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assfro posted:Book of the long sun is pretty solid. I'll agree that Long Sun is solid. However, the pacing in each book is odd. The first book is incredibly slow, following one person and his every thought and action over the course of a few days (or maybe just 1? It's been so long since I've read it). Each book moves faster and faster until the last one where things are happening so quickly that sometimes you don't catch what is going on at critical moments. Long Sun is definitely in the New Sun universe. The tie is iffy if you only read Long Sun but if you read the Short Sun series that comes after it (I recommend it), the ties are made slightly more clear. Has anyone read Home Fires? What did you think? Someone gave it to me for my birthday and I blazed through it but ended up feeling disappointed. There was so much coincidence in the story that it was obnoxious. Wolfe always writes a lot of dialog in his novels, but in Home Fires I feel like he did way too much story telling via characters after the fact rather than showing the events as they happened.
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Sep 6, 2011 18:39
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I just finished Pirate Freedom today after picking it up a few weeks ago for a pittance at Borders during their going out of business sale. I really enjoyed it. It was like...reading a book of Sid Meyer's Pirates! with a narrator who is constantly lying about his morals. On the surface it was a pretty fun adventure novel, but the whole lying about his morals was sort of shocking, especially near the end. He talks about wanting to do the right thing, and he does, sometimes. However, he constantly makes choices to be a bad person, especially at the end when you know the connection between him and Brother Ignacio. After that, any sort of redemption on his part is out of the question. I do have a couple of questions, if anyone knows the answers to them. What is his last name? He makes a big deal of it at one point, but I can't come up with what it might be. What was the deal with all the "throwaway women," as it were? It just seemed to me that other than Novia/Sra. Guzman, the women were just there for Chris to deny having sex with. Am I missing something or was that about it? Xenix fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Oct 1, 2011 |
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Oct 1, 2011 04:18
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Dickeye posted:Is it Australia? There's been a couple things in the first fifteenish chapters of Shadow to make me think that. South America, with Nessus maybe being Buenos Aires, IIRC. The Ascians are "people with no shadow" because they live to the north, near the equator, in Central America. However, it's been a couple of years since I've read the books so I can't remember the specific hints other than how Ascians were described having no shadow and living far away to the north.
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Dec 2, 2011 18:55
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Hels posted:I'm hoping some of you all can elaborate on some "holy poo poo" moments you had while reading. It's not a huge one, but one of my favorite holy poo poo moments was when Severian is in the Perelines camp and he is talking to one who used to live in Nessus. She tells him about watching a strange duel between men with flowers and it clicked with me how completely and utterly set up Severian was to die in book 1, all because of a sword. edit: It is actually significant as it obliquely supports the idea that Severian has at the end of Citadel of the Autarch that there were many lives that Severian lead. Something intervened in this life to keep him from dying in the many ways he died in his other lives (such as drowning in the river in book 1) Xenix fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Mar 14, 2012 |
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Mar 14, 2012 07:19
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Neurosis posted:Speaking of which, I still have a few stand alone Wolfe novels I have yet to read. These are: I haven't read them all (though someone I met through work recently gave me Castleview when I commented on the Wolfe books on her shelves...), but I really enjoyed Pirate Freedom. drkhrs2020 posted:How about how he actually rapes Jocasta while on the boat after becoming serious with Dorcas? They go on a lovely boat ride and he decides to help himself to her, not even bothering to hide it, so Dorcas starts weeping as soon as she sees them. In Urth he even says "Some people might call it rape, but I maintain she wanted it" While his intent surely makes him a piece of poo poo, it surprises me that this encounter, of all of them in the series, is the one that bothers you. I don't have the books to look back to make sure it happened like this, but I seem to remember that Jolenta was the one who orchestrated the boat trip between the two of them. During the trip, she just lay there half asleep while Severian went about his business. Afterward, Severian was frustrated over how the encounter went exactly because she didn't fight him. I had the impression that Jolenta wanted sex, though possibly only to make Dorcas jealous. After this, Dorcas and Jolenta have a physical altercation. Am I misremembering this?
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Oct 26, 2012 03:11
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Neurosis posted:If he finally goes off the rails and starts writing crazy political poo poo at 82 he'll have withstood the call of the elderly sci-fi writer longer than most. The only overtly political thing I have noticed so far was in An Evil Guest where he mentioned postpartum abortions. I didn't read Home Fires too closely though because I found it boring so I could have missed something there. Operation Ares might've had some crude political poo poo too but thankfully about 3 people have read that book. Home Fires had some stuff about his views on the amount of litigation that goes on in the US, the state of marriage in the US (I don't believe it touched on gay marriage, however), and a small bit about the spread of sharia law. None of it was really that crazy, but it did come up.
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Nov 8, 2013 15:24
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