealed later that i haven't connected back, or else i am missing the point by thinking in more practical rather than thematic terms.

so, this is just me muddling through. is there an accepted reading of that scene?

good questions!

at first, wolfe's prose seemed distressingly dense and even somewhat comically pretentious

i actually think severian is supposed to be somewhat comically pretentious

Almost at the end of a second re-read. Pottering around on the internet I found this, Gene Wolfe on J.R.R. Tolkien: http://www.thenightland.co.uk/MYWEB/wolfemountains.html

Striking especially after reading the final words of the Autarch: "Until the New Sun comes, we have but a choice of evils. All have been tried, and all have failed. Goods in common, the rule of the people... everything. You wish for progress? The Ascians have it. They are deafened by it, crazed by the death of Nature till they are ready to accept Erebus and the rest as gods. We hold humankind stationary... in barbarism. The Autarch protects the people from exultants, and the exultants... shelter them from the Autarch. The religious comfort them. We have closed the roads to paralize the social order... Until the New Sun..."

I'm basically a progressive atheist, and all this stuff rubs me up the wrong way. I love and admire the book a great deal, but am wondering if some of their political / religious content is uncomfortable or troubling for other readers?

i don't mind the words you quote, since they're from a place of great weariness that comes from this ruined palimpsestic world sev+you have been immersed in -- and because there is a sense in some of the scenes w the ascian soldier (iirc?) that the dogmatic ascian language/culture is maybe not as impoverished as it seems to the southerners, even if true communication w them is near-impossible -- and because i do kinda think that our various social utopias require a fundamental change in human conciousness expressed here thru crypto-xtian eschatology (although irl i don't think we'd get to it by waiting around in barbarism) -- but the straightforward feudal nostalgia in that tolkien essay seems p dumb. idk why he thinks other people's wealth was "a spur to ambition" under feudalism, unless he means ambition to go on a crusade. which is what sam does.

anyway i've only read the book once so i am a lil foggy on it, may well be misrepresenting it.

As a child I had been taught a code of conduct: I was to be courteous and considerate, and most courteous and most considerate of those less strong than I -- of girls and women, and of old people especially. Less educated men might hold inferior positions, but that did not mean that they themselves were inferior; they might be (and often would be) wiser, braver, and more honest than I was. They were entitled to respect, and were to be thanked when they befriended me, even in minor matters. Legitimate authority was to be obeyed without shirking and without question. Mere strength (the corrupt coercion Washington calls power and Chicago clout) was to be defied. It might be better to be a slave than to die, but it was better to die than to be a slave who acquiesced in his own slavery. Above all, I was to be honest with everyone. Debts were to be paid, and my word was to be as good as I could make it.

sounds pretty good

Does it? Has there ever been a time where "everyone agreed as to what good rule was" and could distinguish between "legitimate authority" and "corrupt coercion"? Very much doubt that was the case in "Christianized barbarian society".

Also, does a desire for progress inevitably lead to the destruction of the planet and Ascian slavery?

Also also, is there something a bit patronizing about his comments on women and the working class?

Might as well have stopped at the second sentence: The king might rule badly, but everyone agreed as to what good rule was.

ORLY.

Whole essay is the worst kind of rose-tinted harking back to the good old days.

nah, it's not that bad

Best thing in it is that cs Lewis quote which I'd never read.

Did anyone dig The Wizard Knight? I never proceeded to the second half, I just could not get a bead on the thing.

i was so let down by the long sun books that i haven't followed up on anything beyond "5th head of cerberus"

maybe i will give it a shot

Yeah the only things I've read that can contend with the new sun are his amazing short stories and novellas. But I've never read the soldier books or a bunch of his standalones.

even if true communication w them is near-impossible

actually iirc at the beginning of "urth of the new sun" severian references making peace with the ascians and living among them for a year

actually it is at the end, but i misremembered the quote, he just mentions living among them. i think i filled in the bit about making peace with them. maybe he is referring to the war?

It was the longest day of my life. If I had been merely awaiting nightfall, I could have wandered in memory, recalling that marvelous evening when I had walked up the Water Way, the tales told in the Pelerines' lazaretto, or the brief holiday that Valeria and I had once enjoyed beside the sea. As it was, I dared not; and whenever I relaxed my guard, I found my mind turned of its own accord to dreadful things. Again I endured my imprisonment in the jungle ziggurat by Vodalus, the year I had spent among the Ascians, my flight from the white wolves in the Secret House; and a thousand similiar terrors, until at last it seemed to me that a demon desired that I surrender my miserable existence to Apu-Punchau, and that the demon was myself.

Finished it last night, and had to read the Triskele chapter again this morning for the scene in the Atrium of Time. Is the final bit with Valeria when the engines start up and he begins his journey to Yessod?

I'm going to start on Urth of the New Sun later this year (haven't read it before) but giving myself a break to read a bookabout Christianised barbarian society...

no he doesn't leave for yesod for 10 years after that

i'd given the copies i read to a friend but the other day i found four matching hardcovers of this in the kona-side location of the bookstore whose hilo-side dvd shelf ought to be named after me, and bought them all with my gargantuan reservoir of store credit; i am rereading them. i am imo in general a poor first reader and an above-average second one, so this has been revelatory not just in the obvious ways (secrets i know, e.g. the nature of talos/baldanders) but in mundane and embarrassing ones (i much more clearly and perceptively visualize everything that happens; i would attribute this to the strangeness of the world [well worse than strangeness, right--uncanniness] and the various apparatus of alienation and occlusion in the text, except that this happens with everything, elmore leonard, robert jordan, everything). an early reverie of severian's (triggered by the sense that dr. talos has the face of a stuffed fox, that on some simultaneous and "more profound" level of reality dr. talos' face is a dead fox's face hanging on a wall) likens the layers of reality to the archeological layers in urth's much-used soil--i'd forgotten this but it's absolutely central, the concept comes up all the time, both for severian (the hut in the botanical gardens, the house in the fog, the house absolute and the second house, the question of whether it is the autarch or father inire who rules, the concealed natures of basically everyone he meets) and for us (the archaic words that have been "translated" from unknown far-future ones, and the gimmick in general of the book's coming on like the past but being the future). there is a sense particularly that stories--the thanksgiving myth that's also about alien contact (or something? memories vague); the mutated theseus legend; the dying angel who echoes the dying sun ("you have observed the wasting of my blood--do you not observe also that it no longer issues in straining spurtings, but only seeps sluggishly?"); the transmuted xtian theology that's everywhere, encrusted by layers of undocumented future history; even the claim of the prostitute to whom severian loses his virginity to be the chatelaine thecla--accrue layers of meaning+truth like the soil accrues history. my memories of most of the series are bad but halfway into a reread of book one this seems to be right up there with severian's agent of death/agent of resurrection dialectic as structuring idea of the story. i once read a definition of history, i forget where (eliot?) as being (paraphrased) "the simultaneous sense of the presence and remoteness of the past"; something like this is all over BOTNS i think, pervades it thematically/structurally/mechanically in that real daunting modernist way.

still understand people who find it frustrating; it's one of the most picaresque books i've ever read. stuff just keeps happening to this guy, and then he moves on to new stuff; he often feels blown about passively, like a leaf (like the dead leaves he dreams as a child of vivifying, with a thorn); and all the stuff is so weird. i mentioned this to my friend i lent the books to, who just finished 3, and he said "well except every now and then he suddenly murders someone." he acts in odd places. from the very beginning, i suppose.

anyway roberto spiralli has kindly provided a tl;dr of this post upthread:

one thing that i really love above these books is how wolfe uses language that 1) creates a setting both familiar and strange, appropriate to a world we know but far distant in time; 2) dislocates the narrative in time, which is obv important thematically

totes!

it is dense. i suggest reading aloud in a foppish voice.

― the late great, Wednesday, May 23, 2012 8:49 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this really does work btw

i've been rereading these on and off for a few months and i still kind of feel what i felt to begin with -- that they're an impressively constructed exercise in worldbuilding and narrative, but that's all -- but, on the other hand, man they are really good at being that

i'd forgotten most of book four (i remember, broadly speaking, how it ends) and i'm really charmed that as of a third of the way in severian is still sitting around the pelerines' tent with shit-all to do. also, the translation of the ascian's story is pretty virtuoso -- i think he got better at the embedded stories as he went along; the theseus/thesis minotaur/monitor one made me want to throw the book out the window

I'm doing a re-read, and getting close to the end of book 1.
I definitely appreciate and understand wolfe's pacing of the series much better now.
catching a lot of things but still get the feeling i'm missing a lot as well.

hey guys

I'm almost finished with Claw of the Conciliator, and this is book has it all. I can't believe I almost missed this, I only discovered it because of this thread.

Was just trying to talk my wife into reading this the night before last. She loves Wolfe's short fiction but wasn't feeling the newsun last time she tried it

How far did she get into it? It took me three attempts before I made it past the first 20 pages. It starts off like a boring medieval fantasy story ... then the fun starts. Glad I pushed through.

barelling through a re-read of these, just started Claw of the Conciliator. The transition from the end of Shadow of the Torturer to Claw of the Conciliator is so jarring and disorienting. And then it takes several chapters to get up to speed on where Severian is/how much time has passed.

one random thing that's stuck out at me this last time around - have people terraformed the moon? There's a reference to the moon's "green" glow, and then later a reference to the "fabled emerald forests of the moon". Just one of those weird details thrown in in the background with no further explication, easy to gloss over but curious to ponder.

also really enjoying reading these with the internet handy, cuz now I can look up all the weird words thrown about (most of which, like the thing with the moon, don't seem particularly critical but do add a compelling level of detail).

I can think of few other writers who do such an incredible job of keeping the reader off-balance - you never know what's going to turn out to be significant in the narrative.

yah the moon has been completely forested

wait til you get to the bit abt mountains

And yes I found that transition very jarring too And I’ve never quite been able to figure out what he’s going for

Hopefully I am not spoiling too much if I tell you that there is a similar transition between each book

Does it? Has there ever been a time where "everyone agreed as to what good rule was" and could distinguish between "legitimate authority" and "corrupt coercion"? Very much doubt that was the case in "Christianized barbarian society".

Also, does a desire for progress inevitably lead to the destruction of the planet and Ascian slavery?

Also also, is there something a bit patronizing about his comments on women and the working class?

― Mercer Finn, Sunday, August 31, 2014 1:32 PM (three years ago)

wolfe is a believer. for him "legitmate authority" is authority you feel in your heart, cf the bit where malrubius asks severian about forms of the government. malrubius asks severian to list the types of authority (or something like that, maybe it was types of power) in terms of development. severian starts with personal attachment to a deity, moves on to attachment to a monarch, then attachment to an elected body, then attachment to an abstract set of laws, etc. something like that, i'm paraphrasing here. and he asks severian which is the best and severian cites the last one. and then he asks severian which type triskele (his dog) feels toward him, and whether he thought it was better or worse than attachment to an abstract set of laws. so for wolfe legitimate authority is ultimately with god and everyone has to suss their relationship with god's authority out for themselves, since god (like the hierophants in yesod) is more or less infinitely far away. that's actually a big theme in the books, right? "following your heart" toward some distant goal or whatever rather than the torturer's code?

on the second point, i think you're misreading it. ascians are not "political correctness run amok" or something wingnutty like that. there are many various fallen civilizations on urth beside the ascians and the autarchy, all of them are implied to have sought progress in one form or another and fallen into degeneracy for their own reasons (prodded by ecological disaster). remember wolfe is christian, so this is a resurrection parable. it is about a dying sun (son) so civilization is going to die one way or another (it has to, to reborn). it's not a desire for progress ... there's no way in wolfe's mind a civilization could stop progressing, any more than a person can stop aging. it's about the cycle of life or whatever, not a critique of the direction of civilization.

on the third point yes, but when hasn't a crusty white sci fi writer man been patronizing

i mean i get as an atheist one might find this stuff to be corny bullshit or whatever but lighten up, it's sci fi literature not a manual for living

also like a fair number of other sci fi writers you just have to ignore the stuff that isn't sci fi (the tolkien essay)

just like you have to ignore when stephen hawking talks about politics or whatever

does a desire for progress inevitably lead to the destruction of the planet and Ascian slavery?

to continue w/ this a bit more 1) the planet is not destroyed for another few billion years, when the sun swells up etc and 2) near the beginning of book 2, at the fair at saltus we learn the ultimate fate of the human race and not only is it destruction or turning into ascians or something awful, it's actually pretty fucking cool and utopian

*not only is it not destruction*

following your heart" toward some distant goal or whatever rather than the torturer's code?

this is kind of interesting because he takes thecla out from under the authority of the other torturers, and then submits himself for torture in her place. instead he gets exile, and then all this crazy shit happens to him, these epic trials and all this fate and destiny stuff. so he's really being interrogated by god over the course of story, and he willingly submits to it. so i feel like wolfe is saying there are legitimate and illegitimate types of the authority, the legitimate ones being the ones that people are compelled to submit to willingly.

so i mean, if you want, this story about a torturer is literature about submission, not liberation.

As a child I had been taught ... It might be better to be a slave than to die, but it was better to die than to be a slave who acquiesced in his own slavery.

^^ make this ironic, right? because this is a roman-a-clef where severian decides that submitting to god by willingly offering yourself up for punishment is the best way to die

you will spot this theme many places but i don't want to spolier

"following your heart"

^^ without getting directly into spoilers, this is relates to the claw (the artifact itself)

is anyone here knowledgable about catholicism? i would love to learn more about how the imagery in these books relates to catholicism (and i guess christianity in general which i don't know *that* much about)

it's funny, the one episode that really stuck with me from Sword of the Lictor (which I'm about 2/3rds of the way through now) was not the stuff in thrax or the alzabo or little severian or baldanders - it was the Typhon and Paiton chapters on the giant statue. Something about that whole sequence, while not seeming to have much significance in the larger narrative, is so compelling and otherworldly. Maybe it the religious-revelation trappings, scaling a mountain while starving and meeting a god - it has all the rite-of-passage trappings of archetypal mountain myths, mount analogue, holy mountain etc.

it is a very significant sequence!

It might be, I just can't tell yet! I'm discovering that I remember very little of the final book besides certain elements of the climax. I just got to the part where he relinquishes the Claw to the Pelerines.

one thing I'm appreciating a lot this time around - which maybe didn't register with my first reading over a decade ago - is the way Wolfe incorporates and refracts various myths and archetypes into these strange new shapes. I lol'd when I spotted the Marlowe/Faustus quote in the brown book Severian carries. Wolfe seems way more interested in littering his narrative with this kind of thing than in filling a more standard fantasy framework (a nobody goes on a quest, meets companions, gains a magic weapon, faces a nemesis, learns true nature of self etc. - although obviously all of that is present as well!) There's a very meta/postmodern sensibility at work that's constantly highlighting that this story is literally made up of lots of other, older stories, and yet they often appear strange and unfamiliar because of the way they are presented or because of slight revisions.

wait - there's a marlowe quote?!?

I forget where this happens exactly, maybe after he talks to the undine?

Some fragments Severian sees while the wind is turning the pages to dry them: "soulless warrior!" ... "lucid yellow" ... "by noyade" ... "These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient." ... "Hell has no limits, nor is circumscribed; for where we are is Hell, and where Hell is, there we must be." (Note: The last fragment is from Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Noyade is a mode of execution by drowning.)

interesting!

Apparently Dr. Talos quotes Faustus at one point as well but I’m not sure where that is

that i recall

Dicking around with Google books instead of working - "soulless warrior!" looks like it's either from Lucy Larcom's poem Orion or Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning by Richard Hinckley Allen, where the poem is used as an epigraph. Maybe the latter, because "lucid yellow" turns up in William Henry Smyth's Sidereal Chromatics, on star colours. The "ancient times" one is Francis Bacon.

almost to the end, and a couple things sticking in my head a bit

- Malrubius + Triskele are the products of an AI, right? It's kind of implied (esp if one takes a literal interpretation of the "deus ex machina" ref)
- Agia's character (and maybe this gets cleared up towards the end) really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. She's this shopkeeper who initially is enamored of Severian's sword and concocts an elaborate scheme to obtain it, but then it turns out she has this essentially super-powered suitor that can summon extradimensional beings and crazy weapons (so what would she want a big sword for)? And she hounds Severian with them, apparently out of rage-revenge, but instead repeatedly rescues him rather than tortures/kills him? And was also totally unaware of the significance of Vodalus and the Autarch (her murder of Vodalus is referenced but not depicted/described)? You add all those things up they don't form much of a consistent character.

Malrubius + Triskele are the products of an AI, right

no, not really. aquastors are much higher-tech than that, to the point that they're basically just magic ghosts reincarnated by the hierogrammate. it's explained a bit more in book 5, but the answer is really just magic.

from paracelsus - AQUASTOR. - A being created by the power of the imagination - i.e., by a concentration of thought upon the A'kasa by which an ethereal form may be created (Elementals, Succubi and Incubi, Vampires, &c.). Such imaginary but nevertheless real forms may obtain life from the person by whose imagination they are created, and under certain circumstances they may even become visible and tangible.

so yr not a million miles off but it's the concentrated thought power of the hierogrammate that reincarnates them, not the concentrated thought of an AI (book 5 goes into hierogrammates in a bit more detail, they are portrayed mostly in vague terms but they possess near-limitless power from our POV, though not from theirs)

it turns out she has this essentially super-powered suitor that can summon extradimensional beings and crazy weapons (so what would she want a big sword for)

agia seeks power and doesn't enjoy being beholden to hethor. in fact she really doesn't like hethor at all, because he is a creep.

i think agia represents self-interest, in contrast to severian's sense of duty

oh hi, I have read the first two and am gonna get the rest soon, reading the 2-in-1 books that I assume are standard now.

will check back in later

so yr not a million miles off but it's the concentrated thought power of the hierogrammate that reincarnates them, not the concentrated thought of an AI (book 5 goes into hierogrammates in a bit more detail, they are portrayed mostly in vague terms but they possess near-limitless power from our POV, though not from theirs)

this seems like an intentionally obscure way of Gene Wolfe saying "this is me, messing about with the plot". I'm sure there's some literary term for when authors essentially insert themselves into their own work as semi-omnipotent figures, which kind of sounds like what's going on here

hierogrammate literally defined as "A sacred scribe; specifically, a writer of hieroglyphics", and akasha as space/sky (I remember that much from hindu mythology) + the "deus ex machina" refs... all seems to be Wolfe getting a little cutesy with the po-mo literary devices

i lent out my copy of the first two, but maybe when i get a break from this mystery bender i'll do a re-read of the second half. I love this shit.

yr definitely on to something shakey, esp considering that the first time we see a hierogrammate it appears when the autarxh opens a book whose pages are made of magic mirror

Ok just finished. So...

Father Inire is the green man, and Dorcas is Severian’s grandmother...?

And Severian’s life is some kind of time loop

no, yes, yes

you still have one more to go

inire is a hierodule, not a human, i think

Which hierodule? Severian says he was with him in the jungle, but the only ppl he was in the jungle with were vodalus and his retinue, agia and the green man

inire is the "savage guide"

from the end of the first section of chapter 28 of citadel of the autarch ("on the march")

"for guides our column had three savages: a pair of young men who might have been brothers or even twins, and a much older one, twisted i thought, by deformities as well as age, who perpetually wore a grotesque mask ... a covered palanquin ... bore the autarch ... and one night when my guards were chattering among themselves ... i saw the old guide (his bent figure and the impression of an immense head conferred by his mask were unmistakable) approach this palanquin and slip beneath it. some time passed before he scuttled awauy. this old man was said to be an uturuncu, a shaman capable of assuming the form of a tiger"

i highly recommend reading "urth of the new sun" btw, it's an excellent coda to the series

Ah thx forgot that paragraph lol

haha yeah these books are so dense!

I truly can’t remember if I read Urth of the New Sun after finishing my first traversal of the four. I definitely didn’t read it after my more recent traversal. I might never have read it.

it’s very good

plot-wise it tells the story of the conciliator, resolves the time loop thing, takes us into the mothership, finishes the baldanders / talos / abaia story by showing what happens when the new sun arrives (spoiler alert - wolfe veers toward hard sci fi here and it’s not pretty)

solid payoff imo

it’s a bit like when you finish an epic d&d campaign and become a living god and then the gm lets you play a few adventures in super high fantasy god mode just for the hell of it

well that and it spelled out a lot of plot points from the first four for me (i am a dummy)

but i don’t mean to imply the tone shifts radically - he’s still exploring the same themes and questions as before, with the same voice and pacing. if anything it’s even more elegaic than the first four, even though it packs in a lot more earth shaking action

hey I just found super cheap old hardbacks of the last two books and Urth in a thrift store! time to get reading.

Has urth o’ th’ NS gotten kind of swept under the carpet since it came out? Is it included in the reprint schemes that have happened since then? I feel like it doesn’t get mentioned much

for whatever reason it has its own volume, but it’s still in print and i think there’s an ebook bundle w allfive

i mean i get as an atheist one might find this stuff to be corny bullshit or whatever but lighten up, it's sci fi literature not a manual for living

― the late great, Sunday, August 12, 2018 8:12 AM (two months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Haha fair enough. Looks like the essay has disappeared from the internet so I can't reread it and get angry all over again.

Didn't realise that there are many various fallen civilizations on urth beside the ascians and the autarchy. I thought the two were portrayed as a binary that perhaps unconsciously (?) reflected the cold war division of the world at the time the books were written.

Currently reading Viriconium and enjoying it a lot. Probably not as good as BotNS but working in the same (future fantasy) genre and has some of the same stylistic flair.

from a friend, I just got to this part of the 3rd book:

In Wolfe's Solar Cycle, Typhon the two-headed Imperial person is a direct reference to, possibly an intentional gank, of the two-headed president in Douglas Adams' Hithchiker's Guide.

In fact, there are many plot and character aspects of the Solar Cycle that have direct precursors in Adams' work. One wonders if Wolfe expected to be called on it!

there's a podcast called Alzabo Soup who are doing a close reading of the book of the new sun and i've been listening to it while doing my third read-through and i'm enjoying it, even if a lot of what the dudes suggest is fairly obvious or commonly understood.

I'm almost done with the fourth one! I can tell I'm gonna need to read them again in a few years.

i'm midway thru the third i think. there's so much that opens up on re-reads. it's unlike anything else in that way, ime.

https://alzabosoup.libsyn.com/

fyi. they're just getting into citadel of the autarch.

i'll finish my re-read before they finish their spoiler-lite close reading.

did u guys know patton oswalt is a fan?
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/12/29/what-science-fiction-movie-or-novel-is-most-prescient-today/book-of-the-new-sun-by-gene-wolf

there's so much that opens up on re-reads. it's unlike anything else in that way, ime.

― ian

agree! one of a small # of books that are fairly made for re-reading.

Having recently finished my third reading of the book of the new sun, I started listening to the Alzabo Soup podcast mentioned upthread and am enjoying it a lot. There are definitely many things that are easy to miss even after multiple reads that these guys are pointing out. I liked the part about how Severian is probably hiding the coin he got from Vodalus not so much because he treasures it so much but because it links him to his murder of the person who was trying to stop Vodalus in the first chapter and he doesn't want to get found out.

On the other hand it kind of annoyed me that they keep saying that Severian is obviously lying about his perfect memory because he mentions forgetting about the coin in his pocket or other similar examples, when it seems pretty obvious that when Severian talks about perfect memory he's talking about having perfect recall, not about actually never forgetting anything.

I've been listening to Alzabo Soup as I work one of my day jobs (washing LPs & 45s or taking photos of LPs & 45s for 8 hour stretches) -- i just caught up with them last week. sometimes i think they overreach in looking for significance in things, but it's really nice when they explain where certain names come from, and where certain stories come from.

The thing with Severian's memory is tricky because it depends on how the reader chooses to interpret the book. It seems too simple to think that "Severian's a liar so we can't believe his interpretation of things exactly" -- his issue tends to be more sins of omission (Jolenta's rape, probably other things that make him look bad) he mentions a few times saying he sometimes wonders if he's going/gone insane, and he refers to "all you inside me" or something like that, before what he receives as autarch is revealed. I have no concrete answers because I keep thinking about it too hard and confusing myself. Bu the the idea of the Writer Severian relating not only episodes from his life, but also possibly making reference to things that happened not to him, but did happen to other Autarch's, or to Thecla. We know he has Thecla's memories in there -- are there other scenes in which he's disconnected from the rest of his companions that could potentially be recollections by a different person, recast by Severian as "I" for the writing?

sorry i can't think much better than this right now.

Also how many times did he die.
And what is the relationship of Inire and the Hierodules. if any ?

man I need a glossary for all the different social classes

still not done with the 4th one, been real busy

inire is a hierodule

i figured he is a non-human of some kind, but is he the same being as the hierodules that Sev meets in the castle or one of a different type? He doesn't seem to have the same relationship to time that the hierodules say they have.

same was my assumption. i thought he didn’t experience time backward because he was stuck on earth and not traveling on tzadkiel’s ship? i don’t know, wolfe half explains and half abandons that idea in book 5.

i need to re-read Urth next i guess.

i never understood the relationship of abaia and erebus to the hierodules, also the cumaean, what’s up w her

i think the hierodues are working in opposition to erebus and abaia, who are trying to enslave humanity/control urth for their own nefarious ends. no idea what's up with the cumaean. is she litereally snakelike or is that a metaphor

rip

dang, just finished the first book of the new sun ... was unfamiliar with this guy, but loving it so far.

just saw this, RIP

I literally just found a replacement copy of the 4th New Sun book yesterday, I lost my copy when I was almost done. Looking forward to diving back in.

RIP big man

Aw fuck off :(

is this where i admit i don't care for anything he wrote except "fifth head" and tBotNS?

Aw man, I just finished a third reading of New Sun. I was really spending a lot of time thinking about this book the last couple of months.

xp

book of the long sun is totally worth reading. First book is basically just a heist in a weird setting (I enjoyed it, but I guess not everyone would) but then it really opens up starting with book 2.

i started litany of the long sun but couldn't get very far into it

:(

it just felt very "normal sci fi" to me

i've only read the four orig sun books but i picked up a used urth of the new sun the other day, should get to it soon. rip. good stuff.

^^ that one's next up for me

might kill a can of pringles today in his honor

two immense Catholic pinnacles felled in one day

it was a bummer. ok, he was 87, but i still wanted to talk about it, and apparently nobody i work with has ever heard of the book of the new sun

i should sometime reread the book of the new sun, i liked it but whenever i read this thread it becomes apparent to me that i have no idea about anything that happens in that book. i thought it was, just, people dueling with leaves and maoists telling stories.

at least i finished it though!

well those things do happen

https://www.theringer.com/2019/4/25/18515675/gene-wolfe-science-fiction-author

Urth of the New Sun is kinda blowing my mind right now, I have no idea what's gonna happen next (1/3 of the way through)

did you finish it yet, sleeve?

yes! I'm still a bit confused about what exactly happened at the end, I'll probably re-read it in 6 months or so.

some of the parts in "Urth" where all the puzzle pieces of the time travel fit together were really cool, like the Witch's Tower getting damaged and the origin of the Claw (which seems to be entirely self-referential?)

yeah the claw is an ouroboros

by the end you mean the *very* last scene? yeah i was always unsure about the significance of that too, except that perhaps it closes the loop (the first novel begins in a graveyard)

well that scene yeah, with the "gods" that were the 4 survivors on the raft, but also the whole stone town thing (last few chapters? with Apu-Punchau), I think some of it will become clearer when I re-read but iirc the stone town stuff was all in book one and my memory is already hazy on that.

The last time I did a re-read a couple of months ago I tried re-reading the stone town chapters in Urth of the New Sun and Book of the New Sun back to back just to get a better idea of what exactly is happening but I'm still not sure I completely get it.

As far as I can tell the real Severian died on the ship and the hierodules come to the stone town to help save a copy of Severian (an aquastor I think?) and another dead copy of Severian is left behind for the ritual with Hildegrin who will be destroyed by coming into contact with the real Severian from the end of Claw of the Conciliator. I'm going by memory here though, it was somewhat clearer when I read it. I'm still unclear on what purpose that ritual served.

stumbled upon this, i wish i were rich

https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-book-of-the-new-sun.html

Just finished reading all of these and enjoyed the short sun a lot more than I expected; new sun probably still best but no regrets about reading the whole thing.

i don't listen to podcasts, but this one might be intersting

Such an honor being asked to discuss Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun for the Great Books Podcast! https://t.co/J7rjGaHPGl

— Ada Palmer 💉🎉 (@Ada_Palmer) August 5, 2021

that podcast was good. I know mostly nothing about Ada Palmer but it was nice to get a historian's perspective on New Sun. Liked the line "There is nothing more similar to the future than the past".

Also I'm listening to the Alzabo Soup podcast mentioning above and following along reading Book of the Long Sun which they are currently doing and am slowing coming to think (as the hosts of the podcast do) that Long Sun is actually even better than New Sun.

Wow that’s saying a mouthful!

I just finished The Book of the New Sun and read this thread.

I really liked it overall with a few reservations. The worldbuilding is incredible. My favorite parts were most of Shadow (especially the beginning), the scenes at the House Absolute in Claw, after Severian leaves Thrax in Sword (especially the scenes with little Severian), and the last 100 pages of Citadel. I really felt the first half of Citadel dragged. I could also do without some of the pancreator stuff, but at least it sort of answers the question, "What if HP Lovecraft were CS Lewis?"

I love the feeling like Greek or Sumerian myths of a disorientingly weird cause and effect (or lack thereof) where characters act like natural phenomenon instead of people. On the other hand, Severian is the only character with much depth.

One of the freakiest parts is in the Antechamber in the House Absolute and the reference that it has a drop ceiling. Just another way in which time is layered like geologic stratum that have been revealed and now coexist.

So basically the last thing that happens chronologically is the brief reference to Severian riding in a spacehip to be judged on behalf of humanity?

iirc yes, which is fleshed out a lot in the 5th book

I need to re-read these

I think I'm going to order that 5th book.

it rules

i never got around to the long sun books tho i have them on my shelf

i'm gonna try long sun again.

I'm about halfway through Urth of the New Sun - it's fine, but I'm not nearly as into it as I was the other books. That could be due to tiring of them as I've progressed, but I also think some of it is more clumsy (repeated callbacks) and less mysterious than the first four.

i'm gonna try long sun again.

― ian, Wednesday, February 23, 2022 1:58 AM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Long Sun was FANTASTIC. Stylistically super different from New Sun but it really really worked for me. Amazing characters. General Mint is the best. Blood. Horn. Auk. Of course our boy Silk. Loved it.

I read the first two books of Short Sun and liked them but felt like I was missing a LOT of stuff that was happening between the lines. I got distracted from the third book, Return To The Whorl, for some reason or another but I'd really like to give those first two another read & then try Whorl again.

just to follow up on the “novel of everything” idea that i had brought up on the ulysses thread … i love novels in that style because there are so many details to figure out about the pov the narrator inhabits

i think i finally figured out the second reason thecla’s group (chatelaines? i forget what the equivalent rank was) has long necks … i always figured it was to look down on people, but maybe it’s also to make it easier to fit on the chopping block!

LONG SUN.

Is it good? I read the original run and then Urth all in a row and was kind of burned out on his quasi-religious stuff by the end.

Long Sun is really good, possibly better than new sun? (I don't know, I just finished a re-read a couple of months ago and it seemed that way, probably next time I read new sun I'll go back to thinking that one is better)

There's religious stuff in this one too, but it's in a different style than in new sun, more like Greek mythology.

Anyway, as I was doing this re-read of Long Sun I was listening along to the Alzabo Soup podcast and the thing kind of blew my mind that I got from that podcast that I hadn't put together was (spoilers for Long Sun, but also a bit for New Sun):

Typhon sent out hundreds (thousands?) of these generational ships, each carrying an embryo for a clone of Typhon (Silk). Obviously in this particular case, it seems like things didn't go as planned (probably in part because of interference from the Inhumi), but in most cases, this would have set up a colony somewhere with a Typhon clone as leader. This is probably the original sin for which the hierodules felt the need to intervene and which ultimately caused the downfall of humanity

oh wild, i had never considered that.

Long Sun is in many ways much easier to read than New Sun. The language is straightforward, it's got jokes and a talking bird. And General Mint!!!!!

Short Sun, for me, has proven to be harder to wrap my head around than New Sun was, even at first.

Hi

https://fifthhead.substack.com/p/fifth-head

nice

it was a bummer. ok, he was 87, but i still wanted to talk about it, and apparently nobody i work with has ever heard of the book of the new sun

i should sometime reread the book of the new sun, i liked it but whenever i read this thread it becomes apparent to me that i have no idea about anything that happens in that book. i thought it was, just, people dueling with leaves and maoists telling stories.

at least i finished it though!

― Jaki Liebowitz (rushomancy), Monday, April 15, 2019 4:34 PM (four years ago)

lolll, aaaaand then the next month my egg cracked

so i did reread the first book for a book club with a friend a couple of years back and it immediately became obvious how deeply and profoundly misogynist wolfe's writing is. god damn, wolfe holds every one of his female characters in contempt in specifically gendered ways.

so that was a bit of a bummer

I'd urge you to remember that New Sun is being written/narrated by an insane torturer, who often obscures his own shitty actions (i.e. rape of Jolenta) and has no real understanding of women, raised solely among men and boys. THAT SAID, I do think there is criticism warranted PRIMARILY because part of Newsun hinges on the Thecla/Severian duality, and in that respect, Narrator Severian, being both man & woman, should probably possess more insight into women than he does.

I'd be curious to know what in the text makes you think Wolfe hates women, rather than Severian. He has very conservative views (Catholic innit) for sure, so I'm not trying to be dismissive at all. I'm just curious. In Book Of The Long Sun, several of the strongest and most powerful characters, and are not written in the one-dimensional way that they are sometimes written in New Sun.

should read "several of the strongest .... characters are women"

I'd urge you to remember that New Sun is being written/narrated by an insane torturer, who often obscures his own shitty actions (i.e. rape of Jolenta) and has no real understanding of women, raised solely among men and boys. THAT SAID, I do think there is criticism warranted PRIMARILY because part of Newsun hinges on the Thecla/Severian duality, and in that respect, Narrator Severian, being both man & woman, should probably possess more insight into women than he does.

kinda funny thinking of it that way. there's not really any way in which i'm a "man" but i guess i've had experiences with gender that a lot of people (wolfe certainly included) haven't.

I'd be curious to know what in the text makes you think Wolfe hates women, rather than Severian. He has very conservative views (Catholic innit) for sure, so I'm not trying to be dismissive at all. I'm just curious. In Book Of The Long Sun, several of the strongest and most powerful characters, and are not written in the one-dimensional way that they are sometimes written in New Sun.

- ian, Saturday, January 6, 2024 3:41 PM (two hours ago)

it's been a while so i can't say precisely, and i don't want to make it sound like a rhetorical argument... like you say, wolfe was a catholic. not just a catholic, but the particular strand of catholic with which one should _not_ get into a rhetorical argument, lol.

mainly it's character voice. it's one of the most challenging things about writing... i've noticed a tendency when writing to fill in the lacunae in character experience and voice with my own experiences. this quality was, if anything, even more pronounced in my writing pre-transition, when i had a false universalist conception of human nature.

that is the interesting thing to me... not the question of wolfe's misogyny, but my complete failure to notice it pre-transition. i don't think of myself as ever having been a man, and i don't think it's hormonal. if anything i'd say it's lived experience. looking at things from multiple perspectives. wolfe was extremely intellectually gifted but it is fundamentally an intellectual framing. that i look at things differently now isn't a matter of intellectual growth, just lived experience.

what i remember is the way severian, as narrator, describes women's bodies... from the way severian describes his own life, his own experience, the way he describes and treats women seems like something of a non sequitur. they're ways in which women are treated in _our_ world, under conditions that don't seem to apply in severian's... in particular, i had the impression that severian finds women's bodies to be in some way indicative of their _character_, particularly in a moral sense. i don't remember reading anything in his descriptions of his world that would justify that approach. it's a very catholic way of looking at things. very catholic in a specifically highly patriarchal way. there's very much a sort of "male gaze" to how severian looks at things - again, in my memory. he observes and judges the bodies of the women in a way he doesn't with the bodies of the men.

i think this is something of a failure of thomist and post-thomist intellectual catholicism in general... there's a sort of misrecognition of the ways we're shaped by somatic experience.

if i can get really personal here... one of the most profound experiences i had relating to catholicism was subsequent to my genital reconstruction surgery. without wishing to get too into detail, it is a complex surgery and one does wind up bleeding for quite a long time. to someone from the outside, to me before i had the experience, i didn't understand what the true impact of it would be. one can't until one experiences it. there's something sort of very mystical and spiritual about that, in a way that's aligned with scholasticism, i feel. the thing is that the anatomical and physiological changes are, comparatively speaking, nothing. anatomy textbooks will tell you that there's just not that much difference between male genitals and female genitals, and my lived experience bears this out.

the difference is in having this new perspective, a new way of understanding oneself. after a few days i was able to step into the shower and wash myself. it's out of necessity a gentle, tender experience. i'm not a parent, but i had a very strong sense of treating this new creation as i would a newborn child, with the love i would show to my own newborn child. it seemed profoundly maternal.

i washed myself, and i saw and felt the blood... being raised catholic, i was taught there was something beautiful in blood, and i felt that strongly at that time. i recall seeing and feeling myself and saying "this is my body, this is my blood". and it felt as if it was true for the first time in my life. that for the first time in my life i truly understood myself that my body was _my_ body.

and from a catholic perspective, well, others might dispute it but the catholicism i was raised in, i know full well that it was blasphemous of me to say that. not because i am comparing myself to christ or saying that my body is christ's body. it's not. it's more that under catholicism, under patriarchy, people - all people, but especially _women_ - don't have the right to their own bodies. our bodies are not our own. we are part of the body of christ. we eat of christ's body and drink of christ's blood, and that is the mystery and the sanctity of communion. the abomination. the cruelty. the dominion, of what they call "communion". my body is my body. not christ's. not any man's body. mine.

which i think puts me fundamentally at odds with wolfe's worldview and perspective, and the way he sees women in particular.

anyway. i hope that makes some sort of sense! kind of hard to put into words.

Makes tons of sense and I agree with a lot of it. In fevers I think you’re right - Severian writes about women as caricatures because he’s definitely a misogynist. That’s severian the fictional author of this fictional book of the new sun.

When I first read it, I thought along similar lines. “Why are all these women falling in with him all the time?” Oh yes, he’s the narrator, of course he’s going to tell it that way. I think the late great addresses this up thread perhaps too… it’s helpful to keep in your mind that the fictional guy writing that book is, yes, a misogynist by all modern standards, but also insane, and a liar (sometimes from his insanity I think and sometimes willfully, and he often omits.) Severian also loves to stroke his own ego. This is also a world in which the masters in the bear tower practice monogamous bestiality, so their whole worldview is kinda ducked by all of our modern standards.

None of this to discount your lived experience, but that one of the … things… for me when reading new sun is to Always keep in mind that Severian is a creation of Wolfe, and one whose moral worldview is intentionally fucked up, because it’s the product of an alien and fucked up place.

Sorry. I’m typing in my phone…

. If you have not read the whole series, it may also help to know the whole story, narration especially, becomes radically recontextualized by the climax of the fourth book.

Like… Severian sucks he’s not cool or fun. Sm

oh yeah for sure i don't look at him and be like WOW THIS GUY HAS A BADASS SWORD AND A CLOAK THAT'S, LIKE, BLACK, BUT IT'S EVEN MORE BLACK THAN BLACK, LIKE HE COULD PROBABLY ROUNDHOUSE KICK CHUCK NORRIS IN THE FACE haha

i do wanna push back on the "he's insane" though, i've dealt for most of my live with severe mental illness and i've found that it often is essentialized. it's like the whole "depression quest" thing where sometimes the right choices literally aren't open to us because of where we've been. it doesn't offer any kind of excuse or justification, though, and i think sometimes there's a tendency to do that. i don't see it as "he's lying because he's crazy". i don't see it as _lying_ at all, like, what he's saying doesn't accord with the facts but like you say there's a difference between saying something he genuinely believes and saying something he _knows_ to be false

either way he's responsible for his words and actions and their consequences. like if i'm gonna look at it from jolenta's perspective it doesn't really matter if severian _knows_ what he's doing

to me basically it's... particularly since i take a trauma-focused approach to mental illness, i look at the circumstances and environment severian comes from and, like, my critical approach is to try and see how those experiences have shaped his character

part of the gender essentialization here, i think, part of the misogyny, is that _wolfe_, not the character, mistakes toxic masculinity for manhood itself. being raised among men, being raised without real access to womanhood and women's experiences... that shaped me. it absolutely did. i don't see being a man in the company of men as something twisted and hateful, though. i guess it can be. i guess it depends on your point of view. again there's a lot of subtext i'm missing. is there a lot of pederasty in the torturer's guild? that sort of trauma would explain severian's perspective. because it's learned, it's a learned perspective, learned behavior

I think you should just read Long Sun, lol - completely different writing style and character work, it's interesting (and the main character is effectively raised by women)

In one of the early chapters, Severian tells you straight up that he is insane and the jumble of memories in his brain are impenetrable even to him, he admits that he may not be lying intentionally, but i still think he often does. So i'm not trying to take mental illness lightly -- but it's something he acknowledges. He also contradicts himself in the text occasionally, usually in the manner of "I remember everything!" "oh, i don't remember what happened next..."

re: pederasty - there are allusions to this happening though iirc nothing super concrete. i'll look out for it during this re-read. here's a reddit thread on the topic - https://www.reddit.com/r/genewolfe/comments/bzerhz/severian_the_pederast_does_wolfe_not_situate/

Even w/o pederasty in the guild it's an incredibly fucked up environment. He never saw a woman until he was god knows how old (whenever he was old enough to go to the witch's tower i suppose) -- he has very little idea how to interact with the outside world at all and women in particular imo. Being raised in an environment where violence is cold and common and, in fact, your duty, is also very traumatic probably.

re: sanity,

"I realized for the first time that I am in some degree insane … I had lied often … Now I could not be sure my own mind was not lying to me; all my falsehoods were recoiling on me and I who remembered everything could not be certain those memories were more than my own dreams.”

^ very end of chapter 3

damn that’s an airtight argument

incredible given that even ursula leguin was tricked by this snake

she called him “the melville of our time” by which i am
sure she meant damn this dude seems weirdly sympathetic to this killer whale and this killer whale killer prep the cancel culture harpoon

:shrug:

i’m not trying to be insulting. i’m just saying i agree that a person who is a literal torturer, trained to inflict pain — and more crucially to reject compassion, since he is told to think of the pleas and bargaining and begging of those under torture as like the squeaks of animals that signify nothing but pain — is going to remind us of people that treat us poorly

also he lives in a world where growth is stilled because the sun is corrupt and every mountain has been carved into the likeness of a murderous male autocrat obsessed with power, and this is normalized to the point where people call them mountains and not “the mountain that looks like the old autarch so and so” and the reader has to figure it out

i’m with you, it sounds like a shitty place to be and for that reason i try not to imagine myself as actually in the story or those ppl actually in my world.

but that’s a general reading tactic of mine anyway

if people want to get mad at a book about a decadent lunatic with a huge sword who destroys the world, that’s fine! the author wants that

and when you figure out what kind of “hero” he is you’ve (and remember it’s a bildungsroman so the story only ends when the narrator is no longer himself … and he has photographic memory and relives his experiences like an alzabo, so has no agency to retell his dark past as a better person) unlocked the theme of the book

so anyway yeah stories about these cursed sword dark
edgelord heroes are not for everyone, and its a bit embarassing how many postcolonial voices or whatever stan for him. maybe you’d like elric novels better, simpler guilty pleasure and also good reading

finally if you wonder why i might read like that … it’s so i can compare books like sundiver vs xenogenesis or foundation vs triton on merit of ideas first, since it is sci fi … and i don’t look to art for practical guidance, i have enough immediate accountability in my life (since i get publicly evaluated, by govt name, by children with microphones, in front of mayors and state assembly leaders for years and years now) … like just personally have enough to worry about without muddying the issue

that’s all i’m going to say on it and afaict that’s definite so i’m done for awhile. this is the only corner of this board i feel useful on anyway, and not at all on an affective or social emotional level, just a sliver of personal knowledge i’ve earned at ruinous cost to myself

definitive* not definite … and only fair since i kicked off this whole mess

do you think it's a mess? this is a book you love and you understand and here comes this weirdo who, like, openly admits to not understanding the book and interprets it through her own biased lens. idk, i know that's a flaw of mine, i come off as more authoritative and sure of myself than i actually am. to be honest i don't read a lot of fantasy novels at all - it's not a genre i'm familiar with. so it's not surprising that i'm maybe a bit ignorant of what's going on in this particular book! the next fantasy author on my to-read list is tamsyn muir and not moorcock. i heard tamsyn muir's books have more lesbians.

i mean, what can i do here, retract my opinions? does it even make sense for a person to retract their _opinions_?

AUTARCH not accepted by today's wordle