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The arrival of the new sun floods the world, yes, but this does not necessarily benefit the megatherians. The new sun also brings a dramatically new temperature to the world, perhaps it will warm the seas to a degree that the environment becomes unlivable for them.
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May 14, 2018 03:04
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CountFosco posted:The arrival of the new sun floods the world, yes, but this does not necessarily benefit the megatherians. The new sun also brings a dramatically new temperature to the world, perhaps it will warm the seas to a degree that the environment becomes unlivable for them. IIRC, in the glossary, Abaia is specifically referred to as a "warm water eel".
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May 14, 2018 03:14
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Yes, that would punch quite a hole in my theory.
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May 14, 2018 03:18
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CountFosco posted:Yes, that would punch quite a hole in my theory. They mythological Abaia, that is. But it always sounded like an oddly specific detail to include. Plus the focus on the megatherians' weakness is usually their size, it being enough to collapse then on land.
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May 14, 2018 03:23
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CountFosco posted:The arrival of the new sun floods the world, yes, but this does not necessarily benefit the megatherians. The new sun also brings a dramatically new temperature to the world, perhaps it will warm the seas to a degree that the environment becomes unlivable for them. there's really conflicting information on the new sun and the megatherians. it's often said the new sun will destroy abaia, erebus and the others (i've read someone say there's a fair bit of evidence that erebus is already dead though i haven't seen any myself). but it's said equally as often that those under the sea will survive - baldanders says it immediately before the flood, for example. there are lot of different ways it could go down - they may be literally destroyed by the huge pressures of the ocean movements caused by the white fountain; their hold on humanity may have been broken by the deluge, either because their power base in ascia is broken or because the weaknesses of the commonwealth are gone; possibly aquastor severian could still have some adventures to undertake... there'd be others, i'm sure. i think the megatherians must be the most tantalising puzzle in the botns because they're a substantive bigger-picture villain which is ominous but too obscure on the information we have now to possibly understand. i want to know why they want to enslave (rather than destroy) humanity. the hieros were, after all, doing it for a bigger purpose. but we never get much of a hint of what their end-game is - unless they are associated with the hieros and wiping away the commonwealth lets them now force humanity down the path to create the hieros. speaking of another tantalising puzzle, i was kind of touched by severian's last interactions with valeria. while severian was certainly not sexually loyal to her once he left urth, everything he ever said of her suggested real affection, and his natural but intimate physical contact with her when he last sees her is rather uncharacteristic of him. and she obviously had some affection for him, given the efforts she went to to capture his face as it was when he was young, and that she later married someone who resembled him. in a series where it's difficult to read severian's expressions of affection completely at face value (his love for thecla was weird and adolescent, dorcas he seemed to actually care for but it was a rather messed up relationship; he did seem to genuinely care for jonas as a friend, and palaemon as a father, but he mentions them only rarely), and no one seems to ever regard him with a great deal of warmth, it was nice. but then there are the theories she's related to him and it's incest all the way down l o l so much for that Neurosis fucked around with this message at 05:13 on May 14, 2018 |
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May 14, 2018 05:07
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Certainly agree that the megatherians are one of the most intriguing aspects. I always thought about the struggle in terms of legitimacy. I think once someone mentions that they would trade the Ascians for the Commonwealth in a heartbeat. Sort of like in biblical terms the pact with God is very important, and taking over the Commonwealth would make them the legal successors to that pact. It is quite some time since I last read a bible, but wasn't the promise of the old pact that god would not drown all humans again? And in Christian reckoning that gets superseded by Jesus? Seems relevant. And that is definitely something I've noticed: Severian writes very little about what he really cares about.
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May 14, 2018 07:38
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genericnick posted:Certainly agree that the megatherians are one of the most intriguing aspects. I always thought about the struggle in terms of legitimacy. I think once someone mentions that they would trade the Ascians for the Commonwealth in a heartbeat. Sort of like in biblical terms the pact with God is very important, and taking over the Commonwealth would make them the legal successors to that pact. It is quite some time since I last read a bible, but wasn't the promise of the old pact that god would not drown all humans again? And in Christian reckoning that gets superseded by Jesus? Seems relevant. It wasn't humans specifically, god promised not to kill all life with floods. Genesis 9:11 New International Version I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth."
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May 14, 2018 20:02
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Your Gay Uncle posted:It wasn't humans specifically, god promised not to kill all life with floods. Wolfe got himself out of this pickle in an interview by saying that the universal cycle in BOTNS is NOT the same as the one we're living in. Which is...suspect, given all of the clearly-our-world allusions in the Solar Cycle. quote:JJ: This universe that you set in Briah, or part of it--is that our universe? Or is that a universe that resurrected saints have set up in the world to come as part of the cities that they made? So this puts us in a universe without the Flood, without Christ...but with Allah? Idk. Here's the full interview: https://web.archive.org/web/20140911190904/http://mysite.verizon.net/~vze2tmhh/wolfejbj.html
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May 14, 2018 21:08
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my bony fealty posted:Wolfe got himself out of this pickle in an interview by saying that the universal cycle in BOTNS is NOT the same as the one we're living in. Which is...suspect, given all of the clearly-our-world allusions in the Solar Cycle. there's nothing to say that the universal iterations can't be highly similar. i mean, if they weren't, the hieros would have no reason to think humanity could be led to remaking them in briah. and that we are in a subsequent universal iteration follows from the conceit that wolfe is translating some obscure discovered text. edit: finished urth last night. enjoyed it more than i had on previous reads, probably because in the several years since i last read it i have learned a lot more about reading these kind of texts, as well as literary, political and philosophical background knowledge which gave a lot of things in it new significance. still not as good as the main book, but very good nonetheless and it explains so much! i think the main appeal though was in seeing what severian is like after all these years. a still-flawed but more genuinely thoughtful and moral character than he was in the book. though having said that i don't know if there's anything that can expiate what he did to jolenta... i also read the two short stories from endangered species (and how glad i am many of wolfe's older books are making their way into the kindle store now, including castle of the otter and devil in a forest which i'd never been able to lay my hands on) set on urth. nothing really mind-blowing; the map is a simple story involving eata. though short, following him was a rather different experience than following severian since he is more of a basic rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold character. somewhat refreshing to follow someone who seems to have a good moral compass, given not only severian but how so many characters on urth are avaricious. the cat had a little more to it, focusing on the house absolute and featuring father inire as it does. i still don't quite get what his interest in young women is. while it's definitely creepy there's never anything explicitly sexual. indeed, it would seem strange given he's, well, a loving alien (although maybe one of the human-created species - though we are never given confirmation on what exactly he is, unlike the cumaean who one of the two hieros who follow ossipago tell us is also a hiero). i also found out some of the adventures severian mentions off-handedly in urth later on are things wolfe started writing but abandoned. one being a story about assassins going after ymar, which eventually was apparently incorporated into urth as the assassin that kills valeria, another being about severain being captured and spending a year as an ascian slave. how interesting an adventure that would have been! although i think it would have worked much better as a whole book, maybe taking place in between sword and citadel. he also mentions running from white wolves in the house. i gather these are mirror-monsters of some variety. whenever i see wolves used in wolfe i always assume there'll be something tying it to the author but i guess we'll never see what the significance of the white wolves was intended to be. anyway, onwards to the long sun. Neurosis fucked around with this message at 06:20 on May 15, 2018 |
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May 15, 2018 04:59
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Neurosis posted:there's nothing to say that the universal iterations can't be highly similar. i mean, if they weren't, the hieros would have no reason to think humanity could be led to remaking them in briah. and that we are in a subsequent universal iteration follows from the conceit that wolfe is translating some obscure discovered text. Endangered Species is legitimately my favorite collection of short stories from any author ever. When I Was Ming the Merciless, The Map, In The House of Gingerbread(my personal favorite), Detective of Dreams....god drat that book was amazing. I saw that Thomas Wolfe died today, but the headline just said " Author Wolfe dies" and I was really bummed for like 10 seconds until I read the article .
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May 15, 2018 20:35
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I have nothing intelligent to add to this thread, I just wanted to post about my having learned that Wolfe invented Pringles and his face is the inspiration for the Pringle Can Man and this is kind of bonkers.
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May 20, 2018 06:02
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Yeah, I like to spend my weekends lurking in the chip aisles of grocery stores, accosting people by giving them copies of Book of the New Sun - "SO YOU'RE BUYING PRINGLES DID YOU KNOW GENE WOLFE INVENTED THEM, AND ALSO THIS BOOK, READ IT?"
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May 22, 2018 14:08
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uber_stoat posted:I have nothing intelligent to add to this thread, I just wanted to post about my having learned that Wolfe invented Pringles and his face is the inspiration for the Pringle Can Man and this is kind of bonkers. i've never heard of the face bit. as for the invention of the pringles - i think he invented the machien that cooks them? it's cool, at any rate. i like to think his engineering background carries over into the books in terms of how the puzzles are constructed - that all of those bits we've all been puzzling over for decades will be put together in some masterful interpretation where everything fits neatly. i've read marc aramini say he thinks wolfe did intend his books to be solvable in that way, he just vastly underestimated how hard other people would find the task. there'd still be the evaluative judgments and character stuff to argue over, of course, i'm not saying i want books that are sudoku puzzles rather than literature. also about halfway through nightside and my only comments are: (1) it's amazing how much stuff is told to you almost as plainly as it could be upfront - that there are foetuses with strange properties out there, that gods and people can possess others, that gods appear on computer terminals, for example; and (2) the description of silk breaking into blood's feels like a novelisation of a mission from one of the Thief games.
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May 22, 2018 15:05
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 ...the only truly magical ring this universe would ever know. And really Fredric Baur is more responsible for creating Pringles. After he died in 2008, he was cremated and his ashes were buried in a Pringles can. I am not joking.
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May 22, 2018 18:20
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Action Jacktion posted:
Think I can see a Vanished Person through that ring if I look hard enough. It is most fun to tell people, "did you know he also invented Pringles?", even if it REALLY was just the cooking machine. e: that quote went totally by me until I remembered it's from Urth. That whole sequence of Severian on the deck of the Ship is mindblowing and one of my favorite scenes of any of Wolfe's work. Urth is good. Neurosis posted:i like to think his engineering background carries over into the books in terms of how the puzzles are constructed - that all of those bits we've all been puzzling over for decades will be put together in some masterful interpretation where everything fits neatly. i've read marc aramini say he thinks wolfe did intend his books to be solvable in that way, he just vastly underestimated how hard other people would find the task. there'd still be the evaluative judgments and character stuff to argue over, of course, i'm not saying i want books that are sudoku puzzles rather than literature. Agree with this. Wolfe's books are definitely well-constructed puzzles where every moving piece contributes to some greater whole, no doubt about it. I'm not smart enough to figure them out but I maintain that it doesn't really matter, you can enjoy a Wolfe story at any level that it speaks to you and that objectively "wrong" interpretations of what happened are also ok to hold (uh oh!). Wolfe's biggest strength as a writer is his characters anyhow. He writes really human characters. Long Sun is really cool because it does give you so much, and builds a wonderful world through it, but not really much of what Silk's true nature is and why he was destined to become such a pivotal figure in the Whorl. I think, I need to re-read them. My current grand theory of the Solar Cycle's backstory is heavily informed by Long Sun and where Pas's family, and Pas himself, fall into all of it. Short Sun helps illuminate a lot of it too. my bony fealty fucked around with this message at 01:25 on May 23, 2018 |
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May 22, 2018 23:41
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my bony fealty posted:Wolfe's biggest strength as a writer is his characters anyhow. He writes really human characters. his characters really are good. his protagonists have always been strong - severian is obviously extremely complicated and an easy example, but even his minor characters are pretty solid. this is particularly so, i'm finding, in the long sun - although maybe that's just because his dialogue had reached master level by the time of the long sun. it was good in the new sun, of course, but in the long sun it feels terrifically natural as well as giving each character a distinctive voice. i suspect he uses some kind of basic rule-of-thumb for giving character to minor characters regarding their distinctive characteristics, but the dialogue is much harder to do by formula, so it's impressive. re pas - something which occurred to me: could silk be an embryo that was a clone of pas/typhon, with the intention behind including that embryo being that typhon was to be downloaded into silk when they arrived at the colony? it would certainly give an extra meaning to what happens later on with silk being asked if he would like to be pas, which at the time seems about an AI merger because of some deficiency in pas that was making him unstable. and it's consistent with how typhon rolls in terms of getting his new bodies. and i seem to vaguely recall typhon's head having some wispy yellowish hair, (albeit mostly grey) and we know silk is blonde. edit: and typhon and silk having the same genetic makeup and therefore being similar in abilities and some predispositions such that lead them to power but being so very different in moral value would be consistent with what seems to run through the solar cycle about the free will of moral creatures. though unlike severian silk was already a good man by the time we meet him albeit that would be a difficult thing to always uphold, whereas severian had to struggle towards being good through many choices. it fits thematically, i think, and we know something funny is up with silk's parentage given he has no identifiable father. the old calde is the other possibility, but i don't think the evidence is stronger towards him being silk's father than silk as an embryo implanted in his mother. Neurosis fucked around with this message at 03:55 on May 25, 2018 |
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May 25, 2018 02:21
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Action Jacktion posted:
Those ashes are probably the tastiest thing ever put in a Pringles can
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May 25, 2018 12:07
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One thing that I think Wolfe does really well is depict friendship. Jonas, for example, or many examples from Wizard-Knight.
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May 25, 2018 16:20
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I put off finishing BotNS for a while because I was so engrossed in it I didn’t really want it to end. Last night I sat down and did it. I feel weirdly like I killed a friend.  Gonna take a break and read something else before Urth but man what a weird and wonderful book.
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Jul 13, 2018 17:14
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Marc Aramini wrote something on the Wizard Knight: https://pastebin.com/WZ0QHrRv
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Jul 14, 2018 11:38
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So, about Peace Weer is some horrible amalgamated demon, right? There's a part that mentions when a bad person kills another they become a demon with parts of both or something like that. And it seems like he's killed a bunch of people, starting with Bobby Black when he's young. Is he bad from the beginning or does he kill Bobby Black by accident on the stairs and it starts from there? Weer is haunted and can't be at peace, clearly. Also WTF happened in The Land Across in the end?
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Jul 25, 2018 04:45
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Spite posted:So, about Peace Weer isn't haunted, he's doing the haunting.  I should add his time of postmortem unrest due to his sins may be at an end by the end of the book - and yes, he's killed at least a couple I can remember, although it's been a while, with the two that jump to mind in my memory being the guy in the freezer and the librarian. What made me think that - although, again, it's been a fair amount of time since my last reading - was that the book ends with his aunt asking him if he's awake, which she used to do when he was a kid to indicate to him it was time to go to sleep. Neurosis fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Jul 25, 2018 |
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Jul 25, 2018 07:11
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So I was listening to Velvet Underground with Nico for the first time in years and the lyrics to "Venus In Furs" struck as very Urth of the Sun. Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather [b/]Whiplash girl child in the dark Comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart Downy sins of streetlight fancies Chase the costumes she shall wear Ermine furs adorn the imperious Severin, Severin awaits you there I am tired, I am weary I could sleep for a thousand years A thousand dreams that would awake me Different colors made of tears Kiss the boot of shiny, shiny leather Shiny leather in the dark Tongue of thongs, the belt that does await you Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart Severin, Severin, speak so slightly Severin, down on your bended knee Severin is a very uncommon name and it seems very torture themed. Has Gene Wolfe every described what his influences were in depth? If it's just a coincidence it's a crazy one.
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Sep 4, 2018 02:19
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That song is based on a book from 1870 with a character called severin
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Sep 4, 2018 02:23
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Your Gay Uncle posted:So I was listening to Velvet Underground with Nico for the first time in years and the lyrics to "Venus In Furs" struck as very Urth of the Sun. Gene Wolfe is catholic and has apparently heard of every obscure saint. Severian was a bishop who was assassinated. There was an earlier Severian that was an armenian martyr as well, iirc.
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Sep 4, 2018 04:23
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He's also very clearly heard of bad prose, because I'm reading Shadow and Claw and he keeps bringing it up.
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Sep 4, 2018 05:11
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:He's also very clearly heard of bad prose, because I'm reading Shadow and Claw and he keeps bringing it up. c o o l
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Sep 4, 2018 06:34
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:He's also very clearly heard of bad prose, because I'm reading Shadow and Claw and he keeps bringing it up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aE-5xCrEeQ
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Sep 5, 2018 01:36
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I can't believe you fuckers insisted that Book of the New Sun is some prose masterpiece. The greatest strength of Wolfe's prose is how quickly it zips along. I'm not trying to be Statler and Waldorf here, that's exactly it's most important quality. It's effect is to hypnotically drag you around, and when you actually pay attention, you'll notice that it's just bad. If you actually excerpt it, the magic is lost and some fan is going to blame you for cherry-picking. This is also ironically what Wolfe wants readers to do, to start shifting for details. His sole advantage as a prose stylist is also a handicap for "understanding" his work.
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Sep 7, 2018 19:31
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Well I was going to talk about the Wizard Knight and Urth of the New Sun now that I've read them and saw this thread come up but I'll just wait for BotL to get probated because he got mad at a children's cartoon or some poo poo
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Sep 7, 2018 20:30
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More like durrrth of the new sun
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Sep 7, 2018 20:55
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I wish I could take any aspect of my responsibilities as an adult in my life as seriously as this guy takes his obligations to dunk on a sci-fi novel on a dying web forum
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Sep 7, 2018 21:57
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poisonpill posted:I wish I could take any aspect of my responsibilities as an adult in my life as seriously as this guy takes his obligations to dunk on a sci-fi novel on a dying web forum You could probably just have a hell subforum that only BotL and SMG can post in and it would probably solve the world's energy crisis.
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Sep 7, 2018 23:41
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DeadFatDuckFat posted:You could probably just have a hell subforum that only BotL and SMG can post in and it would probably solve the world's energy crisis. I don't understand this post at all.
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Sep 8, 2018 15:25
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Chichevache posted:I don't understand this post at all. SMG and BotL are involved in a lot of arguments on the forums I don't think they've ever argued with each other, but it's an experiment I am willing to witness, so someone find something they disagree on.
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Sep 8, 2018 16:55
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So this is how dedicated people are to talking about Gene Wolfe in the Gene Wolfe thread.
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Sep 8, 2018 18:41
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:So this is how dedicated people are to talking about Gene Wolfe in the Gene Wolfe thread. Lol that's so botl Post your analysis, if you're going to. sebmojo fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Sep 8, 2018 |
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Sep 8, 2018 22:57
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:So this is how dedicated people are to talking about Gene Wolfe in the Gene Wolfe thread. link your patreon so i can pay for you to go away thanks
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Sep 9, 2018 00:59
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The Vosgian Beast posted:SMG and BotL are involved in a lot of arguments on the forums They also post long-winded analyses of trash media. BotL's posts aren't as ludicrous, and he's more of an intentional troll from what I've seen; SMG's posts get... Pretty out there. It is probably more interesting to quote an FYAD parody of SMG's arguments with another poster than anything SMG has actually written: quote:The sound of metal chains whipping against bare flesh hang heavy in the air, like a bird flying into a headwind. The room is damp and sparsely lit. SUPERMECHAGODZILLA’s scarred jowls are illuminated by a desk lamp laying sideways on the floor
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Sep 9, 2018 10:24
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Neurosis posted:They also post long-winded analyses of trash media. Sheesh, that's harsh on the topic of my next review, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.
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Sep 9, 2018 13:17
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