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Hels posted:I'm near the end of Botns. At first I couldn't quit understand all of the hubbub, but he more I read the more I was sucked in. However, I'm still at a loss toward perceiving much of the depth and cleverness which people so often attribute the work. I'm hoping some of you all can elaborate on some "holy poo poo" moments you had while reading. But there was plenty I found amazing on my first read. The avernus duel, the idea of a vivimancer who summons the living, the magic duel, the heartbreaking climax of the alzabo sequence, and especially the moment when Severian finds a bush covered with Claws (thorns). And then there's the writing, which is full of amazing little observations that frequently forced me to stop and think when I was reading the book for the first time. Severian has a lot to say on human nature, the world, politics, and the divine. A lot of the time I disagree with what he says (and some of those times, I believe, Wolfe would disagree with as well) but his reasoning is often startlingly novel. The last time I reread the book I took extensive notes, and much of that was me grappling with what to make of a tricky argument. Most of that material was too long and in depth for me to type up (like Severian's analysis of magic after rescuing little Severian from the magicians, or his moment of transcendence with the Claw that ends with him removing his shoes) but I do have some of the more pithy lines typed out: Severian: "...By the same argument, the [entire] life must reside in each joint of every finger, and surely that is impossible." Ultan: "How big is a man's life?" Severian: "I have no way of knowing, but isn't it larger than that?" Ultan: "You see it from the beginning, and anticipate much. I, recollecting it from its termination, know how little there has been." - "Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people believe what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real. What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it?" - "It is said that it is the peculiar quality of time to conserve fact, and that it does so by rendering our past falsehoods true. So it was with me." - On Terminus Est: "Art had been lavished upon her, but it is the function of art to render attractive and significant those things that without it would not be so, and so art had nothing to give her." - Dorcas: "When the world is horrible, then thoughts are high, full of grace and greatness." [...] Severian: "...Nor do I believe that beautiful thoughts--or wise ones--are engendered by external troubles." [Dorcas places his hand on her breast] Dorcas: "Now, where are your thoughts? If I have made the external world sweet to you, aren't they less than they were?" - "In our commercial society, one may set one's price as high as one wishes, but to refuse to sell at any price is treason." - "A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart." - "I know little of literary style; but I have learned as I have progressed, and find this art not so much different from my old one as might be thought." (This seems like a quick, self-effacing joke on Wolfe's part but Severian actually develops this thought into a really meditation on literature, authority, and tradition.) - Green Man: "I am not a talking vegetable, as you should be able to see. Even if a plant were to follow the one evolutionary way, out of some many millions, that leads to intelligence, it is impossible that it should duplicate in wood and leaf the form of a human being." Severian: "The same thing might be said of stones, yet there are statues." - Severian: "What are you?" Green Man: "A great seer. A great liar, like every man whose foot is in a trap." - Green Man: "I drive away those who pay to see me by foretelling their futures, and I will foretell yours. You are young now, and strong. But before this world has wound itself ten times more about the sun you shall be less strong, and you shall never regain the strength that is yours now. If you breed sons, you will engender enemies against yourself. If--" Severian: "Enough. What you are telling me is only the fortune of all men." - "It must be a truly ancient family." "Those ancient families are the newest of all. In ancient times there was nothing like them." (A clever way of expressing the fact that Thea's heritage is both "ancient" in that she is a very pure exultant as well as new, in that exultants are clearly genetically modified from base human stock) - Severian to Typhon: "You said you loved truth. Now I see why--it is truth that binds men." - "The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just as the momentous events of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when the sun is drawing toward the dark, our own shadows race into the past to trouble mankind's dreams." (The first time I read it I was arrested by the outrageous idea of an inverted causal arrow going all the way back to Mary Shelley, and it was only on rereading that I noticed that in Wolfe's story Baldanders was the man of learning and Dr. Talos was the monster.) - "I, however, never suffered more than a sore throat and a running nose, forms of sickness that serve only to deceive healthy people into the belief that they know in what disease consists. Master Malrubius suffered real illness, which is to see death in shadows." - The Malrubius aquastor: "We are as solid as most truly false things are--a dance of particles in space. Only the things no one can touch are true." Martin Van Buren posted:Question for e'erbody: After a single read-through of Botns, should I continue on to Urth of the New Sun, or should I give botns at least another go?
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Mar 12, 2012 04:25
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Neurosis posted:Edit: I am pretty sure the initial post was incorrect; human names are not all from the Bible and include saints - or maybe they are exclusively saints, I can't remember.
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Mar 13, 2012 23:56
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Martin Van Buren posted:I've only read BotNS and UotNS, and as a result of my poor google skills, I accidentally read on URTH.net that (new sun/long sun spoiler maybe?) Silk is or becomes Typhon or something crazy like that. Is this just one fan's wild speculation or something that is fairly clear to most people after reading New and Long Sun in their entirety? That said I think that as Wolfe theories go, this one is fairly well attested. It's not way out on a limb like Borksi's meticulously researched but (IMO) extremely improbable theory about the role of heirodoles in New Sun. Incidentally I think I would argue it's really not possible to spoil Wolfe's books. For one thing, just because Person A says something happened doesn't mean you will agree. For another, as an author he's very much about the journey, not just the destination. The first chapter of Book of the New Sun tells you he becomes Autarch in the end. Gee, spoiler alert! But that doesn't really spoil anything, does it? For those of us who enjoy New Sun, that enjoyment comes from the language, the mood, the style, and the sense of hidden depths. None of that can possibly be spoiled, IMO, because it vanishes once you summarize the text instead of just read it. Those of you who have read New Sun can see if you think these possible "spoilers" would have really impacted your enjoyment: Dorcas is really Severian's grandmother! Little Severian dies! Severian is really the Conciliator! It is possible that from the beginning Severian had some presentiment of his future! (Just kidding. I think.) It's true that some people enjoy the puzzle quality of Wolfe's work, but given that most of his truly interesting puzzles have uncertain solutions and how much more his work has to offer, I don't see it as a big issue. More than any other SF/F author, Wolfe intends for his work to be reread, and there's no bigger spoiler than a first reading.
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Jun 7, 2012 05:19
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From what I've seen online, most people don't like Wizard Knight, but I love it. Some reasons: Wolfe is unusual in that a lot of the dramatic tension in his novels revolves around the metaphysics of the world. Severian spends a while trying to understand how and why the Claw works and doesn't work, for example, and the revelation of the true nature of the universe (and Severian's life) is the climax to Citadel of the Autarch, not some sort of single combat showdown. Wizard Knight kicks all this up to 11. For instance, early on the main character gets a somewhat magic dog. For a long time he keeps coming back to wondering why the dog is magic, and this isn't an idle thought...it really matters. Throughout the novel these questions are asked again and again, of almost everything. In another book it might be tedious, but I think the world is fascinating. Someone already mentioned the heavy use of Norse mythology, but that mythology is worked seamlessly into a neo-Platonic universe. Able accumulates magical artifacts (and encounters magical entities) at an incredible rate, so much so that I think Wolfe must consciously have tried to put every possible cliche in: flying horse, magic sword, talking dog, talking cat, etc. Some people think Able is a wish-fulfillment Gary Stu because of he gets loaded down with so much gear. But each one of these things has an explanation that not only fits beautifully into the world system but also is important. But aside from the metaphysical elements, there's a very serious examination of how the powerful should act. This is another thing that trips people up: they think the author is endorsing Able's behavior in the first book. Most stories have the hero start from humble beginnings. Wolfe has the hero start by not being at all a hero. Able's journey toward actually being good is also, I think, a lot more clearly laid out than Severian's. Finally, while the surface story is straightforward and (by Wolfe standards) relatively easy to follow, there are vast depths to excavate. I guess that can't really be quantified but I would say there's more hidden meaning than the New Sun books. Unlike in New Sun, the true nature of the world is never laid out even in brief. Last time I reread it (for probably the third or fourth time) I made pages of notes and felt I was getting close to understanding it all, but it's going to take at least one more trip through, and that's probably too optimistic. But as ever with Wolfe, I think the truth is out there.
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Nov 1, 2012 00:42
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As for Castleview, I didn't like it all that much. It's written in a dime paperback page-turner style: short chapters, each of which ends on a cliffhanger. I can't help but see it as more of a writing exercise than anything else, though of course there's a lot of the usual Wolfean business of hidden identities, misunderstood magic, and so on. In Castleview I felt that without knowing a lot more about Arthuriana I had no chance of ever getting close to understanding what was going on. Because Wolfe holds so much back he's always running close to incomprehensibility. The second Latro book was like that, and I thought Castleview was even worse.
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Nov 1, 2012 00:46
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andrew smash posted:If you want to make a spoiler-filled effort post about this at some point I would like to read it. andrew smash posted:It's been a while since I read it and I don't remember reaching that specific conclusion, what convinced you that was the case? Not 100% either way, I think, but when I reread it a month or two ago I read it the same way as Tuxedo Catfish.
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Nov 1, 2012 03:11
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02-6611-0142-1 posted:I still have no loving idea what happened at the end of book two. A slave revolt or something? I couldn't find any information on it. Ordinarily the helots (slaves) were not allowed to have any access to weapons, but due to the military emergency the Spartans armed some and allowed them to fight. When the situation was secure, they held a big manumission ceremony to give freedom to these helots. Except the Spartans were afraid of helots, particularly that these helots would lead the others into revolt. So during the ceremony they murder them all. Latro is at the ceremony too because he also is being freed, and not being a helot he's not murdered. They don't allow him to write down the details so the text we read is confusing and he himself almost immediately forgets what happened. But the horrible sight of the helots getting murdered and the betrayal it represented left an emotional mark that was not erased on his amnesia and leaves him depressed for the last section of the novel. In an interview while discussing how nasty the Spartans were Wolfe mentions this and acts like this was a thing that happened. The historical account it is based on is somewhat more equivocal: "Once, when they were afraid of the number and vigour52 of the Helot youth, this was what they did: They proclaimed that a selection would be made of those Helots who claimed to have rendered the best service to the Lacedaemonians in war, and promised them liberty. The announcement was intended to test them; it was thought that those among them who were foremost in asserting their freedom would be most high-spirited, and most likely to rise against their masters. So they selected about two thousand, who were crowned with garlands and went in procession round the temples; they were supposed to have received their liberty; but not long afterwards the Spartans put them all out of the way, and no man knew how any one of them came by his end." -- Thucydides, Book IV No mention of murder actually at the ceremony; in fact the murder happens at least a little time afterward. Also it's not situated within Thucydides' (quite reliable) historical narrative, it's this anecdote just floating around..."I heard that one time they even did this horrible thing..." What he's actually talking about is a totally different incident where the Spartans armed some helots and sent them to help some cities rebelling against Athenian control.
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Nov 15, 2012 01:01
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rufius posted:I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels like some of Wolfe's stuff is non-sensical. But there is genuine nonsense associated with his books: a lot of what passes for interpretation of his books, in my opinion, are stupid reader theories that get more attention than they deserve because the readers in question are obviously very smart. But even smart people (I'm thinking of people like Borski and Clute) can't help but project their own ideas on what is at times more of a Rorschach inkblot than a picture. rufius posted:I'm struggling to convince myself to finish the fourth. I found the writing of the first three interesting but at times tedious. I hate leaving things unfinished but I can't seem to get up the energy to focus on the last book.
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Dec 3, 2012 22:50
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DFu4ever posted:I'm guessing from the love you guys are showing the series that there is more to it than meets the eye, but from a straight writing and story standpoint it's been extremely lackluster. Wolfe does not follow the conventional plot structures, or at least doesn't appear to. The Book of the New Sun begins, develops, and ends in a climax. But although it seems like this is supposed to be an action/adventure story, it's not, and therefore the climax isn't going to be a three way swordfight between Severian, Vodalus, and the Autarch. Swordfights do happen, but they won't align with the rhythms you expect out of a narrative because this is not a story about swordfights. This is why Wolfe didn't spoil his own book when he ends the first chapter with Severian mentioning he eventually rises to the throne. The other thing is that Wolfe does not write with the aim of clearly communicating information. The clear action and dialogue in any Wolfe book is just the scaffold for what he is trying to indirectly convey. In New Sun he tells very few specifics of the setting outright and instead tries to create an atmosphere by using words the reader won't know but are built out of the Latin and Greek structures that are the foundation of our actual language. By the same token, Severian tells you little about what he thinks or feels, but his character emerges from the gaps and from details he accidentally lets slip (people like to say he lies, but he does this rarely if ever, he just omits key information). For instance, most authors, wanting to communicate something about the impact of Severian's upbringing on his attitude toward torture, would have either him as a narrator flat out tell us or else provide a different character who would persuasively tell Severian (who might not listen, but we as readers would) why he thinks the way he does. Wolfe expects us to notice how Severian rationalizes torture, how the longer he's away from the guild the less comfortable he is with it and the more desperate his rationalizations become, and to see from his actions (because he doesn't tell us) his increasing degree of estrangement from his origins. You're free to interpret all this as "Wolfe is a bad writer". Many people do. But many other people, including lots of critics and authors but also random people in this thread, think he's doing something almost uniquely amazing (when it works, which it doesn't always).
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Feb 27, 2013 03:28
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BuckarooBanzai posted:I could be misremembering, but I don't think he ever outright claims to not sleep with Thecla. I think he just omits it.
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Mar 5, 2013 02:04
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I think your criticism, though justified to a degree, is a little over the top. Sure, people over-analyze Wolfe, but I'm not sure it's different than what you might hear from, say, a fan of Donnie Darko, or Lost, or They Might Be Giants, or even something like Star Wars. When you stare at something for a long time you start seeing patterns that may or may not be there, and that's basically what fans do with the work they like. Because Wolfe's work is very literary and not really all that popular, that can certainly bring out the Comic Book Guy nerdier-than-thou attitude from people, but again this is true of fans of obscure music, movies, etc. The only thing unusual about Wolfe's work is that there really are bizarre symbols, hidden structures, etc. throughout his work. Maybe you don't think it's an interesting game to wonder who Severian's sister is, but Wolfe obviously does, and he seeds his work with grist for that sort of mill. Knowing that going in means people look extra hard and, yes, come up with all sorts of crazy theories. But that doesn't mean they're always wrong, and it doesn't mean that you can't gain a better appreciation for Wolfe's work by reading their ideas. You just have to apply some judgment. I ignore everything Borksi says, basically, because his grand theory of Heirodoles strikes me as completely against Wolfe's own ideas about how the world works, but I've read a lot of reasonable things from the Wolfe mailing list.
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Mar 18, 2013 23:22
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Draxamus posted:What were all the religious parallels in The Book of the New Sun? I remember Severian's meeting with Typhon basically being the Temptation of Christ. What other ones were there? The Vodalarii ceremony where they eat Thecla's mind is a corruption of the Eucharist. The idea that the return of the New Sun will lift the curse on the world is clearly based on the Second Coming. and (Urth of the New Sun spoilers) Severian's brief career as the original Conciliator is kind of a weird version of Christ's life Like Severian, Jesus raised other people from the dead...and came back himself (Urth of the New Sun again) The coming of the New Sun looks a lot like Noah's flood, destroying the old wicked world to make way for something better. However, despite these correspondences, attempts to relate Severian to Christ always run aground on Severian's many flaws. He's anything but perfect, and even though he redeems the rest of the world (sort of), he doesn't sacrifice himself to do it, so the redemption he achieves looks a lot more like the redemption a sinning Christian is given by grace. Additionally, in the New Sun books God seems more like the aloof watchmaker God of Deism or Neoplatonism than the involved God of Christianity. Melito's story sums it up: "The pancreator is infinitely far from us," the angel said, "And thus infinitely far from me, though I fly so much higher than you. I guess at his desires—no one can do otherwise." (although even in context this is just a story someone's telling and not necessarily true, it's certianly in line with how the divine is perceived in the rest of the book)
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Mar 23, 2013 03:39
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Nakar posted:Also I didn't notice there is no "of" in the title for like three solid months. Substantive comment: I really like a lot of aspects of Long Sun but it's a bit tough to recommend, or re-read, because as it progresses it gets more and more drawn out with little groups of characters slowly roaming the setting looking for other groups and struggling to communicate with each other. I think of it as a symptom of Late Wolfe (or perhaps just Mature Wolfe) work: it becomes obsessed with the subtle tensions of individual conversations at the expense of any sense of energy in the overall plot; too interested in shuffling characters constantly among groups to see how all the permutations of weird personalities interact with each other. Long Sun has a great concept and setup with the ship and the gods and a really likable protagonist in Silk, but it feels like there's not all that much payoff. Short Sun and especially Wizard Knight have some of the same eccentricities as far as conversation obsession but they have a lot more interesting things happening all the way through, in my opinion. Then in later books, like Home Fires and Borrowed Man, the arid focus on conversation intensifies still further and crowds out other aspects of the novels still more. Also (sorry, now I'm just rambling trying to come to grips with why Wolfe's later work doesn't appeal to me as much as his masterpieces) the density of thought-provoking statements in dialogue is huge in New Sun--nearly every conversation has some fascinating element to it--and still well above most authors in Long Sun, Short Sun, and Wizard Knight, but then it drops off more and more in the later books.
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Jul 12, 2017 01:37
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A better way to think about Severian's unreliability is in terms of his stated opinions and the arguments he makes. Because he writes in an educated style about high-minded topics and is rarely challenged by other characters on philosophical points, I think it's easy to assume he's an authorial mouthpiece for Gene Wolfe like certain characters you find in, say, Heinlein. Most notably, he tries a bunch of different ways to wallpaper over the problem of his guild. "But in truth, everyone is a torturer, because..." or the big bad secret of the guild turning out to be they aren't responsible for this screwed up system they're just following orders sheesh. By itself, that's an interesting character take (if you trust that it's not Gene Wolfe fetishizing torture, as many people on the Internet have thought), but what makes it really great is from scattered references we do get a solid picture that author-Severian has turned totally against torture and his guild. He knows it was wrong but still feels some lingering guilt about breaking its rules and still feels defensive over his complicity in what they did. It's wonderfully complex. As for the Alzabo Soup podcast, I think they've done a good job pointing out how basically every philosophical argument Severian makes is hugely flawed, something I didn't notice the first time I read the book even though I feel certain Wolfe intended readers to notice. Their insistence on keeping tabs on a propaganda reading of the story that is both implausible (much of the narrative clearly makes Severian look bad) and doesn't add any real literary value is annoying, but they put a ton of time and effort into giving a super-niche podcast really high production values so if that's how they want to do it more power to 'em.
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Mar 30, 2019 01:27
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Did I miss hints other than him appearing and disappearing in front of everyone's noses constantly? However the first chapter of Calde of the Long Sun features Quetzal in full vampire mode, insisting on consuming only "beef tea", applying cosmetics, managing how others see him through elaborate means like an intentionally malfunctioning lock, looking at his fangs in the mirror, and just to cap everything off: "For some while he remained before the window, motionless, cosmetics streaming from his face in rivulets of pink and buff, while he contemplated the tamarind he had caused to be planted there twenty years previously. It was taller already than many buildings called lofty; its glossy, rain-washed leaves brushed the windowframe and now even, by the width of a child's hand, sidled into his bedchamber like so many timid sibyls, confident of welcome yet habitually shy. Their parent tree, nourished by his own efforts, was of more than sufficient size now, and a fount of joy to him: a sheltering presence, a memorial of home, the highroad to freedom. Quetzal crossed the room and barred the door, then threw off his sodden robe. Even in this downpour the tree was safer, though he could fly." The one thing you mentioned that I don't think there's any way to know is that he's an alien from the destination planets but if I remember correctly on my first read I had a hazy but pretty good understanding of the rest by the time I got to the end of Nightside. By Wolfe standards I'd call that unusually clear. I think the real point of it all is to establish Quetzal as this ambiguous monster and then as a closing twist it turns out the promised land Silk has worked so hard to get people to is no paradise but full of the devils he feared. But of course all this is meant to set up Short Sun, not be fully satisfying in and of itself.
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Jun 1, 2019 04:37
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Gaius Marius posted:Gotta get on that long/short sun train
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Feb 1, 2022 22:02
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Speaking of problematic female love interests, does anyone have a theory as to what is going on with Hyacinth in Book of the Long Sun? Specifically Silk's undying-love-at-first-sight thing. Horn of all people says he finds it inexplicable, which suggests Wolfe is doing it "on purpose". My best guess used to be that it was supposed to be some sort of "Christ's love for the Church" analogy, but with Alzabo Soup moving slowly through Long Sun, they made it seem like Silk fell instantly in love with her while she was possessed by Kypris. That's a bit more understandable since she's the goddess of love. So is it a bait and switch: well, I sort of couldn't help falling in love with you while you were someone else, so now being Silk I'm going to be loyal no matter who you really are?
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Feb 6, 2022 19:59
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afflictionwisp posted:... I haven't read Long Sun in a few years but I have no memory of this. Did I miss something absurdly obvious or is this one of those super cryptic things that Wolfe puts everywhere? One more point about Hyacinth: I see Silk as an experiment on Wolfe's part in making a nearly-perfectly-good character (though arguably his near-perfection comes not from Silk the guy who really existed but from Horn's adoring hagiography) and therefore expect all his major quirks to relate back to that. So it's unsatisfying to think he just got brainwashed somehow into loving Kypris/Hyacinth. One possibility, though, is that Wolfe felt Silk's love for Hyacinth is more perfect the more she is unworthy of it, so she's unlikeable and seemingly a poor match for a man of Silk's education. Again there is a religious connection here; Wolfe would have been very familiar with biblical allusions to Jesus as a long-suffering groom who has perfect love for an extremely flawed and unworthy bride (humanity, basically).
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Feb 7, 2022 04:35
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Your Gay Uncle posted:A friend that I turned on to the Shadow of the Torturer series is just starting the Long Sun series of books and had a question that I really had no answer for. He asked me if Gene Wolfe wrote the Short Sun series knowing in advance that it was actually being written by Horn after the the Whorl got to Blue and Green. I have no idea. I think I might just email Marc Aramini, seems like something he'd know.
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Feb 19, 2022 23:10
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Wizard Knight is not the best Wolfe series but it's my favorite. I find it very rich. Lots of really fun concepts and scenes, a lot of thought-provoking material on morality and obligation, and...alas...a lot of sequences that go on too long and dialogue that circles frustratingly around what's important without ever quite engaging with it (oh well, it's late Wolfe, what are you going to do). I find the cosmology, a mashup of Norse mythology and Neoplatonism, to be delightful and extremely unique. I always feel like I'm just one more insight from grasping the true nature of Able, his brother, the world, etc. but I never quite get there. Still, this is the one Wolfe book where it feels rewarding to me to launch into Druissi-style theorycrafting. My theory of it all is that the levels of the world below ours represent the subconscious. The Aelf are our potentially positive desires, the dragons are our inner demons, and the Most Low God is reptilian nature, fallen human nature. Skai is human-created ideals of courage, institutional religion, etc. Kleos and Elysion are heaven and God respectively. This is why the Aelf should "worship" us, our desires should serve us, not vice versa. Anyway this explains a lot of the book but doesn't quite line up. "Disiri" is desire and appears as many different girls to Able because she's his imagination of love, great, so...uh...he gives his erotic imagination his blood and then they go to Kleos? Maybe this is just meant to represent Able's willingness to sacrifice for the ideal of love, a Christlike virtue that human society can't understand(represented by the Valfather who doesn't approve of what Able is doing). As an aside maybe my most controversial theory is that Wolfe intended for attentive readers to know exactly what he means with all his books (on the second read at least), but he wasn't good at estimating what readers would pick up and didn't have buddies to read things beforehand, so he usually errs too far toward the opaque, and unfortunately editors just go along without getting him to fix it (except for the time they made him write Urth of the New Sun).
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Apr 16, 2023 22:12
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Levitate posted:I wondered a bit how much of that was him still being a kid inside an adult body As time goes on and he ascends to the realm of the gods, he truly grows up, learns what honor and virtue really are, and becomes a good and wise person. The risky part is us spending so much time with Abel while he's being a huge rear end in a top hat, the maturation process is a typical coming of age thing. But because it's Gene Wolfe and typical bores him, he puts it entirely off-screen between the two books and probably at least half the people who read it (including me the first time I suspect) are too confused to notice he's acting very differently in the Wizard.
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Jul 15, 2023 00:08
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Just finished Christopher Ruocchio's Empire of Silence. If you haven't heard of it (I hadn't until very recently), this is basically a Quentin Tarantino approach to writing a book: constant references to better books. Most people catch the overt "homages" to Dune and The Name of the Wind but there's an absolute ton of Book of the New Sun references in it as well. I guess I will use spoiler tags for a quick list in case someone wants to find them themselves but there's nothing that spoils either Wolfe or this guy's book, just off the top of my head: frequent use of words like "necropolis" and "peltast", the book's closing talk to the reader, thinly reworded thought bubbles like the invention of symbols and the main character reciting the types of obedience to authority, a character named "Saltus", and late in the story, there's even a female prisoner facing torture who the main character wants to disobey the rules and give a merciful death to, probably more I'm forgetting. The author doesn't seem to have read any Wolfe besides BotNS or else I'm sure there'd be some Silkisms in here too. I had surprisingly mixed feelings about the book. On one hand, as a matter of craft this book is far below what it's referencing in plot, character, and prose so it mostly just made me wish I was reading one of those books. Except for The Name of the Wind, which I didn't like, and at first enjoyed that here the smugness is almost entirely gone, but in its place is a character I disliked for totally different reasons. It's also depressing to think some people's first exposure to prominent BotNS motifs is going to be this debased version. And yet...it is kind of a good feeling to read a book where the author is kind of winking and nudging you, in effect saying "hey, Book of the New Sun rules, am I right?" Most modern SF/F books show no visible Wolfe influence at all, whereas here it's right next to Dune and so on. It's also pretty incredible how densely he has pieced together these references from such different stories. And it does give me some more appreciation of Wolfe to see a far less talented (and, to be fair, also far less opaque) author trying to use some of the same ideas.
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Aug 30, 2023 04:23
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Perhaps relevant to some of the recent posts here, saw recently that Jo Walton and Ada Palmer are co-writing a novel called Wrath of Abaia. Wolfe didn't invent the term "Abaia" of course but that's got to be a conscious reference. Thematically there seems to be some resonance as well:Ada Palmer posted:It's a very hopepunk project, dealing with future politics, Climate Crisis aftermath, biological and planetary custodianship, and the connection between the dream of space colonization and Earth's destructive colonial past, and ways we can address and rehabilitate the dream of space in anticolonial ways. The world build was a ton of fun to work on, especially the future politics plus stuff with disability & future medicine and A.I. civil rights, and it's really fun working with Jo on it, who is so much faster that me at getting words down on the page, and great at such vivid characters.
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Oct 8, 2023 21:17
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Hammer Bro. posted:Anyone here have good to say about Palmer's Terra Ignota?
It's not for everyone. The Mycroft narrator voice is very strong and Palmer is unapologetic about incorporating all her interests whether or not, strictly speaking, they maybe ought to be there. The overall tone is pretty consistent so if you didn't like the first one I'm not sure the rest are going to change your mind, but the plot IMO is pretty well constructed and though I have lots of nitpicks with some of the choices she makes with the ending, she ties everything together at the end the way she wants to and it all makes sense and was planned well from the beginning. The fourth and final book, in particular, has some really standout sequences in its first half that really reward readers who get that far. I think everyone who's enough of a Wolfe fan to be in this thread ought to at least try it if they haven't yet. There's not many other authors out there so obviously in dialogue with him and we're not getting any more Wolfe novels.
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Oct 17, 2023 03:19
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anilEhilated posted:I enjoyed Too Like the Lightning up until it went full on on the de Sade sex club conspiracy. Is there more of that in the following books?
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Oct 17, 2023 15:42
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I just want to express the view that In Green's Jungles is just amazing and for me justifies a lot of the sloggy parts of later Long Sun and OBW. Unfortunately I didn't like the last book nearly as much but not in a way that invalidates what came before. That part of On Blue's Waters is awful and I don't know why Wolfe insists on exploring that both there, Claw of the Conciliator, etc. But that's the low point of Short Sun from a reading perspective if that helps, I'm pretty sure.
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Nov 30, 2023 01:40
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MeatwadIsGod posted:I disliked Long Sun enough by the end that I don't know whether I'll ever get around to Short Sun. Wolfe's style seemed to morph around this time into being way more dry and expository compared to his earlier stuff that I've read. I think as he got older Wolfe got really interested in conversations with lots of subtext. That's something Vance did really well, but Wolfe, though a genius in some ways, frequently is just wrong about what readers are going to be able to follow, so as he loads up more and more subtext on to conversations they get more weird and inscrutable. It doesn't help that, to speculate based on some very vague comments, after he wrote Book of the New Sun David Hartwell and the others are Tor were like, "this guy's a genius" and basically didn't think they were worthy of touching the work he turned in. So maybe editors were keeping him more in check before that (though Castleview and even Fifth Head might argue otherwise, they're still plenty obscure). I don't know anything about his writing process really but I think he really needed beta readers and must not have had them.
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Nov 30, 2023 03:40
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I've never found anyone's grand unifying theories to be satisfying and don't have one of my own but here's a few things I think. Long Sun:
Short Sun:
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Dec 22, 2023 04:26
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mellonbread posted:Working on Castleview now. It feels like a mix of Devil in a Forest (teenage protagonists face a supernatural threat in an isolated community where the authorities are powerless) and Land Across (vampires and general vibe). It's not my favorite so far but I'm interested to see how all the pieces fit together.
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Apr 19, 2024 22:25
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