|
anilEhilated posted:I have literally no idea who any of those people are which makes me kind of wary of their fanfiction. I figure, at worst, the art is pretty cool. If the words are good that's a bonus.
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2023 20:59
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 06:15 |
|
|
anilEhilated posted:I have literally no idea who any of those people are which makes me kind of wary of their fanfiction.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2023 02:20
|
|
|
Typhon also having two dongs is a pretty good sight gag, but I don't think I'll be going for a book by randos, Wolfe is inimitable.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2023 10:10
|
|
|
Osmosisch posted:Typhon also having two dongs is a pretty good sight gag, but I don't think I'll be going for a book by randos, Wolfe is inimitable.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2023 07:19
|
|
|
ReReading Wolfe's twitter page is so weird.
|
|
#
?
Mar 13, 2023 00:52
|
|
|
I had to stop listening when they ground to halt for multiple episodes on the genesis play. Listening to one of the hosts talk around in circles and arguing with his co-host and guests about not understanding the allegory which is too much for me. What's up with the twitter?
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 10:58
|
|
|
Alzabo Soup is the good podcast
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 14:54
|
|
|
Whale Vomit posted:Alzabo Soup is the good podcast I think they read too much into things sometimes. But otherwise they are fine.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 15:31
|
|
|
Whale Vomit posted:Alzabo Soup is the good podcast That's gonna be a no from me dog
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 22:43
|
|
|
Is there a good let’s read of the BotNS series? I read it once as a teenager and again as an adult, and would enjoy seeing someone do a deep read.
|
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2023 15:39
|
|
|
My local library branch had The Wizard Knight on the shelf so I picked up. I'm like 90 pages into The Knight and its not bad but feels pretty basic so far, cool Norse aesthetics notwithstanding. Just checking if there's a significant change or revelation coming up or if this style just isn't for me.
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2023 05:26
|
|
|
I loved it from the word go, so if you're already bored it may just not be for you.
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2023 05:55
|
|
|
Salvor_Hardin posted:My local library branch had The Wizard Knight on the shelf so I picked up. I'm like 90 pages into The Knight and its not bad but feels pretty basic so far, cool Norse aesthetics notwithstanding. Just checking if there's a significant change or revelation coming up or if this style just isn't for me. It has a really complicated cosmology with I found neat and which gets untangled as the story progresses
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2023 18:13
|
|
|
Salvor_Hardin posted:My local library branch had The Wizard Knight on the shelf so I picked up. I'm like 90 pages into The Knight and its not bad but feels pretty basic so far, cool Norse aesthetics notwithstanding. Just checking if there's a significant change or revelation coming up or if this style just isn't for me. I found it unreadable but I am not a fan of most of his later stuff because it seems to turn into people just trying to explain the plot to each other.
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2023 21:27
|
|
|
The setting of Wizard/Knight is pretty bland compared to Solar Cycle. The giant kingdom is my favorite part.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2023 20:52
|
|
|
I was new to Wolfe and dug the first book -- it started off slow but got more intense until all my standard fantasy boxes were checked but in more-creative-than-usual ways. Then I felt like nothing really happened the second book. I went back to it with a few more wolves in my belt and the second book felt like a completely different novel. So much happens! These days it's one of my favorite Wolfe novels. It's worth sticking through if you like standard fantasy stuff and I do think it gets better with every read. It's wildly sentimental in quiet ways which aren't immediately obvious, and it has a huge cast of memorable characters; you've probably only encountered a fifth of them so far.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2023 18:35
|
|
|
I'm curious about this one but it's a ways down my TBR queue. Is it a spin on Arthurian fantasy?
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2023 03:40
|
|
|
Whale Vomit posted:I'm curious about this one but it's a ways down my TBR queue. Is it a spin on Arthurian fantasy? ahhhh it's kind of a knight errant meets narnia meets norse saga meets dante's divine comedy meets british folklore meets greek myth kind of thing. Like, the basic premise involves fair folk and a geas and and a dude sucked into a different world but poo poo goes psychadellic with multiple layers of reality and stuff, all of it extremely Catholic. Like I said, I enjoyed it, but I recognized the various component parts and I enjoyed how they were in conversation. If you're not into that kind of thing or into reading those various types of mythology, I can see it falling flat, though. e. I came here to post that I may have gotten my hands on a copy of Epiphany of the Long Sun to go with my copy of Litany, so I may read those pretty soon.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2023 04:07
|
|
|
It cannot be stressed enough how important re-reads are to enjoying Wolfe. The more you read him, the richer it gets. I loved his writing from New Sun on so maybe it doesn't work if you don't have that initial sense of wonder, but even his books I initially didn't care for have gotten better over the years.
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2023 04:50
|
|
|
Salvor_Hardin posted:My local library branch had The Wizard Knight on the shelf so I picked up. I'm like 90 pages into The Knight and its not bad but feels pretty basic so far, cool Norse aesthetics notwithstanding. Just checking if there's a significant change or revelation coming up or if this style just isn't for me. Feel like this one felt like it had less revelation or mystery than some of his other works, but it commits to the kid in an adults body premise in a really fun way. Watching Abel wander around beating the poo poo out of anyone who crosses his path because he has a 9 year olds understanding of consequences is a lot of fun.
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2023 19:24
|
|
|
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).
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2023 22:12
|
|
|
Yeah, I'm pretty in-line with those ideas myself. Marc Aramini has a couple of keen observations that result in a reading which implies all of that, and a few extra things. I find viewing the books through that lens enriches them and it feels pretty consistent overall, though I'm prone to getting swept away in enjoyment of the surface narrative. My personal theory is that, building atop Marc's reading, Disiri represents Able's desire to live; more specifically to be born. Given how often the narration repeats thing like, "You've got to understand that I loved Disiri. If you don't understand that, you don't understand anything," it's pretty clear that she's key to more than just the outward-facing events of the story, and Able's sacrifices (especially to Berthold) feel much more significant if those two things are true. It's also just a minor detail but I think the Angrborn might literally be heartless. They're described metaphorically that way often enough, but every time their shed blood is described it's seething, crawling, or otherwise moving of its own accord. If their blood can move on its own, why would they need a physical heart to mechanically pump it?. Doesn't really affect the novel in any way but I smile to think Wolfe might've had his engineering hat on. I also agree that I think he meant for everything to be solvable / understandable but made the flawed assumption that if he could figure it out / understand it, so could his readers. As his career went on and he continued to receive praise from other writers (who as a collective are likely to recognize a lot of the indications of depth -- the allusions and references at whatnot -- without being able to piece the whole together) and less and less involvement from editors he kinda went down a positive feedback loop of inscrutability.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2023 17:45
|
|
|
...At the end of which you find An Evil Guest.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2023 17:47
|
|
|
My dumb theory is that it's a DnD session and they needed another player, so Able was called in last minute and wasn't really familiar with the game or like how to play DnD and he kept ruining it for everyone and loving with the DMs plot.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2023 09:29
|
|
|
I'm into book 2/4 of Long Sun. Enjoying myself. I quite like the setting. There's deffo some weird Dark Souls of Reading poo poo going on here.
|
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2023 03:56
|
|
|
Finally picked up A Borrowed Man, alright enough so far although I don't quite think Wolfe has an ear for Hardboiled dialgoue, of course then I think he's doing it intentionally to show Smithe is more of an impersonation than he might think or let on, and that even the original was a writer not a detective and to expect Chandler to speak like Marlowe is a bit ridiculous. Regardless, his speech is utterly charmless as is his female companion. However what I've really come to praise is the prescience he showed in portraying the horribly frustrating experience of being forced to deal with "AI's". Smithe calling the cops on Colette's abduction only to be met with useless robots who don't understand the problem, can't help, don't understand why they can't help, and don't understand that they don't understand. Is spot on with what we've got nowadays, and I'm sure cost cutting will assure a world where all of our non friend/family communications are filtered through uncomprehending software. Just giving us that little extra bit of misery with every email, text, phonecall, and message. Also got through Sorceror's House. Between that and Borrowed Man it seems Wolfe was spending a lot of time staring at blueprints and pondering the ideas of liminal phantom space. It's all over the Black house and the Coldwater residence, not that I'm complaining it's a fascinating concept. What could be more terrifying than awaking, walking through your morning routine in a haze until your eyes set on a brand new door that doesn't belong there. Gonna go out on a limb and say there's something going on with the Humans being some sort of Recloning just as Smithe is, there's talk of the population being only 1bn with Colette saying she'd reduce that by half. Something awful happened, and I'm guessing it was some sort of full reset for humanity. And the novel is perhaps one of the only things to last past it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 2, 2023 03:41
|
|
|
I recommend Interlibrary Loan next. It's not properly edited because Old Man Wolfe wrote it on his deathbed, so the last quarter is incomprehensible and has characters from the first book popping in where he clearly just spoonerized the names. But the payoff at the end is incredible.
|
|
#
?
Jun 2, 2023 17:53
|
|
|
Well, just finished Return to the Whorl, and with it, the complete sun cycle. drat. I guess it's time to start a re-read.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2023 06:55
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/1667191140783734784 Ranged Touch (Games Studies Study Buddies, Just King Things) just started a podcast series on Book of the New Sun with Austin Walker (A More Civilized Age, Friends at the Table, Waypoint).
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2023 19:49
|
|
|
I need them to stop bringing up Homestuck It was actually pretty good aside from the Homestuck poo poo. Two of the people are versed in the Novels and one hasn't completed them all so you get a nice mix of discussion about how one should and should not read and dissect a Wolfe novel, how he uses character and language, what references and inspiration he is drawing on, as well as a good mix of excitement as it dawns on people that they live in a rocket or the moon landing portrait. Gaius Marius fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Jun 11, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2023 01:24
|
|
|
Ffff. I was just listening to Austin's send-off episode now that the post-waypoint premium episodes have been released. Thanks, I'll check this out. I wonder how long it'll take them to catch up to ReReading Wolfe 
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2023 09:30
|
|
|
I hate the bit in Wizard Knight when Abel rocks up on a ship, insults the captain to his face and eventually murders him and chucks him off the ship 'cos he failed to show proper respect or some poo poo and never seems particularly sorry afterwards. Wtf, Abel.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2023 22:04
|
|
|
Pistol_Pete posted:I hate the bit in Wizard Knight when Abel rocks up on a ship, insults the captain to his face and eventually murders him and chucks him off the ship 'cos he failed to show proper respect or some poo poo and never seems particularly sorry afterwards. I wondered a bit how much of that was him still being a kid inside an adult body and Pouk told him how everyone’s going to be out to scam him so he went a bit far in aggressively making sure he wasn’t being scammed Though he killed the captain since the captain tried to kill him and after able had helped save the ship
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2023 12:31
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
?
Jul 15, 2023 00:08
|
|
|
Lex Talionis posted:Able is an immature kid who thinks honor is how people treat you, so he violently forces his own self-image of himself as a Knight on people and thinks that makes him honorable. Because he happens to have lucked into being the biggest, strongest dude alive with an over-the-top number of enchanted inventory items, he wins every fight and so people come around to thinking he's amazing despite the fact he's acting like an enormous rear end in a top hat. I mean, I think it’s even more complicated than that. He knows he’s a kid, he’s still really thoughtful on some things, but yeah is still an rear end in a top hat on a lot of other things, but the world is complicated and full of people being assholes and weird stuff as well The ship scenario is a little more complicated than Pistol Pete mentioned but still kinda initiated by able being an rear end
|
|
#
?
Jul 15, 2023 00:41
|
|
|
Pistol_Pete posted:I hate the bit in Wizard Knight when Abel rocks up on a ship, insults the captain to his face and eventually murders him and chucks him off the ship 'cos he failed to show proper respect or some poo poo and never seems particularly sorry afterwards. He definitely does feel sorry about it imo. I think one of the defining features of Able's narration is that he rarely describes his own emotions (or moral judgments) except in oblique asides. But there are a few conversations later in the book where he tells other people about his regrets.
|
|
#
?
Jul 17, 2023 11:26
|
|
|
New to Book of the New Sun and would love some recs on auxiliary reading on the books, does anyone know of good companion guides, etc? Going to reread soon and would like some more cool theories and insight.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2023 17:56
|
|
|
parara posted:New to Book of the New Sun and would love some recs on auxiliary reading on the books, does anyone know of good companion guides, etc? Going to reread soon and would like some more cool theories and insight.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2023 19:09
|
|
|
Lexicon Urthus by Michael Andre-Driussi but be careful on entries re: specific characters because you will stumble upon spoilers.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2023 16:36
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 06:15 |
|
|
Cheers, I'll check these out! Excited to dig back in.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2023 19:26
|
|