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Nightside the Long Sun took me a while to get into. Not sure why, I think because the structuring of it is more low-key than New Sun and Silk is initially a less gripping figure than Severian. But Wolfe is slow-selling it, and Silk's devotion to the Outsider following his enlightenment is pretty weird once you think of it as a Catholic priest constantly asking people to pray to St. Aristides; not quite heretical but just plain off. Also I didn't notice there is no "of" in the title for like three solid months.
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Jul 11, 2017 19:29
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Based on Severian's conversation with Ouen toward the end of Citadel, Severian seems reasonably confident that a woman Ouen slept with was made a prisoner of the Torturers and that Severian was taken in by them as an infant. He mentions earlier, I think in Claw, that the children of prisoners are sometimes kept by the guild, and that female children are handed off to the Witches. So regardless of how old a Torturer apprentice could be, Severian was one from basically birth.
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Apr 24, 2019 05:02
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It almost certainly derives from the Spanish alcalde (a title used in Book of the New Sun), or mayor. It derives from the Arabic al-qadi, the judge/magistrate, which can be a bit confusing as the Latin word for "warm" sounds similar but the Spanish in this case isn't borrowing from Latin. It's literally the mayor of Virion.
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Feb 26, 2020 17:17
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Finished a reread of Peace and I'm curious: Does anyone else find the "orthodox" interpretation of the novel to be kinda horseshit? I'm referring of course to the idea that Weer is dead and the story is somehow his ghost reliving things, which is the conclusion of most Wolfe "scholars," who seem to be wrong about nearly everything else Wolfe writes (The Gene Wolfe Literary Podcast guys made more sense of Fifth Head a year or two ago than any of those blowhards have made of it in decades, with a much simpler explanation). The main things that make this dubious to me are the following:
Also, just a random thought about something else in Peace: Weer mentions "certain financial transactions" resulting in him acquiring Mcaffee's department store which I believe ended up owned by Stewart Blaine, and it's kind of implausible to believe that he inherited Julius Smart's company -- a man who would no longer speak to him after Olivia's death and for the next 25-30 years -- as well as whatever additional wealth he appears to have acquired. Given the running theme of forgery that begins with the women at his fifth birthday party forging the treaty between the Native Americans and the Blaines, and Weer's awareness that Blaine has a fireproof document storage room, I've begun to wonder if maybe Weer and Louis Gold forged Blaine and Smart's wills so that Alden would acquire their wealth, possibly even resulting in Weer murdering Blaine by arson (there's that suspicious bit about Blaine's old house's fireplace and Aunt Olivia mentioning that Den is good at starting fires in the Lorns' house); people would already be inclined to believe that Smart would leave the company to his nephew, as when Weer tells Ron Gold about it he asks whether he expects to receive an inheritance from "Uncle Julius." It just seems very unlikely that Smart actually would leave it to him, absent some kind of fraud, which is heavily textually supported. EDIT: Another thought that's kind of just thematic rambling: The book is sort of about alchemy, with Smart as the titular Alchemist of the third chapter, but it's interesting that alchemy tries to create gold from nothing and yet it's Gold who creates from nothing. Alchemy also being a fraud, one could say the "alchemy" of the book is Weer learning from all the deception and duplicity in his life to make something of himself by nefarious means. Nakar fucked around with this message at 00:16 on May 4, 2020 |
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May 3, 2020 23:53
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Safety Biscuits posted:How many people get killed in Peace, anyway? I recently re-read it and made it three - the boy when he's young, the lad in the juice factory fridge or whatever it was, and the girlfriend he was hunting for treasure with - did I miss any? I should have taken more notes... In terms of others, Aunt Vi is run over by a car and killed; most people think Peacock was the one who hit her but if the timeline works out correctly it's possible Weer did so instead, which would explain Julius Smart not talking to him anymore. There's also Doris, the carnie Cinderella that the dog man talks about in his letter, who kills herself by electrocution. Other murders are perhaps implied but not stated; there is some reason to suspect Weer might have killed Stewart Blaine, Sherry Gold's death is never given an adequate explanation or cause, Ron Gold may have been the victim of the coldhouse prank or something else may have happened to him as he disappears around the time Weer sleeps with Sherry and isn't mentioned again except that Weer namedrops the man who replaced him at work, and Julius Smart may have actually murdered Mr. Tilly or perhaps was Mr. Tilly, his story a veiled confession of some sort.
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May 6, 2020 15:29
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Well, I finally managed to make myself finish Long Sun. It's probably my least favorite Wolfe thing so far and I struggled at times to get through it, but I was told Short Sun was really good and I figured I might as well do my best to get through it. Started On Blue's Waters and it's already much more interesting and enjoyable, but there's a lot I would've already missed had I skipped over Long Sun so now I don't know what to think about it. The parts of Long Sun where incredibly important events got totally skipped over were hilarious though, and it never stopped being funny right up until the very end.
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Aug 22, 2020 23:09
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I don't see any reason to think the azoth doesn't exist, but rather I think the point is that using the azoth is a distinctly non-Silk thing to do, and this is a hint and reminder that we are seeing a character who is more and more Silk over time; the Horn who died on Green would probably have used an azoth without hesitation in his campaign to repair the lander, against other humans and inhumi alike, but Silk has always seen an azoth as a weapon of last resort and prefers to resolve situations with his diplomacy and cleverness rather than fight it out (consider in Dorp how he admits he probably could've escaped with Jahlee and Hide but decides not to even though he knows that the judges are biased against him). Having the azoth and not using it strikes me as thematically similar to having the secret of the inhumi and not using it, even though Silk/Horn find themselves in situations where it might be beneficial to have used either. Also regarding the azoth specifically: The narrator in Return to the Whorl at one point explicitly refers to retrieving "Maytera Mint's gift." The only thing he could've possibly gotten from Mint is Hyacinth's azoth, as Silk gave the azoth to Mint in Calde and she never returns it during the events of Long Sun, so her returning it to him only makes sense. As far as the dead woman, it's definitely Hyacinth and Silk tried to kill himself after she died by cutting his wrists. It's mentioned by Hound and Tansy that Silk and his wife moved into an abandoned manteion nearby, the farmer and his wife say the woman who moved in there had been sick, and Silk/Horn feel a sense of impulsive revulsion when trying to touch the knife. Hyacinth died, Silk's "spirit" was dying as the Neighbor who came to Horn on Green said, and either Horn's consciousness was (possibly temporarily) transported into Silk to give him the will to live or Silk suffered some kind of psychotic break that convinced him he was Horn and prevented him from recognizing who Hyacinth was. The latter is a bit dubious though, as Silk knows enough of Horn's life on Blue to convince Horn's own sons of his identity, and he remembers Green which Silk's body should have never been to. On the other hand, Horn knows full well what Hyacinth looks like so unless she changed massively in twenty years, Horn ought to have recognized her.
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Sep 2, 2020 23:19
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Sekenr posted:I keep thinking about the azoth and it just doesnt make any sense. He mentions a lot how he hides the azoth from everyone and never uses. Silk used it occasionally, Horn used it not once. I suspect that its a lie and there was no azoth. Note how every mention of it is very deliberate, basically you almost forgot that it even exists and than the author mentions how he hides it from everyone Also, boy that sure was an ending.
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Oct 21, 2020 03:58
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I tend to agree, but Long Sun has some ardent defenders. Maybe I'd like it more on a reread, but I'm in no hurry. That said it's absolutely worth it for Short Sun, which is amazing but complete nonsense if you don't finish Exodus.
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Dec 11, 2020 04:17
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I have the opposite reaction to Aramini, I feel like he's full of poo poo but I have no idea how I'd demonstrate him right or wrong, but I know the GWLP guys' take on Fifth Head makes far more sense than anything he came up with.
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Dec 13, 2020 05:56
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felicibusbrevis posted:So even if Wolfe is waffling in those interviews, there are aliens in fifth head in present day and GWLP says there aren’t??? That’s a lot of useless Chekhov’s guns on the mantle. I don't love Peace because of whatever its "answer" is (and I don't know that I agree with people on that anyway), I love it because of what it's saying and how it says it. If knowing or not knowing the answer does nothing for my enjoyment of Short Sun, then it doesn't matter what Wolfe's intended answer was. If knowing, or thinking I know, enhances the reading, I'm going to be understandably skeptical of an interpretation that has to reach beyond the text to support itself and which makes the work less interesting.
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Dec 13, 2020 20:17
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felicibusbrevis posted:gwlp is so much better. The only thing I haven’t been happy about was their Fifth Head take with them. Veil’s hypothesis and the ambiguous humanity of the people on ste croix are palpable artifacts of the text. They may have come down too hard on "it's definitely this way," but the reading they point out is a valid perspective. This can be true even taking into account Wolfe's interview answers: VRT identifies as Annese quite strongly, seeing in his supposed native ancestry a narrative of defiance and non-dependence on the colonizing English-speakers that is not present in the beaten-down, economically marginalized French-speaking human population. The Free People could as much be a mode of thinking or a way of life; possibly there are French colonists who live out back of beyond in a harsh but independent lifestyle. Perhaps they think they are Annese, or identify as such for political reasons. VRT may well have dwelled among them multiple times in his life, or at least wished such a people did exist and realized that living that way was possible from his mother. He could very easily be, metaphorically, a shadow child or native who has replaced Marsch, even if he did so through entirely human means and only ever believed he was Annese. His identity is political as much as it is biological, and the two are entirely indistinguishable per Veil. I think the textual support for this is there, and GWLP pointed much of it out. What you see in the narrative is based on what you're expecting to see, but in the end, they arguably reach the same tragic place.
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Dec 14, 2020 19:29
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felicibusbrevis posted:Might as well continue the Aggro streak. Man of all the things I see bandied around, Gaiman’s how to read Wolfe essay gets brought up way too much. Wolves in the books wooooooooooo. Limited utility and even more limited cleverness.
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Dec 18, 2020 22:23
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Honestly, Peace was immediately engaging to me and I almost read the entire thing in one sitting, so it's hard for me to say much. One thing that might help is to highlight or jot down the names and descriptions of people Weer mentions. You don't need to keep track of it as such, just consider certain characters as they're mentioned in different contexts. It also helps to keep track of where you are in Weer's memories, just to know "okay, this story is happening at around this point in time."
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May 29, 2021 01:45
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Osmosisch posted:I generally love Wolfe's writing, but after just reading On Blue's Waters for the first time, i gotta say i am extremely done with his naive waifish lady companions and all the raping that happens to them, at the hands of protagonists or otherwise. It definitely goes places after On Blue's Waters though.
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Jun 5, 2021 20:30
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Going back through Peace I can see how it can be difficult to get into initially, as the first chapter is all over the place, it takes a while to get a handle on how Weer discusses his own life, and the meaning of some of his childhood stories doesn't become clear until much later. It really starts to pick up once he starts talking about living with Olivia and her suitors, and the chapter about Julius Smart and the pharmacist in Florida is so bizarrely compelling. A lot of the other (seemingly) digressive stories in the novel are interesting in their own right, but there's something distinctly unsettling about a weird modern American ghost story, with the strange behavior and the carney customers and all of that.
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Jun 12, 2021 05:34
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I'm highly ambivalent toward On Blue's Waters and Return to the Whorl, but In Green's Jungles is one of the best genre works I've ever read. I think it's the best individual book in the Solar Cycle, with maybe Claw or Sword competing with it from New Sun, but New Sun is just better overall. I don't feel too much one way or the other about Long Sun, but Short Sun definitely does make Long Sun better in hindsight. Peace is incredible, easy #1 Wolfe work if New Sun isn't counted as a single book.
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Feb 3, 2022 05:09
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Regarding Hyacinth: I think it's never adequately explained, even in Short Sun, because it's an aspect of Silk that Horn just doesn't get. He never liked Hyacinth, he doesn't understand what Silk saw in her, and so Long Sun goes out of its way to try to come up with some kind of vague excuse or explanation that "fits" Horn's image of Silk and reconciles why he'd basically throw away everything for her despite her seeming to not warrant it. In part we can say that Horn and Nettle's treatment of her isn't entirely fair, but on the other hand I think it might be going too far in the other direction to try to find the "real" reason Silk loved her so much, so quickly. As someone mentioned, sometimes people just have a weird attraction, and though the Pas/Kypris thing might be part of it, it might not explain it fully. I think that's important in humanizing Silk, in proving that there is a real Silk who doesn't just exist "in the book my mother and father wrote" (as Hoof puts it to Gyrfalcon), who was never fully accessible to Horn. And yeah I get the irony of that when what happens in Short Sun happens, but even there some weirdness is going on with the narrator either periodically forgetting about Hyacinth or confounding her with Seawrack. Basically, we never "get" Silk's attraction to Hyacinth, and that shows that Silk isn't solely motivated by goodness and the higher purpose of the Outsider and can just be in love with someone because something about her clicks with him, and that's all we'll ever be able to pull from it.
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Feb 17, 2022 07:45
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If Vodalus wants to return to the stars, then he probably sees Urth as a lovely hole beneath all contempt. No reason not to hand over the keys to Abaia and friends on the way out the doorbit if they want it so badly. That Urth might be special in some way because it is Urth, because it is the spiritual origin of humanity, is entirely outside his concern. He has no interest in being a good steward or bringing about a renewal of the planet.
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Sep 28, 2023 19:36
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Lex Talionis posted:I just want to express the view that In Green's Jungles is just amazing and for me justifies a lot of the sloggy parts of later Long Sun and OBW. Unfortunately I didn't like the last book nearly as much but not in a way that invalidates what came before. I think it's that it is, in part, basically harder into the "fantasy" part of science fantasy than any other part. The elevator pitch I've always used for the book is "A man who isn't a wizard tries to convince people he isn't a wizard and fails spectacularly."
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Dec 2, 2023 20:47
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Lex Talionis posted:Short Sun: I also disagree with most of the sweeping unified theories of Long/Short Sun, and I think the basic core of the books is a meditation on what it means to actually be a good and righteous person in a fallen and deceptive world. Silk is a good man, but to be a good man in a bad world, to attempt to do the will of God and bring good from evil, is a tremendous burden that no sensible human being can possibly handle without their will breaking down. I think in Long/Short Sun Wolfe accepts the idea common to Christian tradition and Catholicism specifically that the explanation for God permitting evil is that it's there for us to overcome... but reluctantly, and painfully. We can see this in the story Silk tells about the farmer who meets Pas after he dies and says he would have made the world better (to which Pas replies "Yes, that was what I wanted you to do"), and in Hound -- one of the most unambiguously good-coded characters in Short Sun outside of Silk himself -- saying that he and his wife ought to go to Green instead of Blue, because that's where they're needed. The whole thing with the inhumi having humanity's worst qualities only because humanity themselves display them and the Green Man in New Sun being a human being who does not rely on predation to live suggests the remote possibility of overcoming evil once and for all. Yet I have to think that Wolfe, like Horn and Silk, sees this as a near-insurmountable task even for the very best of us. And the Outsider is not a God of love and comfort; Silk even has to rationalize that he can't expect the Outsider to actually help him in any way and then convince himself that he was receiving help despite the hellish near-death scenarios he faces constantly. That even Silk has to metaphorically strike a deal with the devil in commanding the loyalty of the inhumi at times to accomplish his ends casts a pessimistic view of the Outsider's intentions. Sort of like Wolfe is saying that yes, God brings good from evil, but the process is so painful and wearying that it almost doesn't seem worth it (and when will it ever really end?). It feels like Gene had this issue where he believed but did not understand, and God was to him very much like the Outsider: Inscrutable, hard to trust but impossible to truly doubt, so subtle it isn't clear whether he's doing anything (to say nothing of doing enough). It's also in some sense a Typhon redemption story of a sort, exploring the idea that a man of his talents and charisma could be an agent of tremendous good even as he could be an agent of tremendous evil, merely by the circumstances of how he was raised, which again fits with the themes of God bringing good from evil. But was it worth having Typhon just to have Silk? Which has interesting theological implications and I don't know if Wolfe was quite wrestling with anything that complex, but the Solar Cycle is absolutely anything but orthodox or catholic/Catholic in its theological suggestions; portraying a Christ figure as an executioner is pretty loving wild.
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Dec 22, 2023 06:29
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I think the whole point of the Solar Cycle is a meditation on the nature and relationship of good and evil on the highest, most divine level, as seen from the lowest, most human level. Wolfe correctly diagnoses that evil exists and that the only way to reconcile this that makes sense with the idea of a benevolent God is that all evil is ultimately twisted to serve good purposes. He then explores extremes of this, like New Sun's necessary good act being Severian's execution of the entire Urth to renew it and bring about the Green Man who need not live by predation, or the more obvious Long Sun example of the Plan of Pas serving the Outsider's needs and thus being allowed to succeed, more or less, or Short Sun's inhumi and the way their predatory tendencies are the result of the same tendencies in the humans they prey upon. I think his goal in speculative fiction is to push the envelope and ask himself if these things really can be justified, and if they still allow one to say that God is "good." Where Long/Short Sun I think is at its most interesting is that he then turns it around reflexively to ask what it means, if the world is full of evil being turned slowly toward some eventual promised (but not presently foreseeable) good, to be a "good man." Silk is a man who is in some sense too good, too sensitive, too helpful, too self-sacrificing, yet he goes down paths that would in most other characters be seen as morally compromising and the reader isn't entirely sure if he actually has been compromised by them, or if he is somehow so good that he is capable of weaponizing evil toward good ends in just the same manner as the Outsider. Hoof sums it up in his brief narrative section when thinking about his father: If you're that good, the rules are different, as if one gains the ability to permit and utilize evil means at a certain level of ethical development. But I'm not sure that Wolfe himself believed that; I think we'd be right to question whether that is actually true, and if it isn't, what then of God (and I think this may explain Short Sun's development of the Outsider into a more uncomfortable presence, in spite of the narrator's appeals to him)? I don't know what his answer would have been, but it is a troubling meditation when viewed through a theological lens.
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Feb 20, 2024 00:57
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