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Lester Shy posted:I'm 90% of the way through Claw. I'm really enjoying the experience, but there are three little "episodes" I've read that left me completely baffled. I've never read any Wolfe before, I know nothing about Christian/Catholic lore, and it's been ages since I've read anything remotely challenging. Talos's play is, as he says, a dramatization of the Book of the New Sun, a lost religious text that he claims to have read. It's about the end of the current era and the beginning of a new age, plus some veiled criticism of the autarch. Consider it kind of a prophecy of how things are supposed to go when the world is reborn and the new sun comes.
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Jan 24, 2018 01:13
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Finally finished Fifth Head. “VRT” was really cool and did a nice job tying everything together while still being plenty mysterious. I agree with whoever said it’s a good intro to Wolfe. I read the first two parts of BOTNS a while back but got a little lost towards the end so I decided to table it and try to re-read later. What do people here think of Peace? I picked that up and plan to start it next before giving BOTNS another shot.
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Jan 25, 2018 19:32
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Shark Sandwich posted:What do people here think of Peace? I picked that up and plan to start it next before giving BOTNS another shot. Peace is excellent, it's not science fiction or fantasy. If anything, it's easier to follow on a narrative level than Cerberus, but still highly representative of his style, methodology and subject matter, even if it's not his usual genre.
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Jan 25, 2018 20:33
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Finished Return to the Whorl last night and so have finally closed out The Solar Cycle. That is a goddamn heavy ending. OK so here's my hot take. A Typhon sent the Whorl to Blue and Green. Like the ship in Urth, time passed oddly for them. When the Cacogens banned human expansion, they plucked the Whorl from reality. To the passengers and crew, it felt like 300 years, but even that was longer than they were supposed to have been on board. They are eventually released into the universe of BotNS. Technically they arrive before Severian has brought the New Sun, but the Cacogens by that point basically already know the Severian of that universe is going to succeed. And the real expansion isn't the arrival on Blue/Green where they might fail, but when the Whorl is repaired and leaves again. That coincides much closer with Severian having brought the New Sun. The Severian that Silk visits may or may not be the Severian in BotNS. There's nothing to say that the astral projection brings them to places in their own universe. There's never an example for instance of someone being visited by them and then encountering them later and asking what the hell that was about. The closest we get is Mucor, but she's doing something entirely different to what Silk and the inhumi do. When Wolfe says Green is Urth, I take it more figuratively. It's an ancient planet worn down by the crush of time that's witnessed the rise and fall of multiple civilizations. Ultimately none of that matters because that's just the plot. This book is about so much more than that. Of all the fantasy authors that ever wanted to write a holy text for their universe, I think this is the only guy who ever accomplished it.
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Jan 26, 2018 00:48
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Severian in stitches! I completely missed the contradiction resolved by your first italicized words but it's obvious as soon as you mention it and I do the barest amount of mental math. Gonna delightfully have to reread that whole cycle again at some point. Except maybe Urth. That one hasn't done it for me yet.
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Jan 26, 2018 19:02
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Finished BotNS last night, and I'm really puzzled. I could hardly put the book down, but now that it's over, I'm not sure how I feel about it. Mostly I think I'm too dumb to get it. I don't have anything interesting to say, but I wish I hadn't seen the words "unreliable narrator" a thousand times in all the years this has been on my to-read list. Instead of discovering the deception myself, I was second guessing Severian's narration from the start, expecting him to outright lie regularly, which never really happens.
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Jan 26, 2018 19:51
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As mentioned a few times here, it's important to remember that "unreliable" doesn't necessarily equate to "lying." He could be unreliable because he actually is insane, as he suggests, or maybe that suggestion is just his grandiose self-importance trying to find an excuse for the fact that he can't recall things perfectly even though he's convinced himself (and tried to convince the reader) that he has perfect memory. One of the things I find most interesting in reading people's reaction to Severian is that, while most people accept that his narration is unreliable, they take his assertion that he has perfect memory at face value. Generally speaking, the more people feel the need to remind you of something, the more you should question that and ask yourself why it is so important to them that they remind you of it. My read has always been that he does not have a perfect memory at all, but that his self-conception depends on his having it, so he twists the truth and essentially lies to himself, and therefore to the reader, to make it seem as if he does. In other words, whatever lying that happens is not someone with a perfect memory lying to cover up something he knows about, but instead is someone with an imperfect memory lying to cover up the holes (insert Trump metaphor here). There are other places where Wolfe has Severian tell us something that, in my mind at least, is meant to be disbelieved by the reader. One of my favorite examples from the scene where he performs his services on Morwenna. The rival woman tells us after Morwenna's death that she knew Morwenna was innocent because she was too careful to be caught. Then the old woman inhales her flowers and dies. Severian assumes that Morwenna poisoned the flowers as she walked to the scaffold, but I always thought it was clear that the old woman poisoned the husband, framed Morwenna, and then commits suicide with the flowers after seeing her revenge.
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Jan 26, 2018 22:07
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A big part of Severian's unreliability is that he himself doesn't understand what he's seeing a lot of the time and he's trying to relate events that are beyond his comprehension through the lens of his personal interpretation. Like the fight with the Alzabo is crystal clear because that makes sense to Severian through his experiences and frame of reference, but Talos's plays are super bizarre and muddied because Severian himself didn't get what was happening at the time, in no small part because he was in the show and not able to give it the whole of his attention. But since we've mentioned, "If you have to mention something regularly then it probably isn't true," what kind of monster was Silk actually?
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Jan 27, 2018 04:55
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wizard knight chat: so, no one doubts at this point it was garvaon who killed gilling, right? the angrborn are such unlikable pieces of poo poo, so it's hard to fault him in any way for it. except for thiazi. i don't know what's going on with him, but it seems like his intellectual pursuits have made him very un-angr-like. but it could just be his moral turpitude isn't as obvious, so i wonder if i'm missing something. edit: as I think about it, it seems likely it's thiazi's experience in the Room of Lost Loves that has made him different. we find out that the angrborn are never loved, even by their mothers; thiazi entering the room may have either allowed him to see what it is, or to realise there's something direly wrong with the angrborn and he is then seeking to escape his nature. note when gilling is wearing that ring that idnn says changes colour depending on the strength of the wearer and gilling says they should give it to thiazi to see if that's true and all the angrborn laugh - clearly he's viewed as failing to evince the virtues of the angrborn, which as far as i can tell are to be nasty, brutish and large. Neurosis fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Feb 5, 2018 |
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Feb 5, 2018 01:57
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on wk reread i jsut noticed something i hadn't before: it seems the giants of winter and old night are from deep space. i find this curious - i can't recall any other hints of anything sci fi-like in the book (arguably kullili, i guess, being a gestalt mind of worms, but that idea might have its source in sci fi but does not seem to me something that is necessarily sci fi). now, there's too little evidence to suppose a sci-fi broader cosmos veiled with fantasy, and too much that seems to admit of no possible sci fi-explanation but for the most grotesque stretching of clarke's third law. nonetheless, i thought it was interesting and a nice little touch that reinforces that these giants aren't just evil but have alien psychologies.
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Feb 10, 2018 07:52
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What are the textual indications of that? I love W/K, the world is just so vivid and interesting to picture mentally. It is food for one's minds eye. And it's depiction of the lowest realm is truly chilling. I'm most of the way through A Borrowed Man now, and I'm enjoying it, even if I'm not finding it totally wonderful. It's got some of the noir, 1950s movie feel of something like An Evil Guest, combined with his obsession with the concept of slavery that we see in Pirate Freedom or The Return of the Whip. It really does seem like a way of exploring what it would be like to be a slave in a Roman-empire way in a world not too dissimilar from our own.
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Feb 16, 2018 23:25
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CountFosco posted:What are the textual indications of that? later on in the wizard able has a paragraph about the bodies of the giants in which he says that they needed warmth and size for being from far beyond the sun's warmth, and that where they were from the sun was no more than a star, though a particularly bright one. ah, here we go, found it: quote:“Know you . . .” Hela was panting in a way that recalled Gylf her tongue lolling from her mouth. “Why you name . . . My sire’s folk Frost Giants?” finished my wk reread yesterday. i could've done with another two series in this setting, i love the mix of fantasy and myth, and the optimism of able's character progression is great. the action was pretty good, too, which is something i don't think of any of wolfe's other work. there are as with all wolfe a bunch of things i'm uncertain of, but one that bothered me particularly when we met idnn for the last time: did mani die off-screen? i'm thinking maybe from natural causes. some time had passed since we last saw him, he physically is just a cat, he'd had his discussion of what would happen to him when he died with able as a spirit/cat fusion... but i couldn't spot any evidence other than his absence. i doubt he'd leave idnn, so maybe that's enough. the other one that's bothered me about the wk since the first time i read it was the relationship between earth and myrthgarthr. it doesn't seem that it's just a case of people having direct analogues - able seems to have one and bold berthold does, but gerda was just gerda when able put his helm on and not ben's girlfriend. another thing i realised when we met the lothurlings: the lothurling king is descended from a dragon hybrid, like arnthor. the minister says in the stilted way they talk that the descendant of the dragon 'becomes the dragon' when he mates. so i guess we know the queen was wise to not consummate her marriage, and possibly why arnthor would let her refuse him, despite being king and arnthor having a mean and dominant streak. Neurosis fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Feb 17, 2018 |
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Feb 17, 2018 06:01
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An artist named Len Davis has an exhibition with some pieces that use pages from a copy of Shadow of the Torturer as a medium, I was skeptical but it turned out to be pretty neat. Definitely novel to see Wolfe's work used in a context like this. http://www.eccalifornian.com/article/eclectic-work-len-davis-now-showing-grossmont-college%E2%80%99s-hyde-art-gallery I saw it last week and took some pictures - https://imgur.com/a/7vbGK The SOTT stuff starts about halfway through with 'We Were Here.'
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Feb 17, 2018 22:52
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I finished my first re-read of Book of the New Sun a week or so ago. A lot more clicked for me this time around, and I more or less followed the entire narrative without ever feeling utterly lost at any point. I did get lost during the second Talos play, and slightly lost at the very end, but I wasn't totally lost like I was for large portions of my first read-through. I really enjoyed certain parts of the story, for instance the encounter with Typhon was really interesting to me. I almost wanted to see an alternate book where he took Typhon up on his offer, because it would have been cool to see how he would have retaken his spot as ruler of Urth after having been asleep so long. I also really liked Agia as a character this time around, and I thought it was cool that she ended up replacing Vodalus. Somehow I didn't pick that up at all on my first read. I still felt really confused about what Severian actually is and how he did all the things he did with or without the Claw. I have a pretty vague impression of it, but it just kind of slips away from me if I think too hard about it. The nature of Severian got kind of tied up to me with what the hierodules are, so that ended up feeling fairly confusing as well. Sometimes I wish the narrative would have just been a bit tighter, and all of the "alternative universe and timelines" stuff would have just been dropped, because the world is compelling enough as just "this is what things are like after the Earth is billions of years old." Having the blackhole in the sun instead of just "The sun is old and dying" feels kind of like a step further than needed to me, but without all that extra stuff it probably wouldn't be what it is. I don't really know what I'm arguing or saying, and I find it really difficult to articulate my feelings on the books after my re-read. Either way I really liked it and think it's one of the best book(s) I've ever read.
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Feb 17, 2018 23:17
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Just remember -- the people who tell Severian about the "alternative universe and timelines," like the dude in the cool time-traveling tower, are not necessarily right either! Maybe they're all just misunderstanding the nature of time.
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Feb 18, 2018 06:36
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it's not just alternative, but sequential (so much as that can make sense when it's not clear there is time outside the universe), with the conceit being our current universe is itself subsequent to the botns, and that's how the book came to us in the modern day. the wizard knight has something kind of similar in that conceit - the book is a long letter from the protagonist to his brother, his brother being in our earth. the protagonist says michael (as in, the archangel, who is also a character) found a way to get communication from the norse-like cosmos where the protagonist is to his brother, which seems to be by way of inspiring gene wolfe to write the story.
Neurosis fucked around with this message at 10:18 on Feb 18, 2018 |
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Feb 18, 2018 10:16
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i'm one third through shadow on my... fourth or fifth reread. i still don't understand who or what valeria is about. i remember having some vague thoughts from the atrium of time she could be disjointed from her source, but never saw anything confirming that. i also remember her marrying someone who might've been related in some way to severian after severian vanished to hang out with those insectoid hiero fucks, but there was no particualr meaning to that.
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Feb 23, 2018 14:16
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I just finished The Book of the New Sun and it has me reminiscing about it a lot which is good. The world building and use of of language was great and I really appreciate Wolfe's "show, don't tell" approach. But other than appreciating the writing itself, I found the plot...lacking something? Severian stumbles from one metaphor to another which leads me to think that we're reading a version of the brown book he carries everywhere, but wasn't entertaining or enlightening. I've also got a "thing" about time travel, so when it became obvious it was in play, I was really disappointed. One of the great aspects of the book was the mysterious quality to everything, due in large part to Severian's explaining modern technology in terms he understands -- yet beneath it all is a knowable universe based on physical principles/laws. Once time travel came up, it turned into "magic wand time" which was a shame because it was a real buzzkill. Yes, yes, any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic, but in this case it was pretty clearly explained as being straight-up time travel (as opposed to something Severian understood to be time travel) which I found to be a cheap crutch in an otherwise smart book. AARP LARPer fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Feb 26, 2018 |
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Feb 26, 2018 06:25
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The plot will make a lot more sense next time you read it, especially if you read Urth of the New Sun first, which spells out what all of the events were building towards and that many were arranged, but not exactly how they all relate Edit also the time travel isn't quite what it appears in that it does have stable rules governing it which aren't total nonsense - one being that causation runs in both directions Neurosis fucked around with this message at 07:50 on Feb 26, 2018 |
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Feb 26, 2018 07:15
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I've always thought of Wolfe as more of an "Imply, don't Show" guy than a "Show, don't Tell" guy. BotNS (and most of Wolfe's work) gets better with every re-read, and I'd actually argue against reading Urth of the New Sun until you're not having fun with Book anymore. I didn't terribly enjoy Urth, and it spoiled some things I probably would've joyously discovered on my own had I not picked it up when I did. The corpus of Book was written as a single work and had at least the first draft done before it was picked up for publishing. Urth was a condition placed upon Wolfe by his editor (or someone publishing-related) -- in exchange for them publishing his tricksy opus mostly as-is they required that he write one more volume explaining some of what happened in more concrete terms. I'm probably biased against it (though I don't know if I knew all this when I first read Urth), but to me Urth feels like it lacks the artistic motivation that Book had. And really most of Wolfe's work.
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Feb 26, 2018 19:19
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So how badly did Severian really abuse Thecla and Agia? I'm almost done with my Shadow read and he's casually mentioned having beaten Agia in the past tense and as a separate incident from when he explicitly depicts striking her. And Agia's dress having been torn to expose her breast? Sure it was a tree as you say Severian, that's believable - I think this is one of the few times I'm confident Severian is straight up lying, the other that leaps to mind being him saying he didn't sleep with Thecla. And as for the Thecla abuse - he mentions at the end Agia trying to claw his eyes as Thecla used to do. He sure as hell never talked about that when he was writing about his time in the Matachin Tower. Lying about his own abuse of what would become himself is certainly something.
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Mar 1, 2018 07:26
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Couldn't it be that Thecla tried to claw his eyes out after the torture device, as she was going insane?
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Mar 1, 2018 14:30
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Yes. The events Severian describes involve a relatively fully explained line of events from Thecla in the Revolutionary to her suicide, but clearly he could be lying or eliding. The evidence against Thecla attacking him only after he torture is that the effect of the Revolutionary directs self-harm, and in fact Severian already has to intervene to stop her hurting herself within hours, and that the Revolutionary causes people to grow progressively weaker, and it only takes a month - so there wouldn't be much of a window for her to attack him, and from the way he described it it happened more than once. And we can maybe suppose Severian wouldn't omit it because it doesn't make him look bad - though equally it could just be painful to write about Thecla attacking him after being tortured (and for him to relieve it, given that seems to be how his memory works). So it's ambiguous, though I retain suspicions things between them were rather more fractious than he describes.
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Mar 1, 2018 15:14
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Is it also possible that he is describing Thecla attacking herself but he's confusing his pronouns?
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Mar 1, 2018 16:19
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Severian? The Torturer??!!
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Mar 1, 2018 17:01
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I'm on my first read through of these books and trying to avoid spoilers in this thread...but just hit the chapter in the jungle where Severian describes the story of Domnina and The Fish....what the hell did i just read? Will stuff start making more sense later or does this pretty much require a second read through?
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Mar 2, 2018 06:32
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Pegnose Pete posted:I'm on my first read through of these books and trying to avoid spoilers in this thread...but just hit the chapter in the jungle where Severian describes the story of Domnina and The Fish....what the hell did i just read? Will stuff start making more sense later or does this pretty much require a second read through? the stories require a second readthrough to 'get' other than the surface level that they're usually mashups of long-forgotten stuff like the jungle book and the remus/romulus myth. unless you're much more perspicacious than i was when i first read these books (which to be sure was when i was 17 so you very well may be) at any rate.
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Mar 2, 2018 10:02
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Pegnose Pete posted:I'm on my first read through of these books and trying to avoid spoilers in this thread...but just hit the chapter in the jungle where Severian describes the story of Domnina and The Fish....what the hell did i just read? Will stuff start making more sense later or does this pretty much require a second read through?
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Mar 2, 2018 10:12
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That story explains how their FTL travel works
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Mar 2, 2018 16:40
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You can plan for several more interjected stories that don't "make sense" in the context of the main narrative. Wolfe isn't much of a capital-p Plot guy. There definitely IS a strong plot but it's not really what drives the story. He instead places an enormous weight on symbolism which is rather unique for SFF fiction.
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Mar 2, 2018 16:45
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Severian is literally a professional abuser.
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Mar 2, 2018 21:56
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We see weirdly little of Father Inire for how important he probably is But then again that's kinda par for the course for the really big players. We just HEAR about Abaia
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Mar 3, 2018 01:35
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angel opportunity posted:That story explains how their FTL travel works Yeah I figured that. the symbolism stuff is really interesting and I can guess after what it means but I imagine things will be clearer later or on a second read through. Severian interjecting with random biblical-ish stories, and all the stuff happening in the gardens made me realize ok literally any time something like this happens it’s going to be a metaphor. I have a literature degree so this stuff isn’t totally lost on me, but I took a break from reading as a hobby for maybe five or six years now so my brain is struggling to kick back into gear, haha. Enjoying my time with the books and should make decent progress through Torturer today.
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Mar 3, 2018 04:44
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i still have no idea what the thing with the heavy tread in the mines under saltus is. i've seen a few theories and none of them are very satisfactory or interesting. while scanning the Urth Mailing List for discussion I saw someone suggesting dorcas might've killed jolenta, given her weird protestations of a vampire bat - i hope not, since dorcas seems to be one of the more morally sound characters in the sea of iniquity that is the Commonwealth (jonas is maybe the only unambiguous one i can recall that we spend any time with).
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Mar 6, 2018 08:14
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So I'm giving Peace another whirl (I tried years ago but it was before I really learned how to read Wolfe or learn to appreciate the pastoral) I'm about a hundred pages in and um, is the narrator a serial killer? Because he brushed off a kid dying of his "spinal injuries" a couple dozen pages after mentioning that they fought on the steps and he keeps making references to things like being willing to kill his aunt's dogs or burning toy soldiers. 
ManlyGrunting fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Mar 20, 2018 |
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Mar 20, 2018 01:48
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I mean, there's no way to answer that without massive spoilers, but --------------------yes--------------------.
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Mar 20, 2018 02:09
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yeah that's a popular theory. i buy it. he's a ghost locked in some kind of purgatory for his sins, it seems. i love that that there's a heavy hint he's a ghost is given away in the first page or two where he says something like a falling tree awoke a ghost in the area or something like that.
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Mar 20, 2018 02:16
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Neurosis posted:yeah that's a popular theory. i buy it. he's a ghost locked in some kind of purgatory for his sins, it seems. i love that that there's a heavy hint he's a ghost is given away in the first page or two where he says something like a falling tree awoke a ghost in the area or something like that. The thing under your spoiler is pretty clear-cut. The first sentence of the book mentions a tree planted by "Eleanor Bold" fell and woke up Weer. About 300 pages later, Weer has a conversation with Eleanor (who is going under her maiden name, which hides it a bit from the reader) about her plan to plant trees over the graves of the town's most notable citizens. Weer's one of them, and the tree falling is what's spurred his spirit to narrating the book to the reader. The whole fable at the end of the book basically presages how Weer is going to be wandering around his "house" forever. The moral of the last fable is that only through accepting your sins and making a sincere repentance of them can you get to Heaven - Weer isn't able to do this, and instead the book starts to loop back into his childhood memories at the end, starting the whole cycle over. One of my favorite little details from the book is that Weer has fake paintings on all his windows to make it so that even at night, it looks like its daylight outside. It's both a tell for his immense capacity of self-deception AND a Proust reference.
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Mar 20, 2018 02:25
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Every now and then I get reminded that although he has become my favorite author, I still have not read like half the novels Wolfe wrote, and probably 75% of his short stories. Embarrassingly that includes Peace. I've got Pandora by Holly Hollander sitting on my desk, but after that I'm gonna go for Peace. Having a library a block from where you work, that has almost all of Wolfe's novels, is dope. And having loads more new Wolfe to read is even better. I haven't even read the Soldier books x.x
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Mar 20, 2018 03:51
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Shelve Pandora for now. Peace is my favorite Gene Wolfe novel (and pretty high up on the list of all-time favorites). Only BotNS and FHoC really come close.
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Mar 20, 2018 13:25
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