gene wolfe's book of the NEWSUN!!!!! reading club

whoops that got "cut off" if you will

why does severian imagine cutting off vodalus' head? does he secretly hate vodalus? is he afraid of one day having to betray vodalus?

http://butdoesitfloat.com/This-was-the-first-time-that-he-had-ever-looked-into-the-labyrinth-of

^^ this is what i imagine nessus looking like

wow awesome thread! i am almost done with the last book, so very timely for me. these books are amazing.

I am gonna reread along with this thread.

actually i guess the resurrection might refer to the grave robbery

book one just arrived to my kindle.

or his exile is the resurrection? but that doesn't make sense, resurrection's not like exile.

xpost with the scifi fantasy thread - here's wayne barlowe's illustration of an alzabo. i pictured them looking far more canine for some reason, but i love this illustration.
http://lcart1.narod.ru/image/fantasy/wayne_barlowe/gtf/Wayne_Barlowe_Alzabo.jpg
i have a lot i want to talk about but you are all just getting started and i don't want to spoil anything! so i'll wait til you're done to join the discussion.

lol i have read this twice and remember remarkably little of it

That thing looks like a fanged rhino crossed with Dumb Donald.

I always pictured a large hyena. Are those its eyes in its jowls?

http://www.paintingsilove.com/uploads/18/18616/the-alzabo.jpg

transient random-noise bursts. . . was in heavy rotation when i first read this and is now forever associated with it in my mind

― mookieproof, Thursday, May 17, 2012 7:42 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

might do this and this

picked this up again as i wanted to take a break from the country music bio i was reading. and

SPOILER

the part where they 34t th34cla and he somehow gets her memories is the kind of stuff i like about this series.

finished chapters 2 and 3, not sure what to say about them quite yet ... thinking

findin this v hard to get into

why?

keep fallin asleep after every paragraph, tbh. it's dense.

it is dense. i suggest reading aloud in a foppish voice.

^^^ lol.

i find it a bit of a hard read too, because the action moves a lot slower than a lot of what i have been reading lately, and i also fall asleep reading it. but.. i am keeping on. it's a strangely episodic book and i think some of the episodes are more engaging than others tbh.

If you can find the audio version, read by Roy Avers for the National Library Service for the Blind, it's a nice version.

Spent the last 5 minutes looking for an old photo I remember, of Roy Avers in his big glasses, but can't find it.

read that as Roy Ayers and got excited.

you should read this book and get excited

i'm gonna. but not now. i have all three in hardcover.

i am on chapter 3 now

Everybody Loves the New Sunshine

lolllllll

the one thing I completely remember skipping when I read this a long time ago was that lengthy play at the end

ah you missed the whole point of the series then

i'm glad i'm learning more about jonas.
it seemed like between the end of book 1 and the beginning of book 2 he became severian's best buddy without much explanation. i guess there is a lot that goes unexplained in these books tho.

there is a gap of a few weeks or even a couple months between shadow and claw i think

i do think severian does explain why he likes jonas so much

guys i am reading gene wolfe's wiki and:

After returning to the United States he earned a degree from the University of Houston and became an industrial engineer. He edited the journal Plant Engineering for many years before retiring to write full-time, but his most famous professional engineering achievement is a contribution to the machine used to make Pringles potato chips.[5]

HOLY SHIT!!

you people are lame

i'm not posting again until at least one other person finished chapter one and gets back to me about it

lol linds, that is like the most commonly known trivia fact about gene wolfe! that and he's some weird branch of catholic.

i am almost done with book two, and fully back on board with this series btw. finished the play at the end of book two last night, ordered books three/four.
it is VERY strangely paced, that's for sure.

btw i have been getting tons of kinda marginal, vintage SF paperbacks from the dollar rack at a local bookstore--leinster, leigh brackett, some doc smith and the occasional good title. a couple days ago i got a whole box of edgar rice burroughs books--complete tarzan, complete mars & venus stories, nearly complete pelllucidar & a bio & a big stack of one-offs. if anyone wants my doubles and/or stuff i am going to get rid of let me know. interesting trades considered.

i was gonna start a new thread on ILB to give away my crap but i decided this makes as much sense as anywhere.

haha well i didn't know anything about gene wolfe until now and that blew my mind.
if you find any octavia butler let me know. i've been looking for her stuff in used book stores with no luck. or anyone else i might like. also wondering if the book of the long sun or other gene wolfe is worth reading.

i started the book of the long sun a long time ago -- it was both less dense and less interesting iirc

i have an octavia butler book or two somewhere unless i sold 'em already.
i tried w her but it didn't work. her description of these aliens as masses of hair/tendrils kept grossing me out.

ah you missed the whole point of the series then

― the late great, Thursday, May 24, 2012 11:03 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ah fuck

V, I've read as far as the greenhouse/garden scenes in the first book. I like it so far! I'm intrigued! My favorite bits are the nested stories, and the very elliptical way that older Sev omits certain pertinent-ish facts. F'rinstnace, I realized after far too long that creepy Dorcas is 'Cas,' the dead wife the older boatman's mourning for a few chapters prior.

ok here's one of my favorite parts

"it struck me that his face was not only that of a fox but a stuffed fox. i have heard those who dig for their livelihood say there is no land anywhere in which they can trench without turning up the shards of the past. no matter where the spade turns the soil, it uncovers broken pavements and corroding metal; and scholars write that the kind of sand that artists call polychrome (because flecks of every color are mixed with its whiteness) is actually not sand at all, but the glass of the past, now pounded to powder by aeons of tumbling in the clamorous sea. if there are layers of reality beneath the reality we see, even as there are layers of history beneath the ground we walk upon, then in one of those more profound realities, his face was a fox's mask on a wall, and i marveled to see it turn and bend now toward the woman, achieving by those motions, which made expression and thought appear to play across it with the shadows of the nose and brows, an amazing and realistic appearance of vivacity"

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llugdvAsG31qdkmano1_r2_1280.jpg

do we know if book of the newsun directly inspired the boredoms in any way?

Does Frederik Pohl read this thread? He just blogged the Pringles factoid.

frederick pohl if you are reading this thread i <3 u for gateway

by the way ian, it is absolutely true, in fact the covers of various boredoms albums are actually references to certain characters and places in the books

vision creation newsun depicts book 3, little [ ] touching the [ ] on the [ ] of typhon.

the inside illustrations depict the feast of vodalus when viewed in this manner ... note severian and vodalus seated at left and the food heaped on the right, the lines moving upward depict both the trees in the forest and the elevation of consciousness into visions including the new sun at the top, illustrated in black and white

there are several references in this boxset as well. from the top: 1) the tower of [ ] viewed looking upside down from the very top of the ship of the hierodules. the second image depicts the antechamber of the house absolute. the third cover shows the citadel of nessus or perhaps just one tower.

there are other references as well particularly in the super roots series of releases. onanie bomb depicts a masked severian, while super roots 3 depicts an executed criminal carved into five deaths (representing also severian's five deaths in the series = five caskets in the tomb). super roots five shows a hierogrammate as glimpsed in the house absolute, while super roots 7 shows an avern or perhaps the salamander elemental and super roots 8 depicts apheta's planet from book five. finally there is super are with the story represented schematically (severian and the new sun inside of himself)

iirc there's also an iron-cross shaped one in light greenish-blue that is carved into many radial segments, i believe that is a map of nessus or the house absolute, i forget which release that is though.

i think that's it though, obviously not everything they did was a reference to gene wolfe, especially the side projects

Finished the first book. Liked it a lot. Curious about how he'll bring a 'satisfying' conclusion abt. w/ only 3/4 to go, and very little plot movement thus far. (Or am I a savage for wanting more plot?)

how are you liking book two, remy?

I just finished The Book of the New Sun and read this thread.

I really liked it overall with a few reservations. The worldbuilding is incredible. My favorite parts were most of Shadow (especially the beginning), the scenes at the House Absolute in Claw, after Severian leaves Thrax in Sword (especially the scenes with little Severian), and the last 100 pages of Citadel. I really felt the first half of Citadel dragged. I could also do without some of the pancreator stuff, but at least it sort of answers the question, "What if HP Lovecraft were CS Lewis?"

I love the feeling like Greek or Sumerian myths of a disorientingly weird cause and effect (or lack thereof) where characters act like natural phenomenon instead of people. On the other hand, Severian is the only character with much depth.

One of the freakiest parts is in the Antechamber in the House Absolute and the reference that it has a drop ceiling. Just another way in which time is layered like geologic stratum that have been revealed and now coexist.

So basically the last thing that happens chronologically is the brief reference to Severian riding in a spacehip to be judged on behalf of humanity?

iirc yes, which is fleshed out a lot in the 5th book

I need to re-read these

I think I'm going to order that 5th book.

it rules

i never got around to the long sun books tho i have them on my shelf

i'm gonna try long sun again.

I'm about halfway through Urth of the New Sun - it's fine, but I'm not nearly as into it as I was the other books. That could be due to tiring of them as I've progressed, but I also think some of it is more clumsy (repeated callbacks) and less mysterious than the first four.

i'm gonna try long sun again.

― ian, Wednesday, February 23, 2022 1:58 AM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Long Sun was FANTASTIC. Stylistically super different from New Sun but it really really worked for me. Amazing characters. General Mint is the best. Blood. Horn. Auk. Of course our boy Silk. Loved it.

I read the first two books of Short Sun and liked them but felt like I was missing a LOT of stuff that was happening between the lines. I got distracted from the third book, Return To The Whorl, for some reason or another but I'd really like to give those first two another read & then try Whorl again.

just to follow up on the “novel of everything” idea that i had brought up on the ulysses thread … i love novels in that style because there are so many details to figure out about the pov the narrator inhabits

i think i finally figured out the second reason thecla’s group (chatelaines? i forget what the equivalent rank was) has long necks … i always figured it was to look down on people, but maybe it’s also to make it easier to fit on the chopping block!

LONG SUN.

Is it good? I read the original run and then Urth all in a row and was kind of burned out on his quasi-religious stuff by the end.

Long Sun is really good, possibly better than new sun? (I don't know, I just finished a re-read a couple of months ago and it seemed that way, probably next time I read new sun I'll go back to thinking that one is better)

There's religious stuff in this one too, but it's in a different style than in new sun, more like Greek mythology.

Anyway, as I was doing this re-read of Long Sun I was listening along to the Alzabo Soup podcast and the thing kind of blew my mind that I got from that podcast that I hadn't put together was (spoilers for Long Sun, but also a bit for New Sun):

Typhon sent out hundreds (thousands?) of these generational ships, each carrying an embryo for a clone of Typhon (Silk). Obviously in this particular case, it seems like things didn't go as planned (probably in part because of interference from the Inhumi), but in most cases, this would have set up a colony somewhere with a Typhon clone as leader. This is probably the original sin for which the hierodules felt the need to intervene and which ultimately caused the downfall of humanity

oh wild, i had never considered that.

Long Sun is in many ways much easier to read than New Sun. The language is straightforward, it's got jokes and a talking bird. And General Mint!!!!!

Short Sun, for me, has proven to be harder to wrap my head around than New Sun was, even at first.

Hi

https://fifthhead.substack.com/p/fifth-head

nice

it was a bummer. ok, he was 87, but i still wanted to talk about it, and apparently nobody i work with has ever heard of the book of the new sun

i should sometime reread the book of the new sun, i liked it but whenever i read this thread it becomes apparent to me that i have no idea about anything that happens in that book. i thought it was, just, people dueling with leaves and maoists telling stories.

at least i finished it though!

― Jaki Liebowitz (rushomancy), Monday, April 15, 2019 4:34 PM (four years ago)

lolll, aaaaand then the next month my egg cracked

so i did reread the first book for a book club with a friend a couple of years back and it immediately became obvious how deeply and profoundly misogynist wolfe's writing is. god damn, wolfe holds every one of his female characters in contempt in specifically gendered ways.

so that was a bit of a bummer

I'd urge you to remember that New Sun is being written/narrated by an insane torturer, who often obscures his own shitty actions (i.e. rape of Jolenta) and has no real understanding of women, raised solely among men and boys. THAT SAID, I do think there is criticism warranted PRIMARILY because part of Newsun hinges on the Thecla/Severian duality, and in that respect, Narrator Severian, being both man & woman, should probably possess more insight into women than he does.

I'd be curious to know what in the text makes you think Wolfe hates women, rather than Severian. He has very conservative views (Catholic innit) for sure, so I'm not trying to be dismissive at all. I'm just curious. In Book Of The Long Sun, several of the strongest and most powerful characters, and are not written in the one-dimensional way that they are sometimes written in New Sun.

should read "several of the strongest .... characters are women"

I'd urge you to remember that New Sun is being written/narrated by an insane torturer, who often obscures his own shitty actions (i.e. rape of Jolenta) and has no real understanding of women, raised solely among men and boys. THAT SAID, I do think there is criticism warranted PRIMARILY because part of Newsun hinges on the Thecla/Severian duality, and in that respect, Narrator Severian, being both man & woman, should probably possess more insight into women than he does.

kinda funny thinking of it that way. there's not really any way in which i'm a "man" but i guess i've had experiences with gender that a lot of people (wolfe certainly included) haven't.

I'd be curious to know what in the text makes you think Wolfe hates women, rather than Severian. He has very conservative views (Catholic innit) for sure, so I'm not trying to be dismissive at all. I'm just curious. In Book Of The Long Sun, several of the strongest and most powerful characters, and are not written in the one-dimensional way that they are sometimes written in New Sun.

- ian, Saturday, January 6, 2024 3:41 PM (two hours ago)

it's been a while so i can't say precisely, and i don't want to make it sound like a rhetorical argument... like you say, wolfe was a catholic. not just a catholic, but the particular strand of catholic with which one should _not_ get into a rhetorical argument, lol.

mainly it's character voice. it's one of the most challenging things about writing... i've noticed a tendency when writing to fill in the lacunae in character experience and voice with my own experiences. this quality was, if anything, even more pronounced in my writing pre-transition, when i had a false universalist conception of human nature.

that is the interesting thing to me... not the question of wolfe's misogyny, but my complete failure to notice it pre-transition. i don't think of myself as ever having been a man, and i don't think it's hormonal. if anything i'd say it's lived experience. looking at things from multiple perspectives. wolfe was extremely intellectually gifted but it is fundamentally an intellectual framing. that i look at things differently now isn't a matter of intellectual growth, just lived experience.

what i remember is the way severian, as narrator, describes women's bodies... from the way severian describes his own life, his own experience, the way he describes and treats women seems like something of a non sequitur. they're ways in which women are treated in _our_ world, under conditions that don't seem to apply in severian's... in particular, i had the impression that severian finds women's bodies to be in some way indicative of their _character_, particularly in a moral sense. i don't remember reading anything in his descriptions of his world that would justify that approach. it's a very catholic way of looking at things. very catholic in a specifically highly patriarchal way. there's very much a sort of "male gaze" to how severian looks at things - again, in my memory. he observes and judges the bodies of the women in a way he doesn't with the bodies of the men.

i think this is something of a failure of thomist and post-thomist intellectual catholicism in general... there's a sort of misrecognition of the ways we're shaped by somatic experience.

if i can get really personal here... one of the most profound experiences i had relating to catholicism was subsequent to my genital reconstruction surgery. without wishing to get too into detail, it is a complex surgery and one does wind up bleeding for quite a long time. to someone from the outside, to me before i had the experience, i didn't understand what the true impact of it would be. one can't until one experiences it. there's something sort of very mystical and spiritual about that, in a way that's aligned with scholasticism, i feel. the thing is that the anatomical and physiological changes are, comparatively speaking, nothing. anatomy textbooks will tell you that there's just not that much difference between male genitals and female genitals, and my lived experience bears this out.

the difference is in having this new perspective, a new way of understanding oneself. after a few days i was able to step into the shower and wash myself. it's out of necessity a gentle, tender experience. i'm not a parent, but i had a very strong sense of treating this new creation as i would a newborn child, with the love i would show to my own newborn child. it seemed profoundly maternal.

i washed myself, and i saw and felt the blood... being raised catholic, i was taught there was something beautiful in blood, and i felt that strongly at that time. i recall seeing and feeling myself and saying "this is my body, this is my blood". and it felt as if it was true for the first time in my life. that for the first time in my life i truly understood myself that my body was _my_ body.

and from a catholic perspective, well, others might dispute it but the catholicism i was raised in, i know full well that it was blasphemous of me to say that. not because i am comparing myself to christ or saying that my body is christ's body. it's not. it's more that under catholicism, under patriarchy, people - all people, but especially _women_ - don't have the right to their own bodies. our bodies are not our own. we are part of the body of christ. we eat of christ's body and drink of christ's blood, and that is the mystery and the sanctity of communion. the abomination. the cruelty. the dominion, of what they call "communion". my body is my body. not christ's. not any man's body. mine.

which i think puts me fundamentally at odds with wolfe's worldview and perspective, and the way he sees women in particular.

anyway. i hope that makes some sort of sense! kind of hard to put into words.

Makes tons of sense and I agree with a lot of it. In fevers I think you’re right - Severian writes about women as caricatures because he’s definitely a misogynist. That’s severian the fictional author of this fictional book of the new sun.

When I first read it, I thought along similar lines. “Why are all these women falling in with him all the time?” Oh yes, he’s the narrator, of course he’s going to tell it that way. I think the late great addresses this up thread perhaps too… it’s helpful to keep in your mind that the fictional guy writing that book is, yes, a misogynist by all modern standards, but also insane, and a liar (sometimes from his insanity I think and sometimes willfully, and he often omits.) Severian also loves to stroke his own ego. This is also a world in which the masters in the bear tower practice monogamous bestiality, so their whole worldview is kinda ducked by all of our modern standards.

None of this to discount your lived experience, but that one of the … things… for me when reading new sun is to Always keep in mind that Severian is a creation of Wolfe, and one whose moral worldview is intentionally fucked up, because it’s the product of an alien and fucked up place.

Sorry. I’m typing in my phone…

. If you have not read the whole series, it may also help to know the whole story, narration especially, becomes radically recontextualized by the climax of the fourth book.

Like… Severian sucks he’s not cool or fun. Sm

oh yeah for sure i don't look at him and be like WOW THIS GUY HAS A BADASS SWORD AND A CLOAK THAT'S, LIKE, BLACK, BUT IT'S EVEN MORE BLACK THAN BLACK, LIKE HE COULD PROBABLY ROUNDHOUSE KICK CHUCK NORRIS IN THE FACE haha

i do wanna push back on the "he's insane" though, i've dealt for most of my live with severe mental illness and i've found that it often is essentialized. it's like the whole "depression quest" thing where sometimes the right choices literally aren't open to us because of where we've been. it doesn't offer any kind of excuse or justification, though, and i think sometimes there's a tendency to do that. i don't see it as "he's lying because he's crazy". i don't see it as _lying_ at all, like, what he's saying doesn't accord with the facts but like you say there's a difference between saying something he genuinely believes and saying something he _knows_ to be false

either way he's responsible for his words and actions and their consequences. like if i'm gonna look at it from jolenta's perspective it doesn't really matter if severian _knows_ what he's doing

to me basically it's... particularly since i take a trauma-focused approach to mental illness, i look at the circumstances and environment severian comes from and, like, my critical approach is to try and see how those experiences have shaped his character

part of the gender essentialization here, i think, part of the misogyny, is that _wolfe_, not the character, mistakes toxic masculinity for manhood itself. being raised among men, being raised without real access to womanhood and women's experiences... that shaped me. it absolutely did. i don't see being a man in the company of men as something twisted and hateful, though. i guess it can be. i guess it depends on your point of view. again there's a lot of subtext i'm missing. is there a lot of pederasty in the torturer's guild? that sort of trauma would explain severian's perspective. because it's learned, it's a learned perspective, learned behavior

I think you should just read Long Sun, lol - completely different writing style and character work, it's interesting (and the main character is effectively raised by women)

In one of the early chapters, Severian tells you straight up that he is insane and the jumble of memories in his brain are impenetrable even to him, he admits that he may not be lying intentionally, but i still think he often does. So i'm not trying to take mental illness lightly -- but it's something he acknowledges. He also contradicts himself in the text occasionally, usually in the manner of "I remember everything!" "oh, i don't remember what happened next..."

re: pederasty - there are allusions to this happening though iirc nothing super concrete. i'll look out for it during this re-read. here's a reddit thread on the topic - https://www.reddit.com/r/genewolfe/comments/bzerhz/severian_the_pederast_does_wolfe_not_situate/

Even w/o pederasty in the guild it's an incredibly fucked up environment. He never saw a woman until he was god knows how old (whenever he was old enough to go to the witch's tower i suppose) -- he has very little idea how to interact with the outside world at all and women in particular imo. Being raised in an environment where violence is cold and common and, in fact, your duty, is also very traumatic probably.

re: sanity,

"I realized for the first time that I am in some degree insane … I had lied often … Now I could not be sure my own mind was not lying to me; all my falsehoods were recoiling on me and I who remembered everything could not be certain those memories were more than my own dreams.”

^ very end of chapter 3

damn that’s an airtight argument

incredible given that even ursula leguin was tricked by this snake

she called him “the melville of our time” by which i am
sure she meant damn this dude seems weirdly sympathetic to this killer whale and this killer whale killer prep the cancel culture harpoon

:shrug:

i’m not trying to be insulting. i’m just saying i agree that a person who is a literal torturer, trained to inflict pain — and more crucially to reject compassion, since he is told to think of the pleas and bargaining and begging of those under torture as like the squeaks of animals that signify nothing but pain — is going to remind us of people that treat us poorly

also he lives in a world where growth is stilled because the sun is corrupt and every mountain has been carved into the likeness of a murderous male autocrat obsessed with power, and this is normalized to the point where people call them mountains and not “the mountain that looks like the old autarch so and so” and the reader has to figure it out

i’m with you, it sounds like a shitty place to be and for that reason i try not to imagine myself as actually in the story or those ppl actually in my world.

but that’s a general reading tactic of mine anyway

if people want to get mad at a book about a decadent lunatic with a huge sword who destroys the world, that’s fine! the author wants that

and when you figure out what kind of “hero” he is you’ve (and remember it’s a bildungsroman so the story only ends when the narrator is no longer himself … and he has photographic memory and relives his experiences like an alzabo, so has no agency to retell his dark past as a better person) unlocked the theme of the book

so anyway yeah stories about these cursed sword dark
edgelord heroes are not for everyone, and its a bit embarassing how many postcolonial voices or whatever stan for him. maybe you’d like elric novels better, simpler guilty pleasure and also good reading

finally if you wonder why i might read like that … it’s so i can compare books like sundiver vs xenogenesis or foundation vs triton on merit of ideas first, since it is sci fi … and i don’t look to art for practical guidance, i have enough immediate accountability in my life (since i get publicly evaluated, by govt name, by children with microphones, in front of mayors and state assembly leaders for years and years now) … like just personally have enough to worry about without muddying the issue

that’s all i’m going to say on it and afaict that’s definite so i’m done for awhile. this is the only corner of this board i feel useful on anyway, and not at all on an affective or social emotional level, just a sliver of personal knowledge i’ve earned at ruinous cost to myself

definitive* not definite … and only fair since i kicked off this whole mess

do you think it's a mess? this is a book you love and you understand and here comes this weirdo who, like, openly admits to not understanding the book and interprets it through her own biased lens. idk, i know that's a flaw of mine, i come off as more authoritative and sure of myself than i actually am. to be honest i don't read a lot of fantasy novels at all - it's not a genre i'm familiar with. so it's not surprising that i'm maybe a bit ignorant of what's going on in this particular book! the next fantasy author on my to-read list is tamsyn muir and not moorcock. i heard tamsyn muir's books have more lesbians.

i mean, what can i do here, retract my opinions? does it even make sense for a person to retract their _opinions_?