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Someone please tell me what the hell happened at the end of the second Latro book. It sounds like there was a slave uprising or something, but I can't find anything historical to match it and I couldn't work it out from the book. I doubt I could handle reading it a second time.
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Sep 6, 2011 16:26
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Some people just seem to react to TBotNS with vitriolic hate. I found your review amusing, but it reminds me of my friends. Some thought it was the coolest thing they'd ever read, and some thought it was the worst heap of poo poo every written, and there was no pattern to who thought which. One friend in particular is really into ultra-confusing non-linear fantasy like Erikson, and he thought it was awful. One can't stand fantasy and thought it was amazing. I know two people with masters degrees in english literature, and one says it's his favourite book every written, the other one thinks it's terrible, and they both like fantasy. It just seems to have a really polarizing effect on people. Personally I really enjoy the pacing and the way the story flies in weird directions all the time, and those meaningless stories in the middle are probably my favourite part of it as a whole, especially the retarded rework of the minotaur myth. But then, I also don't enjoy some of Wolfe's other stuff because it feels like pointlessly-over-dense masturbation and I can't break through the wall to actually enjoy it. Wolfe is some kind of chaos-god sent to test us.
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Sep 12, 2011 01:09
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The Book of the New Sun is the book, Shadow and Claw is the first two acts of it, so no, he hasn't read it. His opinion was smug but far from vitriolic, are you aware that you are posting on something awful dot com? I disagree with the book standing on its own merits argument. It really varies from series to series. Sticking within fantasy, the Malazan books are clearly episodic because each new story contains a host of new characters and has a series of resolutions, even though the larger story remained unresolved. The Song of Ice and Fire books, the first three books were obviously a single story arc, with the mysteries from the begging of the first book being neatly solved at the end of the third book, and so far it feels like books 4-7 will be the second arc. The Book of the New Sun is very clearly one book if you go by the vibe of it, in this same way. And it's difficult to say this without spoiling it, so I'll just give up. I assume BananaNutkins is not going to finish the series, so it's not chronologically linear. It's a time travelling headfuck with a narrator who's continuously lying to you, and you can't understand the point of anything that's happened at the start of the story yet. 02-6611-0142-1 fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Sep 12, 2011 |
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Sep 12, 2011 05:11
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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. It's been awhile since I read the series so some of this stuff might not be perfectly accurate: Severian is making lots of poo poo up, and the more carefully you read it the more you'll be able to pick up points where he contradicts himself, and from there it's your duty to work out what he omitted or changed, and why he did it. Severian also gets a glimpse of the future at two different points of the story, and if you think about it, they present two mutually exclusive futures. What did Severian do between those two points that changed the future so much? There's a lot of weird intertextual stuff going on. The names of the all the human characters are from the Bible, but the names of all the alien characters are from Roman mythology. There's only one exception to this rule, so one of the characters you thought human is probably actually a cacogen, somehow. You should look up all the the character names, for a start. Most of the sub-stories within the novel seem to be mixtures of two or more greek/roman/biblical/whatever myths as we know them now, blended up until the meaning is lost.
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Mar 12, 2012 07:15
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I'd simply forgotten. It's been awhile. I knew it was something *like* that.
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Mar 14, 2012 01:05
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Levitate posted:I still don't really know what I'm supposed to think about the Latro books There are things about them that I enjoyed, but you need to be a really hardcore ancient history buff to get the most out of them, I think. I *thought* I knew a lot about that period of time until I read the first two books and they were nearly completely incomprehensible. 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.
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Nov 14, 2012 22:13
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Oh, awesome, thanks! I've been wondering about that for a long time. Maybe I will even try the third book.
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Nov 15, 2012 10:21
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DFu4ever posted:A bit of a necro quote, but I am left feeling pretty blah after finishing the first book of the BoTNS series. 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. It's actually the greatest piece of science fiction ever written, but if you aren't enjoying it now, you probably won't enjoy it later. I struggle to think of another piece of sci-fi that works so well on so many levels at once.
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Feb 27, 2013 12:41
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BuckarooBanzai posted:Example? He insists that he's not sleeping with Thecla through the first book, then later on he fondly looks back at all the sex he had with Thecla.
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Mar 3, 2013 20:44
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I love the idea that the shadow children are a visual metaphor for a brain parasite.
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Apr 4, 2013 11:01
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The really confusing bit is at the end of Soldier of Arete.
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Jun 13, 2013 22:50
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The Insect Court posted:Any part in particular? The slave revolt. I still have only the vaguest idea what happened after a bunch of research. There's a discussion of it on page 4 of this thread. It doesn't help that it's based on something that might have really happened if you read between the lines but there isn't a lot of solid evidence for.
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Jun 21, 2013 15:48
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