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BuckarooBanzai posted:The painting Severian finds the curator restoring, described as a man looking through a bronze glass at a desolate wasteland. It's the moon, described in Severian's age as green. This just blew my mind. I read through it once a few months ago and I picked up on most of the things you mentioned, but this is just awesome and has rekindled my appreciation of the entire work. Simple but so brilliant. 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 04:13
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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?
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Jun 7, 2012 01:39
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I'm currently working my way through Long Sun, having recently finished Urth and BotNS, and it's interesting how much of inversion of/reaction to BotNS it is in terms of religious content and tone. I have been thinking a lot about New Sun in terms of Wolfe's Catholicism, mainly regarding Severian's connection to Christ. I think I picked up on a lot of the connections pretty immediately, but I recently had my mind kind of blown when someone completely unfamiliar with the work pointed out the play on words in the loving title: New Sun / New Son. Not that the concept surprised me, but the "New Son" thing seems to really drive home the sense of a continuation/rebirth of aspects of our own culture. Is BotNS Wolfe's attempt to rationalize his new faith? Is Severian's path supposed to literally explain how and why Jesus did all the Messianic stuff he did? Or is it all just sci-fi fun and games with heavy religious themes and biblical parallels? I could see it going either way, but I think the former would be way more interesting. Any input, Wolfegang?
Carly Gay Dead Son fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Aug 3, 2012 |
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Aug 3, 2012 19:12
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Nice to see this thread revived or whatever claw of the conciliator joke I could make. I'm having a bit of trouble getting through Long Sun. Right around when Gene drops those big ol' pro-life bombs was when I started to feel leery about continuing. Does it get worse? And by worse I mean more politically Catholic.
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Oct 25, 2012 03:00
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Juaguocio posted:
I was referring to a bit on the second to last page of Lake of the Long Sun: "Yet Pas's seal had been disturbed many times; [Silk] himself had scraped up the remains of one such seal. Embryos, mere flecks of rotten flesh, had lain among the remains of another. Was Pas's seal to be valued more than the things it had been intended to protect?" Am I misinterpreting this?
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Oct 25, 2012 03:58
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PateraOctopus posted:Yeah, I think you're misinterpreting it a bit. This isn't a pro-life statement, it's a statement against empty ritual. The fact that the objects in question here are embryos isn't a huge part of this passage's importance--it's mainly Silk realizing that the Vironese faith put more emphasis on the literal doctrine of leaving the Seals undisturbed than they did on thinking about why the Seals shouldn't be disturbed, and rejecting that doctrine. Embryos in the Whorl were incredibly valuable because they ensured that the breeding population would never fall below replacement levels--no matter what cataclysms occurred on the interstellar journey, Pas gave them all a backup so that they could still have a sustainable population base when they reached the Blue/Green system. However, the letter of the doctrine became more revered than the logic that led to the doctrine being in place--"Don't disturb my seal, because you might gently caress up the embryos that are your backup in case you near extinction levels" became "Don't disturb my seal." More emphasis is here being placed on respecting the symbolism of the seal than on the rationale for that symbolism's existence in the first place, and as Silk observes the major error in this scriptural logic--if you disturb both the Seal and its contents, you're only going to be chastised for the part with no practical application--he distances himself further from the Faith he was raised in. He doesn't yet know what the deal with the embryos is, but he's realizing that no sanely-ordered universe would place more emphasis on a lock than on the thing behind the door. I don't know if Wolfe is personally pro-life or not--he's vocally Catholic, but he's also incredibly non-dogmatic--but if this was (and I really don't believe it is) intended as a pro-life statement, that sentiment doesn't crop up elsewhere in the series. Ah! Thanks for this interpretation, man. I think you've saved my Gene Wolfe reading experience. I guess I just never thought an old Catholic dude's lament over embryos could conceivably not be a pro-life statement. What a world we live in.
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Oct 26, 2012 04:50
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I just finished The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories and I recommend it to everyone. All the stories are at least cool, and some of them are just Wolfe mindfuckery of the most outrageous variety. It also features the best prose I've read from him (having only read New Sun and half of Long Sun), which is some excellent prose indeed. It was also cool to see him trying out some of the plot devices he makes use of in New Sun and the Latro books (fact-coloring or amnesiac narrators), and that whole unreliable narrator shtick works great in such small doses. Read it, y'all.
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Nov 14, 2012 05:59
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rufius posted:The interesting thing (to me) about my experience is that I did actually enjoy what I was reading. I think the writing (mechanically speaking) is just hard to adapt to. The cryptic nature of the work is frustrating but not entirely off-putting. You're advice is accurate. You'll probably have a better time with Long Sun, which is leagues more readable and quite pulpy by Wolfe standards, so my advice to is power through, dude.
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Dec 4, 2012 06:27
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Thinky Whale posted:I just finished Urth of the New Sun, and I have a couple questions about the ending I'm hoping people can shed some light on: The moon?
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Dec 5, 2012 04:14
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Neurosis posted:The ship. This was my second guess.
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Dec 5, 2012 19:41
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Weird how a guy with perfect memory would forget what he previously wrote. Or is that totally the point? Are his obvious inconsistencies there just to prove his memory is in fact poo poo? Or is Severian recalling the perceptions of several Severians, whose realities differ from one another's?
Carly Gay Dead Son fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Mar 3, 2013 |
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Mar 3, 2013 23:37
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Whoa what is this Castle of the Otter thing I just heard about? Has anyone read it?
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Mar 13, 2013 19:26
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otterley posted:I wish the cover art for The Short Sun series wasn't so terrible, I'm really vain with my books Long Sun in particular really benefits from being read in summer while New Sun was great autumn-winter reading. If you aren't reading things in the appropriate climate, you're doing it wrong.
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May 19, 2014 16:24
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The covers make it look like some cheap generic fantasy.
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Chichevache posted:It does not. However since he is grafted to that extremely large man when we meet him- the name escaped me- he is possibly genetically human. Perhaps Wolfe intends for his new life to be a renunciation of his humanity? The big dude is named Piaton, after the saint, so definitely human. Typhon prolongs his life through possession of an unwilling human host, simultaneously playing God and the devil, so yeah maybe that's the source of his loss of humanity.
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Jun 19, 2015 00:26
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Only Wolfe collection I've read is The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories and it's pretty incredible.
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Jun 23, 2015 03:41
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So fuligin's finally a real thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack
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Mar 22, 2016 16:44
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Haven't picked up a Wolfe book in years, but I just got out of The Green Knight and it seemed heavily inspired by Gene Wolfe's work. In a bizarre way it felt watching an actual adaptation of his work. I made some more in-depth posts in the thread for the movie. Also, coincidentally, Gene died while they were filming it. I would love to hear thoughts on this from people familiar with his work.
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Aug 10, 2021 01:20
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Wolfe fam, check out Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem. A genre-bending noir with a very Wolfe-like approach to sci-fi exposition, but mostly played for laughs and it works brilliantly.
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Sep 14, 2022 01:36
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Osmosisch posted:I did so, thanks for the recommendation. Yeah I actually had only read a third or so of the book when I made this rec, and now realize how inaccurate it was. Glad you enjoyed though!
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Sep 26, 2022 02:58
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