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pugnax posted:Enjoying the hell out of A Borrowed Man - it reminds me a lot of Fifth Head of Cerberus actually. That's good to hear - going to check it out now. Post-Wizard-Knight Wolfe hasn't been the same for me, but the premise sounded more interesting than his other recent stuff.
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Nov 7, 2015 03:51
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Your Gay Uncle posted:I just finished The Wizard Knight and loved it, but I'm very, very confused about the ending. So Able/Arthur puts on his helm of true seeing and see's that Berthod is actually his brother from America, Ben. Did they both get switched at some point? I didn't really get that either. There's at least one other allusion to the real world and this mythological one existing in parallel and possibly occupying the same space in some weird way, like after Able fights the pirates he has flashes of him in an ambulance after being wounded by terrorists.
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Mar 23, 2016 05:22
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Hammer Bro. posted:If you're interested in wildly in-depth and possibly-conspiracy-theorist reviews, https://duchyofcumberbatch.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/the-wizard-knight-commentaries/ has a great one for the Wizard Knight. It's been a while since I read it, but by the end of it I remember being convinced by its astounding claim: The Wizard Knight and The Sorcerer's House are related works. Thanks! I've never seen much discussion on the Wizard Knight, which I thought was a pity because I think they're maybe the most accessible and fun of all of Wolfe's works. Accessible to genre readers anyway, if I were recommending to someone who doesn't read genre fiction much I'd put up Peace or the Fifth Head of Cerberus first.
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Mar 25, 2016 08:40
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Leg injuries are fairly common in Wolfe's works generally iirc. This is likely partly Fisher King symbolism and partly autobiographical, since he suffered some kind of nasty injury at some point in his life, too, if memory serves.
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Dec 19, 2016 11:47
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ManlyGrunting posted:I got a friend of mine to the audiobooks to Book of the New Sun, and we were talking about the series (he's just started Sword of the Lictor and thinks Thrax is really neat) and I got to talking about one of my favourite parts from Citadel of the Autarch and I thought I would post it here because it is probably my absolute favourite part in that entire magnificent novel, at least from my initial first reading of it. I find myself both agreeing and disagreeing with what's said. I agree that language can condition thought, but maybe not to the degree your friend claims (though it's difficult to know the exact scope of his claim). People will reach for words that are lacking in the language and invent them, or press-gang words in the dialect into uses that until then had been unnatural. There may be insidious limitations that make certain kinds of thought less likely for the common man, but not precluded for all thinkers, or even necessarily strongly unlikely. Reality and thought are more than mere language constructs. I agree with him that the story in the BotNS is a good depiction of that argument in action, though.
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Jan 12, 2017 09:34
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ManlyGrunting posted:I knew that and I never stop getting tired of letting people know at the end my introductions. I also like to point them to the interview were he really looks like Dr Robotnik. I've always thought he resembles a walrus. http://imgur.com/a/I6dVu Also while looking for this I found out he wasn't too bad looking when he was young. http://imgur.com/a/d45lX
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Jan 13, 2017 07:56
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Levitate posted:I'm reading The Dying Earth and besides the obvious setting that Wolfe drew from it, it's funny to see the parallels between Cugel and Severian. Wolfe's writing is much more complex and the character partially hidden behind his own narration but they're both characters you really aren't supposed to look at as heroes you should like. Cugel starts of his story by selling fraudulent baubles, breaks into a house to steal poo poo, rapes several women, and basically is just a lovely person, but it is funny how it's written that it's not so entirely in your face about how lovely he is. His terrible deeds aren't exactly played up for drama or something. It's a little like how you can miss a lot of what Severian is doing being really lovely if you're just casually reading through the books (though again not as subtle, it's definitely hard to miss that Cugel is a lovely person) yeah. severian has more self-awareness than cugel, which is an amazingly poor reflection on cugel. it was kind of shocking that cugel actually developed a little by the end and realised some of his limitations and that being a complete turd wasn't always the optimal play! i mean, it's not overt, but it's there. funny contrast in moral arcs, though. severian has a moral awakening, even if he never becomes a great person. cugel just fails by being an awful person so much he eventually is forced into some mild self-contemplation. Neurosis fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Jun 11, 2017 |
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Jun 11, 2017 03:54
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angel opportunity posted:I found a podcast that did a really in-depth reading of Fifth Head of Cerberus if anyone is interested. I'm listening to the first ep they cover it and it's pretty good: Score! These look really thorough. I might do a read along for some of the Wolfe books I didn't get and didn't have enough surface pleasure to justify a reread (eg The Sorceror's House)
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Sep 15, 2017 03:56
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angel opportunity posted:I found a podcast that did a really in-depth reading of Fifth Head of Cerberus if anyone is interested. I'm listening to the first ep they cover it and it's pretty good: i was a bit worried when i saw this that the people doing it would be incredible dorks. they're pretty easy to listen to, and most of what they say is reasonable, though if i heard this kind of analysis for nearly any other author's work i'd say they're reading far too much into things and obsessing over boring and insignificant minutiae. also agreed with the post above; seven american nights is really good. it's one of the two works i'd recommend to someone to give them an idea of what wolfe is about in a digestible form, as opposed to saying to just get straight into the new sun, which is very dense and might put off non-genre readers. the other is the fifth head of cerberus.
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Sep 17, 2017 02:54
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my bony fealty posted:Uhlans were harrassing people because the Autarch had closed the roads. That's it, I think. Severian says something to that effect in SOTT. i remember there being a theory that abaia was seen approaching by the river, which was why the uhlans were panicking and trying to clear people. it tied into something else that was happening in the broader story; that kind of panic would certainly make sense as to how it could separate people. i don't remember being convinced but it wasn't implausible. the closure of the roads wasn't a new thing, either, that had been in place a while.
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Sep 24, 2017 05:39
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Snowdog79 posted:Here you go, from Mr. Robert Borski's book: that's the one. i remember borski getting some hate on here for making some tenuous arguments. i didn't think that was so justified, on the basis of my hazy recollection of reading solar labyrinths a decade ago. the impression i had was that while his arguments usually failed to convince, i'd at least learn about some plausible connections and allusions i wasn't aware of before, and some of the intermediary steps on the way to the ultimate conclusion were reasonable. next time i reread the botns i'll have a read of these and may find out 19 year old me is a lovely judge of everything.
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Sep 25, 2017 08:39
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Shark Sandwich posted:I picked up Fifth Head of Cerberus recently and while I have no clue what’s really going on in the second novella it is so psychedelic that I really don’t care. I always found it hard to figure out what was going on with the Shadow Children in that. I thought I understood that they weresettlers who'd changed due to dependence on that plant thing but other interpretations I read strongly implied that was wrong Love that book though, it's what I recommend to people if I think they'd like Wolfe since it doesn't have as much of a minimum time investment to appreciate but still shows a lot of what makes Wolfe a great author
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Jan 4, 2018 09:29
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I thought the Children were separate to the natives I assumed the Children had previously been human because that's the shape the natives appeared to take in the story and the Shadow Children refer to the natives modelling themselves on how the Children were when they arrived and were at the height of their power. That short story was itself from a very unreliable source however and of course my memory could be off edit: on another Children-related note, in Citadel of the Autarch one of the troops mustered by the Ascians is made up of dwarves riding on the shoulders of giants, directing and controlling them. were it any other author i'd assume it's just an idea rehash, but with Wolfe you have to think they could be Shadow Children in however many hundreds of thousands to millions of years. i do not think earth and the moon (which is green in the New Sun) are anne and croix though. Neurosis fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Jan 5, 2018 |
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Jan 5, 2018 08:42
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Even if they were Ushas and Lune, it wouldn't mean they were those we spent BotNS on. The Severian encountered is, I think, not ours, but one from a previous iteration of the universe. The tell as to that I remember is Severian saying he'd never include them in a book he wrote because no one would believe him. I remember pausing at that - really, Severian, given the other poo poo in there? There are others that are a bit too foggy to remember - maybe Triskele being alive when he shouldn't have been? So this could mean the Short and Long Sun are from a prior creation. Which would kind of make sense, for the NEW Sun to post date the Short and Long Suns. As I said though, I thought the evidence was too scant to say Blue was Ushas.
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Jan 6, 2018 09:07
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Agreed. Nor do I think a reference to a Freudian idea is because Freud applied his notions too broadly and was 'colonising' ideaspace. The guy with the theatre background is worse about this.
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Jan 8, 2018 11:27
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my bony fealty posted:
drat that does put a hole in the possibility. Is it definitely the case that Severian failed to bring the New Sun before? If not, it could be the importance of Severian in the BotNS universe is not only to bring the sun but to influence the remnant culture on Ushas so humans don't vanish or devolve. Not that it ultimately matters that much I suppose since I'm still not sold on Blue being Earth.
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Jan 9, 2018 03:12
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my bony fealty posted:Writing first-person narrators who are shitheads is cool and Wolfe is great at it i'm rereading the wizard knight; the protagonist of that is one of wolfe's more sympathetic characters, all-in-all, but for the the first book he acts like an rear end in a top hat. many other characters are themselves assholes or it would be really offputting.
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Jan 11, 2018 11:09
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More jerk protagonist chat: Able in the Wizard Knight is a loving jerk in the first book but he's actually trying to follow some basic virtues and has enough capacity for self reflection that it's fairly clear he is learning to not be a huge oval office. It's just painful and slow because he's a 13 year old boy put in the body of a 6 foot 3 250 pound mega athlete and wants to prove himself in immature ways at every opportunity. As a reflection of his laudable attitude he doesn't really try to obfuscate his past immaturity and shameful conduct. They're actually really optimistic books because they are a parable where following moral ideals or role models can be wonderfully transformative. Severian is often a jerk but he is waaaay better at obfuscating and rationalising it.
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Jan 22, 2018 04:33
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wizard knight chat: so, no one doubts at this point it was garvaon who killed gilling, right? the angrborn are such unlikable pieces of poo poo, so it's hard to fault him in any way for it. except for thiazi. i don't know what's going on with him, but it seems like his intellectual pursuits have made him very un-angr-like. but it could just be his moral turpitude isn't as obvious, so i wonder if i'm missing something. edit: as I think about it, it seems likely it's thiazi's experience in the Room of Lost Loves that has made him different. we find out that the angrborn are never loved, even by their mothers; thiazi entering the room may have either allowed him to see what it is, or to realise there's something direly wrong with the angrborn and he is then seeking to escape his nature. note when gilling is wearing that ring that idnn says changes colour depending on the strength of the wearer and gilling says they should give it to thiazi to see if that's true and all the angrborn laugh - clearly he's viewed as failing to evince the virtues of the angrborn, which as far as i can tell are to be nasty, brutish and large. Neurosis fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Feb 5, 2018 |
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Feb 5, 2018 01:57
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on wk reread i jsut noticed something i hadn't before: it seems the giants of winter and old night are from deep space. i find this curious - i can't recall any other hints of anything sci fi-like in the book (arguably kullili, i guess, being a gestalt mind of worms, but that idea might have its source in sci fi but does not seem to me something that is necessarily sci fi). now, there's too little evidence to suppose a sci-fi broader cosmos veiled with fantasy, and too much that seems to admit of no possible sci fi-explanation but for the most grotesque stretching of clarke's third law. nonetheless, i thought it was interesting and a nice little touch that reinforces that these giants aren't just evil but have alien psychologies.
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Feb 10, 2018 07:52
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CountFosco posted:What are the textual indications of that? later on in the wizard able has a paragraph about the bodies of the giants in which he says that they needed warmth and size for being from far beyond the sun's warmth, and that where they were from the sun was no more than a star, though a particularly bright one. ah, here we go, found it: quote:“Know you . . .” Hela was panting in a way that recalled Gylf her tongue lolling from her mouth. “Why you name . . . My sire’s folk Frost Giants?” finished my wk reread yesterday. i could've done with another two series in this setting, i love the mix of fantasy and myth, and the optimism of able's character progression is great. the action was pretty good, too, which is something i don't think of any of wolfe's other work. there are as with all wolfe a bunch of things i'm uncertain of, but one that bothered me particularly when we met idnn for the last time: did mani die off-screen? i'm thinking maybe from natural causes. some time had passed since we last saw him, he physically is just a cat, he'd had his discussion of what would happen to him when he died with able as a spirit/cat fusion... but i couldn't spot any evidence other than his absence. i doubt he'd leave idnn, so maybe that's enough. the other one that's bothered me about the wk since the first time i read it was the relationship between earth and myrthgarthr. it doesn't seem that it's just a case of people having direct analogues - able seems to have one and bold berthold does, but gerda was just gerda when able put his helm on and not ben's girlfriend. another thing i realised when we met the lothurlings: the lothurling king is descended from a dragon hybrid, like arnthor. the minister says in the stilted way they talk that the descendant of the dragon 'becomes the dragon' when he mates. so i guess we know the queen was wise to not consummate her marriage, and possibly why arnthor would let her refuse him, despite being king and arnthor having a mean and dominant streak. Neurosis fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Feb 17, 2018 |
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Feb 17, 2018 06:01
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it's not just alternative, but sequential (so much as that can make sense when it's not clear there is time outside the universe), with the conceit being our current universe is itself subsequent to the botns, and that's how the book came to us in the modern day. the wizard knight has something kind of similar in that conceit - the book is a long letter from the protagonist to his brother, his brother being in our earth. the protagonist says michael (as in, the archangel, who is also a character) found a way to get communication from the norse-like cosmos where the protagonist is to his brother, which seems to be by way of inspiring gene wolfe to write the story.
Neurosis fucked around with this message at 10:18 on Feb 18, 2018 |
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Feb 18, 2018 10:16
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i'm one third through shadow on my... fourth or fifth reread. i still don't understand who or what valeria is about. i remember having some vague thoughts from the atrium of time she could be disjointed from her source, but never saw anything confirming that. i also remember her marrying someone who might've been related in some way to severian after severian vanished to hang out with those insectoid hiero fucks, but there was no particualr meaning to that.
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Feb 23, 2018 14:16
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The plot will make a lot more sense next time you read it, especially if you read Urth of the New Sun first, which spells out what all of the events were building towards and that many were arranged, but not exactly how they all relate Edit also the time travel isn't quite what it appears in that it does have stable rules governing it which aren't total nonsense - one being that causation runs in both directions Neurosis fucked around with this message at 07:50 on Feb 26, 2018 |
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Feb 26, 2018 07:15
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So how badly did Severian really abuse Thecla and Agia? I'm almost done with my Shadow read and he's casually mentioned having beaten Agia in the past tense and as a separate incident from when he explicitly depicts striking her. And Agia's dress having been torn to expose her breast? Sure it was a tree as you say Severian, that's believable - I think this is one of the few times I'm confident Severian is straight up lying, the other that leaps to mind being him saying he didn't sleep with Thecla. And as for the Thecla abuse - he mentions at the end Agia trying to claw his eyes as Thecla used to do. He sure as hell never talked about that when he was writing about his time in the Matachin Tower. Lying about his own abuse of what would become himself is certainly something.
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Mar 1, 2018 07:26
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Yes. The events Severian describes involve a relatively fully explained line of events from Thecla in the Revolutionary to her suicide, but clearly he could be lying or eliding. The evidence against Thecla attacking him only after he torture is that the effect of the Revolutionary directs self-harm, and in fact Severian already has to intervene to stop her hurting herself within hours, and that the Revolutionary causes people to grow progressively weaker, and it only takes a month - so there wouldn't be much of a window for her to attack him, and from the way he described it it happened more than once. And we can maybe suppose Severian wouldn't omit it because it doesn't make him look bad - though equally it could just be painful to write about Thecla attacking him after being tortured (and for him to relieve it, given that seems to be how his memory works). So it's ambiguous, though I retain suspicions things between them were rather more fractious than he describes.
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Mar 1, 2018 15:14
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Pegnose Pete posted:I'm on my first read through of these books and trying to avoid spoilers in this thread...but just hit the chapter in the jungle where Severian describes the story of Domnina and The Fish....what the hell did i just read? Will stuff start making more sense later or does this pretty much require a second read through? the stories require a second readthrough to 'get' other than the surface level that they're usually mashups of long-forgotten stuff like the jungle book and the remus/romulus myth. unless you're much more perspicacious than i was when i first read these books (which to be sure was when i was 17 so you very well may be) at any rate.
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Mar 2, 2018 10:02
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i still have no idea what the thing with the heavy tread in the mines under saltus is. i've seen a few theories and none of them are very satisfactory or interesting. while scanning the Urth Mailing List for discussion I saw someone suggesting dorcas might've killed jolenta, given her weird protestations of a vampire bat - i hope not, since dorcas seems to be one of the more morally sound characters in the sea of iniquity that is the Commonwealth (jonas is maybe the only unambiguous one i can recall that we spend any time with).
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Mar 6, 2018 08:14
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yeah that's a popular theory. i buy it. he's a ghost locked in some kind of purgatory for his sins, it seems. i love that that there's a heavy hint he's a ghost is given away in the first page or two where he says something like a falling tree awoke a ghost in the area or something like that.
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Mar 20, 2018 02:16
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The chick at the beginning of book 2 who framed another woman for murder killed herself.
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Mar 28, 2018 04:29
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what the hell is the significance of fechin? it seems he may be rudesind, who may be keeping tabs on severian for the autarch, but aside from that i don't get why he's mentioned in as many places as he is. i base the previous observation about fechin/rudesind on: (1) my recollection is that something rudesind he says early on which seems to mean fechin came to visit rudesind, who was a famous child artist, could have literally been taken to mean a famous artist came to visit rudesind, and that the reference to fechin wasn't necessarily to the visiting artist. (2) the old guy in casdoe's shack knew fechin and they were peers; severian says the old guy was about the same age as rudesind. (3) rudesind is described as monkey-like in his motions, and fechin had monkey-like limbs (but a handsome face). (4) the old guy at casdoe's shack mentions fechin taking something from his family when they were both kids that led the old guy to wonder if fechin did a self-portrait with the reflection. (5) rudesind also indicates he is in a painting of fechin's; again, this is from a passage which apparently indicates fechin visiting rudesind, the famous child artist, painted rudesind, but it could be the self-portrait referred to above. (6) vaguely recall something tying red to rudesind - maybe just his name? - and fechin had red hair. i remember speculation that fechin was severian's grandfather, paired with dorcas, and that the girl fechin and the casdoe guy visited (and fechin hosed) in the story the old guy told was dorcas. while that would give him significance, i didn't find this theory too persuasive - too little tying dorcas to fechin, and we know dorcas remembers keeping shop with her husband and child, and that the nature of the shop was not explicitly art-related. sexual mores of the Commonwealth don't appear to be such as to make an earlier dalliance with fechin producing that child impossible, but it seems a little thin just to observe that fechin and dorcas were likely contemporaries and fechin used to gently caress (a lot) to then suppose it's his child, with dorcas' husband also being a candidate for that child's paternity. you'd expect to see some fechin resemblance in ouen if fechin were his father, too, when there is none. at least it seems likely ouen would have light coloured hair if he was the get of blonde dorcas and redheaded fechin. the only similarity is that severian seems to be handsome (notwithstanding his self-deprecation), ouen resembles severian, and fechin was described as being good-looking. i suppose while the parentage theory does give fechin significance and give rudesind a reason for watching severian other than any link to the autarch, i find the evidence too thin on what i've noticed this read-through and what i can remember from past readings. but if i discount that theory, i can't figure out why fechin gets as much press as he does. or rudesind for that matter, other than to indicate severian is being watched, but that seems too simple for wolfe. it seems one could come up with a reasonable handwave as to why rudesind might want to avoid being identified as fechin, given fechin was known as a wild man and is apparently quite famous in a world where fame seems a magnet for trouble. edit: oh, minor point, but there seems to be a bit of a monkey motif with things tied to the autarch. the ape-men obviously serve him. remember also that when severian was recovering after his fight with agilus he saw a monkey-dog thing running through his room, which i think we can safely say was on assignment from the autarch. inire is also described as monkey-like. tying fechin and rudesind to the autarch would fit in with this. edit 2: and some quotations i found on the urth list about monkeys from the books, sorry for the lack of page references: RUDESIND: "When I admitted I did not, he scrambled down from the ladder like an aged monkey, seeming all arms and legs and wrinkled neck; his hands were as long as my feet, the crooked fingers laced with blue veins." THE CYNOCEPHALUS: "An ape with the head of a dog ran down the aisle, paused at my bed to look at me, then ran on. That seemed no stranger to me than the light that, passing through a window I could not see, fell upon my blanket." This guy, but with a dog head: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Dschelada_cynocephalus-gelada.png RED MONKEY: "Birds unknown to me called overhead, and once a monkey who might, save for his four hands, have been a wizened, red-bearded man in fur, spied on me from a fork as high as a spire." FATHER INIRE: "More fantastic still were the tales of his vizier, the famous Father Inire, who looked like a monkey and was the oldest man in the world." FECHIN: "He was the worst of us all, that Fechin. A tall, wild boy with red hair on his hands, on his arms. Like a monkey's arms, so that if you saw them reaching around the corner to take something, you'd think, except for the size, that it was a monkey taking it." SHAMAN IN JUNGLE (INIRE): "The old man had a staff as crooked as himself, topped with the dried head of a monkey." edit 3: lol that little severian asks for a story from severian's book with certain characteristics and severian said he did the best he could to find such a story. the story he finds tells in its first couple of hundred words of a woman finding part of a plant which she masturbated with and which inseminated her. little severian is 3 or 4 years old. Neurosis fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Apr 6, 2018 |
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Apr 6, 2018 12:39
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couple more observations from my reread. i've seen it remarked more than once severian's memory is actually imperfect, despite his claims. i don't think that's quite true. it seems he has three modes of recall. the perfect one is where he actually relives the memory. i gather large tracts of the botns are written like this, with him acting as an amanuensis for the memory. the second is the more standard type of memory everyone has - here he makes mistakes, and is perhaps more prone to self-deception. the third type isn't actually a mode of memory in itself, but is him recalling his recollections from previous memories - i gather those past recollections that he is remembering in this case involve him using the normal, fallible memory. i wonder if his first mode of recollection is a manifestation of his new sun powers. there is speculation (from dorcas in thrax?) that what the claw (really severian) does is bend time for an object back to where it was before. severian reliving moments may involve him doing this for his subjective perceptions. i've never looked in-depth at the theories regarding severian's memory, though, so these guesses may be trite or wrong.
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Apr 14, 2018 05:39
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you may be right, as there are definite points where severian elides things that seem pretty intrinsic to the memories, like his very long affair with thecla which early on he denies ever having... i feel confident there's some system to it involving his memory-trances and about some things he is 100% reliable and there are probably tells but i guess paying attention to try to figure that out will have to await another reread.
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Apr 14, 2018 07:50
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life of lemons posted:Does he deny it? Or does he just omit it? actually denies it. he later confirms it about 10 thousand times from both severian and thecla's perspectives (when he seems to be writing in a memory trance).
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Apr 14, 2018 08:58
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towards the end of citadel. many things to note i've forgotten, but a few moments that interested and amused me. the first was where agia tries to scare severian by telling him the terrible things hethor and she will do to him. severian responds 'quite honestly', as he puts it, how he's been involved in much worse acts of torture and that she should seek the advice of a trained professional. if this were just a random excerpt from a book one might see it as lame bluster, but we know how clinical severian is about torture and it seems there's ample evidence to suggest that yes, really, they'd made torture as close to a science as it could be (i do like in this last respect how in making it so precise palaemon, when young, stressed that they would not inflict an iota of suffering more than that prescribed, nor one less - someone trying through engaging in evil practices to extract what good is possible from them). agia's posturing is thus pretty funny. the second is the part where severian is reflecting on the weight of history on urth, ending with this: quote:And what of the dead? I own thatI thought of myself, at times, as almost dead. Are they not locked below ground in chambers smaller than mine was? In their millions of millions? There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men - all are dead. Their bodies repose in caskets, in sarcophagi, beneath arches of rude stone, everywhere under the earth. Their spirits haunt our minds, ears pressed to the bones of our foreheads. Who can say how intently they listen as we speak, or for what word? in the modern day, western liberal democracies have been feeling the gravity of our own past sins and failures since at least ww2. seeing the failure of secular liberalism to achieve its most utopian desires, many now doubt its value entirely. and i think liberal democracies have a reasonable claim to having advanced human well-being, even though some of its developments also allowed us to inflict suffering on a far grander scale than had previously been possible. how much more crushed under the weight of its own history must the commonwealth be, and how poorly must its morale fare when the best it can argue for in terms of bettering humanity is that it's a preferable alternative to Ascia? thirdly, i thought it was a cute inversion how severian sees behaviour and ties it to the conditions which obtained in human civilisation in its long technological waxing. he reflects on how men in his day behaved as if the conditions of that past greatness now obtained. this is the thinking of evolutionary biology, but tying ingrained behavioural and cognitive defects to the period where we were advanced, rather than tying them as thinkers do now to our primitive origins. while i don't think there's a ton of evidence for severian being right, it seems like a reasonable line of thinking from his perspective, knowing little of the earliest days of humanity and with the technological apex of humanity being temporally in the same position to him as the pleistocene is to us.
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Apr 29, 2018 06:51
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So the Atrium of Time must move at a slower time rate than elsewhere, somethinh like Ash's tower being in different time periods, right? On returning Severian finds Triskele's footprints and the bowl he left. Valeria seems like a relic from the past herself, even moreso than the rest of the citadel. And the Atrium can only be accessed by going down, and despite it being open to the sky, Severian could not find it in a flier. I'm trying to think if there's any way that Valeria's second husband could be related to Severian, given their resemblance. Looking for the incest angle. And trying to figure out what Valeria's significance is - I've never had the vaguest notion. Neurosis fucked around with this message at 14:18 on May 1, 2018 |
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May 1, 2018 14:13
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Section 9 posted:**-I only recently realized I have never read BotSS before, and was going to read that concurrently but I think it might be too much and too confusing, so I'll put that off until later. it's really good. i think long sun is the weakest of the solar cycle, but it's absolutely necessary to understand short sun (and isn't bad by any means anyway, just it has some flaws in terms of structure i wouldn't normally associate with wolfe), which is only a step behind the new sun in terms of quality.
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May 2, 2018 09:05
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Section 9 posted:I mentioned before that we were starting a book club to read through BotNS. We're doing weekly discussions of about 4-5 chapters each week over Google Hangouts which I am recording for people who can't make the Hangouts. Would anyone be interested in listening to those discussions? I'll need to check with folks if they're comfortable with me posting our discussions elsewhere, but if anyone is interested and the participants are down with it I can post them here. Sure! Even if no one is super knowledgeable there are sure to be observations I hadn't thought of that will make me think about my interpretations. Shark Sandwich posted:I just about finished my re-read of BotNS and I’ve been listening to Alzabo Soup. I don’t agree with all of their podcast but it was indispensable in getting a better handle on the book. Go straight into Urth. There are a lot of things in there having a fresh memory of Book of the New Sun will help with. I notice in Book when Severian thinks of calling his memoirs the Book of the New Sun he says it's using the name of some fabled but long lost text. I assume he is in fact talking about the Gene Wolfe authored Book of the New Sun (it might be a reference to the New Testament, too). This occurs to me since it seems in the Wizard Knight the conceit was the way Michael would let Able communicate with Ben, who was on our Earth, was to inspire Gene Wolfe to write the fictional work the Wizard Knight.
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May 4, 2018 06:00
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Shark Sandwich posted:
For non sci fi readers I usually explain some of the identity and writing devices Wolfe plays with as a hook, then recommend Peace, Fifth Head and short stories as a way for people who aren't into sci fi to get an idea what he's about. Fifth Head is sci fi of course but it's a lot more concise and easier to perceive the themes and narrative tricks, while being very good. If they like any of that Book is an easy sell.
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May 4, 2018 06:05
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my bony fealty posted:The 'lost' BOTNS is almost certainly the text that Canog writes sometime after encountering Conciliator Sev while he's imprisoned at the Matachin Tower in Urth of the New Sun. I don't remember the details but Sev dictates his story to Canog through the wall and this goes on to form the basis of the Conciliator myth (via the lost BOTNS). i forgot about that. makes sense.
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May 5, 2018 01:52
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