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I also really enjoyed Shelved By Genre. Yeah, I disagree with their interpretation of the cathedrals disappearance, and certainly other things, but it's infinitely more interesting to hear people discuss the book in front of them than it is to hear about which fan theories the "community" has agreed is Correct. It's been a while, but as I recall they specifically criticized the tendency of some fans to treat the work like a puzzle box that must be solved and intentionally did not want to do that. As someone who has read this whole damned thread, it's really nice to hear smart people explore the work from the other direction.
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Oct 19, 2025 04:41
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I'm not sitting and listening to a podcast, what is their contrarian position on the Cathedral of the Pelerines?
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Oct 20, 2025 15:03
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The description of the cathedral of the pelerines disappearing is different between the first two books. This Reddit post contains enough relevant information. https://www.reddit.com/r/genewolfe/comments/pwpb25/my_theory_for_fun_the_cathedral_of_the_pelerines/ I’m guessing the other objection is to what was added to the fourth book after it was decided that the third was to be split in to two. The first major portion at the army camp with the story telling competition isn’t extremely important and could obviously be cut out or you could see it being written to bulk up the fourth book. How the Ascians are described in the story compared how they are presented when Severian confronts them is also fairly different. You could make an easy assumption that the battle with the Ascians was written first and then he revised his ideas in the story telling competition. I don’t see them as being huge issues, it just clear evidence that the books were written in a certain order and that details change as Gene continued the story and his ideas changed a bit during the writing and editing process. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong in my assumptions, just wanting to discuss and don’t want to smear anyone’s ideas and thoughts!
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Oct 20, 2025 17:20
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I just got to the llm review and that ‘fractal’ comment is a direct, specific, theft from a review I’m sure I’ve read but can’t place or find online at the moment.
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Oct 20, 2025 18:56
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DeimosRising posted:I'm not sitting and listening to a podcast, what is their contrarian position on the Cathedral of the Pelerines? That it was a spaceship. Which works with the original description of a cathedral flying into the sky but is later contradicted by the more mundane explanation that it was a tent that became a hot air balloon when on fire.
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Oct 20, 2025 20:07
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Remulak posted:I just got to the llm review and that ‘fractal’ comment is a direct, specific, theft from a review I’m sure I’ve read but can’t place or find online at the moment. from light
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Oct 20, 2025 20:29
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I'm lukewarm about LLMs but find them really useful for web scraping and other programming tasks, as I can't code to save my life; but I honestly don't see how chatting with an LLM is skipping the "hard work" versus having a podcast explain the text to you. I really couldn't get on with the Re-reading Wolfe podcast, especially with the one guy constantly spamming his blog posts on Reddit about how he thinks the books need to be understood. I see people saying the Alzabo Soup guys do this when they explicitly say there's no one interpretation to unlock everything and aren't even interested in trying to do that. I'm there (and here) for the friendly back-forth and banter. The more casual, fan podcast probably suits me better for that reason alone.
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Oct 22, 2025 02:31
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Double-post, because this is something that's really got me thinking lately. I've gone back and forth on fan theories, especially the Character X is really Character Y all along. Spoilers ahead: 1. New Sun, Urth, Short Sun I don't care for Green is Earth/Urth and Blue is Mars. Mostly because I don't see how it recontextualizes the story at all, and only makes the universe smaller. It also completely negates the need for the Whorl to make a return journey and leaves us wondering what that ship that arrives on post-apocalyse Urth/Ushas was even about. BIRD VOICE: Theory bad! 2. New Sun, Short Sun Silk-Horn is Malrubius works great for me. I think the text in Return to the Whorl actually confirms this so I'm not sure this is even counts as a fan theory; but he's a huge character in New Sun who we never actually meet so it's hugely rewarding to learn we actually have spent seven books with him. It also really works for New Sun because Sevarian needs some role model to serve as a moral compass for the impressionable pre-adolescent Sevarian. He needs some capacity for goodness for the original four books to work. My reading of the series is that's the whole point of the original ambiguous ending in Citadel is that this dark savior figure could go either way but reader have faith that it can go well either way in the very, very far reaching future because of God's guiding hand. BIRD VOICE: Theory good! 3. New Sun and Urth The St Katherine actress is Sevarian's mother is interesting; but I think the ambiguity is the point. Sevarian is looking for his mother everywhere and sleeps with multiple mother-like figures in the process. I think the text is meant to indicate that Sevarian hopes that his mother was watching over him the entire time. I like my head canon that he's mistaken. Also, Sev is autarch and knows everything that every previous autarch knows. If his mother is imprisoned I think he would do something about that. That leaves the mystery of the woman he sees with the prison guards. Is she the St Katherine actress? Is it his mother as a new character? Again I think the ambiguity is central to Sev as a flawed human who will always carry earthly desires but cannot know everything and cannot get everything he might wish for -- even as a godling! I have read that Wolfe confirms Sev's mother is in the text but I've not seen that and can't say that's not a misquote referencing Dorcas as his grandmothe, or something else. BIRD VOICE: Theory good! 4. Long Sun, Short Sun Fava is Hyacinth has some merit. it certainly ties up the loose threads about the mysterious and terrifying knowledge Silk learns about her in Exodus, after their wedding. And Silk Horn in Green's Jungles says he put her on the Whorl as a parting gift. One problem is the description on Jahlee in Return to the Whorl matches too similarly to Hyacith's description and it would almost be more apt for that to be the reveal (but she's dead at the end of Whorl, so I don't think so). My problem is two fold: It doesn't reveal more about her character and it reads as a pointless gotcha. There's enough on the page to explain why Hyacinth is embittered towards men and making her a literal succubus only degrades her character. There's also a theory that goes back to the Ultan's Library forum days that Hyacinth is a masc-to-fem transgender person. It sucks, I think, and just reads as needless and bigoted. It adds nothing to her character and only falls into a gross trope that falls far beneath Wolfe. It's certainly possible that there is something there as Wolfe fell into some other tropes and was certainly interested in transgender identity issues; but I'm super glad to just shelve it into the idiot theory category instead. BIRD VOICE: Fish heads? My personal theory: All of the Sun books Sevarian is the Outsider communing with Silk throughout Long Sun. Somehow I don't like God directly intervening because it contradicts the theme of God's guiding hand. It's certainly possible this could also be a brain aneurysm (as Crane suggests) or an embellishment by Horn the author, but I personally like the idea that Sevarian is working here because he would definitely seek out his mentor Malrubius. Somehow the description of the Outsider always resembled Sev to me and I was always waiting for a reveal that never came. I have seen similar posts to this but somehow it does not have even an iota of the interest of Hyacinth is a femboy. Seriously, screw that stupid podcaster and his boring, incomplete series. And if he's not, I'll also accept Sev being the ghost in Lake. Whale Vomit fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Oct 22, 2025 |
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Oct 22, 2025 03:42
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Glimpse posted:That it was a spaceship. Which works with the original description of a cathedral flying into the sky but is later contradicted by the more mundane explanation that it was a tent that became a hot air balloon when on fire. oh ok. you could argue the later descriptions by people are wrong but i don't think there's any actual evidence for that Remulak posted:I just got to the llm review and that ‘fractal’ comment is a direct, specific, theft from a review I’m sure I’ve read but can’t place or find online at the moment. the llm vomit is fun because it's plainly pieced together from like 40 different interpretations and so it makes no sense line to line (obviously this is just how llms work) but if you just read individual sentences without thinking you could be like oh wow totally. which is of course the exact kind of reading that leads you to think you need an llm to explain book of the new sun to you in the first place
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Oct 22, 2025 16:19
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Whale Vomit posted:Double-post, because this is something that's really got me thinking lately. I've gone back and forth on fan theories, especially the Character X is really Character Y all along. Spoilers ahead: I hate this one to the point it makes me irrationally angry. The text doesn't support this at all. I've also read other theories that Horn/Silk is traveling back in time when he projects to Urth. Which is also, in my opinion, very stupid.
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Oct 31, 2025 01:17
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a starchy tuber posted:I hate this one to the point it makes me irrationally angry. The text doesn't support this at all. I've also read other theories that Horn/Silk is traveling back in time when he projects to Urth. Which is also, in my opinion, very stupid. In Shadow the curator tells Severian while examining a particular antique image that the moon wasn't always green and it used to be farther away, so if Blue is Earth then Green is the moon, not Mars. My take though is that it's just a concept that Wolfe found interesting and which he returned to later, as opposed to some prefigured loop in a mega story. I've been thinking about this type of problem in the last few weeks, as I've reread Shadow and I'm about 1/3 of the way through Claw now, and I've decided that I'm firmly against the puzzle box readings. It's especially interesting, that the chapter that has the reflections on the flying castle, i.e. the chapter immediately following the one that ends with the flying castle that Severian has a meditation on authorship, in which he looks at his experience as an executioner as analogous - he's there to do one job (to tell what happened, or to execute the sentence), but where he also has to play for the crowd and offer them gestures and flourishes which he finds meaningless, but which the crowd/readers expect as part of the process. I'm going to need to reread it, and the book is all the way in the other room, but my take when I read it last week or whenever was as something of a literary theory which rejects too-clever interpretations of events.
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Oct 31, 2025 01:39
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The thing is, Severian is full of poo poo most of the time.
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Oct 31, 2025 02:31
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The Green-Blue thing is also why some people think Fifth Head is secretly in the Solar Cycle. It's not. Sometimes authors just like to play around with the same concepts because they're personally interested in them. If you read Warrior of the Altaii you'll get some striking similarities between it and Wheel of Time because Robert Jordan wrote about what he liked. This doesn't make it a secret book in the Wheel of Time universe.
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Oct 31, 2025 05:48
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I do prefer the Green is Earth Blue is Mars angle but it is largely thematic in Green managing to become more...Godly maybe, by their continued predation while Blue slides back into ungrace by their relative peacefulness. Irenaean theodicy pervades Wolfe's work in my estimation and the Solar Cycle is its epitome.
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Nov 5, 2025 01:47
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