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I think I am going to call it quits reading through Book of the Short Sun. I’m about halfway through “On Blue’s Waters” and just finished reading Horn raping Seawrack and I just can’t deal with this novel anymore. I hate the prose, I hate the structure of the novel and this book along with revelations made at the end of”Exodus of the Long Sun” has really soured me on the solar cycle. I loved the first three books of Long Sun but I found the fourth to really drag its feet and waste a lot of the potential of the setting and characters. Silk is such an interesting character along with the rest of the cast. Short Sun seems to me, reading the jist of what happens in that series, to just torpedo a lot the characters and what made them and the setting interesting. I think my opinion is in the minority of what I can see on the Internet.
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Nov 29, 2023 18:19
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 10:42 |
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Gene so far is not winning me over with “In Green’s Jungles.” I don’t understand what he needs his narrators to constantly describe and assess how attractive nearly every woman and child is. It made sense for a character trait of Severian since his was a little weird who lives his life in a tower that tortured people to death; I don’t see any narrative or thematic reason why it needs to continue to exist in these books. “Her granddaughter, Mora, is clearly her father's daughter, too large and too heavy-limbed and thick-waisted to be called attractive. To be fair, she carries herself well, and seems quiet and intelligent. About fifteen.” “Her friend Fava is about half her size, looks blond next to Mora, and is quite pretty. Fava is—or at least appears to be—several years younger.” Yuck. It’s not the absolutely worst thing in the world but I’m finding it fairly difficult to stay engaged and discover and think about the ideas and themes Gene is writing into his work when I have to deal with this garbage on the surface along with just boring Orientalist depictions of other cultures. Old Swerdlow fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Nov 30, 2023 |
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Nov 30, 2023 15:20
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You got the jist of it! I don’t have all the details in my head anymore and there isn’t much to expand upon other than to just suggest keep on reading! I also just finished Short Sun earlier this week and I am glad to put that behind me. A lot of the fan-service part really hampered my enjoyment of the series and kind of retroactively made previous parts of the series worse through unnecessary explanations. I think the previous two series also tackle a lot of similar themes much better and present them in a more exciting and engaging structure. Horn is just an absolutely nothing of a character and there was no fun interplay like with Severian/Thecla or Marble/Rose. Horn’s side seems to only provide constant repetition of who his family is, his task and that he wrote a book about Silk. Silk’s denial of his situation just gets so tiresome over the course of three books; I think it worked best at the section with the war at Blanko. I’m pretty negative on the Short Sun series as a whole but I’m still digesting it so I don’t have many fully formed thoughts yet.
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Dec 18, 2023 20:35
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quote:I have yet to be convinced of the whole urth equals blue lune equals green yesod equals whorl deal. And to be honest even if it's true it doesn't change how I feel about it. That revelation could have been delivered any number of ways besides bringing back the protagonist from New Sun for a cameo. I found in my reading that is was fairly obvious Green is Urth; and I don’t mean it in a condescending way. The first point is that Gene is obviously going to subvert green = lune, Urth was flooded so = blue.; he loves to be a trickster and the Solar Cycle books have him constantly subvert our expectations. I viewed Blue as hell and Green as heaven (even if it suck there too!; but that’s just because the inhumu are a reflection of mankind) The more evidence based part is that Horn/Silk constantly compares the inhumu city to the red whorl city. Lastly, the Neighbors literally get Horn to recreate Sevarian’s New Sun arrival by having him trudge into the sewers and hack away at a giant mass of bodies to release a flood to clean everything up. Sorry if this comes off as snarky or condescending, no ill will or anything of that intended!
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Dec 19, 2023 14:15
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The Shelved by Genre podcast just finished up their dive into the New Sun series with their most recent episode on Urth! http://rangedtouch.com/2023/12/22/the-urth-of-the-new-sun/
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Dec 22, 2023 21:38
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 10:42 |
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Urth has the obvious problem of explicitly explaining events and mysteries of the main series to a slight detriment. But you already read the first four books and another isn’t a huge hill to climb. It still has a ton of fun and interesting moments for being a work that isn’t very necessary to exist. It’s fun to watch Severian the overconfident doofus figure out how to be a godlike being. The Long Sun series reads and is paced like a really good HBO tv show. I think the ending stumbles but the cast and setting are just fun to follow along with.
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Feb 18, 2024 03:49
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