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

rings of saturn is best imho but that is mho so who knows

i like sebald but i like thomas bernhard more, that's a different conversation though and probably not related much to wolfe

read that even lamp wont talk shit about that

sebald is dope it think we talked about this once on ilx? i feel like i tired to get you to read 'memories of the future' and/or 'letter killers club' but maybe that was someone else/another conversation...

the army doesn't live in the ocean, but they are allies w/ the creatures in the ocean

no i know that i thought the creatures controlled them or something? its also p vague but i thought only one of the creatures lived in the ocean and it was always growing or something?

i like sebald but i like thomas bernhard more, that's a different conversation though and probably not related much to wolfe

― the late great, Tuesday, July 10, 2012 9:21 PM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is 100% reasonable, I agree w/ this, but rings of saturn is a completely different beast I think, also read war and war by krasznahorkai if you haven't, sorry about hijacking the wolfe thread, I'll back off now

read that even lamp wont talk shit about that

sebald is dope it think we talked about this once on ilx? i feel like i tired to get you to read 'memories of the future' and/or 'letter killers club' but maybe that was someone else/another conversation...

― Lamp, Tuesday, July 10, 2012 9:21 PM (36 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah someone else but I'll check that shit out

it's very vague and it's never clear if abaia is one creature, many creatures, a culture, a race or what.

the creatures in the ocean make a deal with the army from the north, but the hierodules - and the undines - both make clear that they're not manipulating human events even though they're somewhat involved in them

in the end it turns out that undines and the hierodules want the same thing anyway but i'm not going to spoil that one

sorry but you guys sound like roman in that one ep of party down

y'all should read p. mckillip's riddlemaster series imo

it is briefer and less convoluted and similarly awesome

who's roman?? what's party down? what did he sound like?

i don't actually think this wolfe book is meant to be a mystery, if you read all four carefully i think almost all of the plot threads are pretty clear, it's just the subtle ways in which they're tied together which is obscure

i think one of my favorite parts of book three is when he's wandering in the mountains after escaping thrax but before finding the cottage in the mountains, and he's delirious and just experiencing looking at the stars in the mountains on a clear night and seeing clouds from above and the sunrise and what not, it's just beautiful and evocative and captures something that i've also felt when looking at mountains and stars and clouds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnYoyCgFKSI&feature=related

oh he looks like a pretty chiil dude

he bones that chick, right?

no he forgot to carry around his badass sword

maybe next episode

both baldanders and typhon represent the folly of scientific materialism

y'know i think i hate books where something REPRESENTS something else. or maybe i just hate this book and there's a dozen counterexamples i can't think of.

late great -- don't get me wrong -- i do not dislike these books, and i will continue to read them and may even read the book of the long sun or w/e.

I do find the structure & flow of these books a bit difficult tho -- I understand that it's written as Sev's memoir and so of course there is a lot Wolfe can do with that and does do quite well w/r/t omission of detail etc but i still find it a bit tough to wade thru some of the less compelling adventures. Whether you want to blame that on Sev's lack of narrative skills or something else is up to the individual i guess.

I read books primarily for entertainment, though I do read a lot of biography as well. I also read books to stimulate my own thoughts and to become engaged in another world or a scenario that otherwise I would be unable to experience. I do not find Wolfe to be all that engaging--there are plenty of episodes in the books that are neat-o (stuff with Jonas I liked a lot, the botanical garden of crazy dimensions, the floating islands, the consumption of Thecla) but I also find long stretches where I am just waiting for something to happen. Idk.

re: Dorcas -- it just seems strange when you build someone up as one of the only other major characters in the book only for her to disappear for almost the entirety of one of the books. I think she was a good foil for Severian and their conversations were good reading, for me.

^ well, wolfe writes in such a way that there are a lot of stubs in sevarian's story. dorcas: she's a savior! she's a lover! she's sickly! she's resentful! she's just ... gone! she was the dead boatman's wife! is a nice little progression of events, but they don't feel like they add up to anything. it seems to me that there's an episodic quality to the novels' structure that undermines the carefulness of the presentation and the cogency of the world-building. what i mean to say is: there's no objective correlative for sevarian's internal issue, whatever it is. there isn't really an internal issue at all, that i can tell. robert penn warren talks eloquently of the 'yearn' at the heart of every great character, the inarticulable, inchoate, desire for some (x) that motivates the character like the virgin mary's immaculately burning heart and is expressed or denied in terms of the outside action in the narrative. but with sevarian....

now, not every story need follow so strict a path as warren says –– but sevarian's story is clearly, one about growth and an expanding understanding of the world, and the slow drip of information about humankind's fall and afterlife. but why? is sevarian especially curious? no – not based on anything i've read. in some chapters, as ian alludes to, he's a hollow shirtless navigator bumbling around and seeing A Thing and engaging The Thing and moving on. But, for many of the chapters, there's no thrill or contribution to the meaning. the village of mages? the fire salamander? the green man? they're interludes, but on the way to what? you can make an argument that together they are all blips in a pointillist painting that will make sense only upon completing the novel, but i'm not buying it. at least not now. many of the incidents don't contribute to the story (i.e. sevarian's journey; education; growth) nor the plot (his physical steps to becoming Whatever He Becomes), which, ideally, are entwined ends. they're just 'a funny thing happened on the way to return the claw'

like ian, i'll continue reading. and i'll continue enjoying. but i'm reserving my right to be critical.

also nobody seems to have a body, a la george martin

you're not reading carefully enough

severian's yearning is to bring things back to life

maybe that becomes clear later on, and he is always 'thinking about trying to use the claw' but tbh a much more motivating factor for him seems to be sex? with thecla and cyriaca especially, his lust causes him all sorts of problems and seems to motivate a lot of the major action in the book.

fwiw i just stumbled upon genewolfebookclub.com and it is pretty neat stuff i guess..

i would say the sex thing is fairly true to life ;-)

but then there's also triskele, and his childhood experiences in the crypt watching nature come to life, and his ambitions as a child to bring the new sun back to life and to restore humanity, etc etc

you're not reading carefully enough

is kind of ridiculous, v.

sorry :-(

hard to read closely when it's hard to tell what's gonna be relevant and what's just stage dressing imo. also tough to read closely when i am half in the bag and going to sleep.

tbf the book does end w/ severian telling you to go back and re-read again

how many times have you read this, TLG?

front to back four times over the last year

but i often dip back in and read a few chapters at a time

wow, four times in a year. that is impressive in some way.

eh, not really

i tend to get obsessed with a few books and read them over and over again rather than reading a broad range of stuff

some other ones i keep re-reading are engine summer, the cornelius chronicles (moorcock), stars in my pocket like grains of sand (delany), lovecraft's stories, etc

this is probably the first time in my adult life though i've got caught up in a multi-volume epic, it's kind of surprising because i really don't care for like tolkien or george martin

i think maybe i just relate very strongly to severian?

that is true actually, i feel a very strong kinship to severian

severian is kinda bipolar i guess in that he swings from feeling like an outcast, a traitor and a failure and feeling like king of the whole world and jesus' son

i can relate to that

interesting that stars in my pocket is on your reread list, late great. of all the delaney i've read (and i've read all of it except the nevèrÿon stuff, hogg, phallos, and mad men), it is the least fulfilling title in the catalogue. what do you like about it? if i think about it, i can see some tonal/formal similarities b/w it and newsun... and they're kind of evenly sprinkled on the attractor/repulsor matrix.

i think the main character in stars in my pocket (marq dyeth, not rat korga) has a very believable interior voice and i find it easy to relate to his thoughts and feelings ... for example, at the beginning, when he remembers a human hand and alien hand linked together in the dappled sunshine of a tree-shaded playground. i have memories and feelings like that too.

i also found the world (and universe) very believable, it felt three-dimensional and solid to me, like there are all sorts of little idiosyncrasies and bits of alien-ness but they don't feel alien, they just feel like a natural part of an alien world, not like classic sci-fi "oh here's a bit of futurism or theoretical physics and let me explain it to you", something a bit more whole and rounded than that.

i guess lovecraft is the same way? i relate pretty strongly to most of lovecraft's narrators (i guess because i'm an indoors-y neurotic bookworm too?) and the world he sketches is very atmospheric, with the fantastic details more often obscured than explained

i dunno though, none of what i'm writing here feels exactly right or like i'm doing justice to it

i promise i'll get back to this

front to back four times over the last year

wau

late great, have you read any clark ashton smith? king of atmospheric Weird Tales writers

a tiny sliver, only "white worm" and "out of space and time"

what else is good?

i often confuse august derleth and clark ashton smith. i know i am not crazy about derleth but i am pretty sure that's why i always pass on them, then later i remember he's lovecraft's friend, not his publisher.

but didn't he help w/ the dreamlands? and the king in yellow? or am i just super confused?

nope that's robert t. chambers

er w. chambers

maybe we should have a wyrd fiction thread.

^ yes

Dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial? Don't mind if I do (a weird fiction thread)

awesome

k so i've been thinking about what you guys said and i am going to make an admission

for awhile the third book was definitely my least favorite and i agree i was also taken aback by the sudden downshifting, so much so that i totally skimmed a lot of the thrax stuff. it was also one of the books that i found most improved by rereading. now i feel kind of silly for being so badly thrown by the transition because the same thing happened at the beginning of the second book.

so here's how i look at the books so far

shadow of the torturer - so the shadow stretches out before severian because it's the beginning of his journey, poisoning the things it falls across (thecla, agia / agilus, nessus, severian himself). at the same time his shadow falls across things more or less by chance. there is also the intimation of a shadow falling across him. there's the story about the angel that alludes to either doom or invincibility, baldanders, the atrium of time, malrubius' ghost, etc.

claw of the conciliator - after having caused so much misfortune in the first book, severian takes up his religious and mystical calling. he gives counsel to agilus, frees the man in green, tames the man-apes, turns the other cheek to agia, takes mass, nurses jonas, meets caesar, glimpses cacogens, nurses jolenta, meets witches and resurrects apu punchau. at this point it becomes clear that carrying the claw is a bit like carrying a cross or a crown of thorns. in contrast to this charity, he's actually abandoned by his companions more than once (jonas and talos)

sword of the lictor - so now the claw has lengthened into a big long sword and he has to learn to deal with the burden (remember the sword is actually described as looking like a cross) of heroism and authority. there's this strong contrast between traditional fantasy heroism and christian heroism. on both levels he is harshly tested. he succumbs to temptation with cyriaca. his faith is tested when he learns humanity is controlled by cacogens. he has another vision of hell. he does manage to resurrect a child but realizes he can't do anything about the squalor. dorcas doesn't accept her rebirth and leaves. he baptises the prisoners but can't save them. he can't save the family from the alzabo. he gets his adopted son killed. typhon is interesting because to defeat typhon he performs a mercy killing of an innocent. he meets the cacogens but barely understands their reassurances that they - the hierodules, anyway - treasure free will. he fights baldanders to a draw.

so i think also part of sword of the lictor is that it reflects a lot on the lengthening story and a lot of these episodes reflect back on the events of the first two books.

thrax is like an inversion of nessus, and now he is in charge of his own citadel. he descends into and back out of thrax as he does nessus. this whole bit reminded me a lot of proust taking the carriage down in the valley, etc etc. unlike severian at the nessus river, dorcas at the river rejects her rebirth. he leaves in exile again after repeating the whole thecla debacle with cyriaca. the alzabo thing is like a meditation on the thecla thing. he duels baldanders as he dueled agilus and again there's a miracle and his opponent flees. again, this is a bit of a debacle. there's a whole lot of mercy-killing going on here too. speaking of which, the baldanders thing completes the story that talos and baldanders have been telling since severian ran into them and severian is left again questioning what exactly being a hero is accomplishing.

anyway i'm kind of losing my train of thought.

hey LGG thanx for that post.
midway thru book 4 now and it seems like severian is trying himself to put perspective on all the things that have happened to him which is sort of a 'big moment' in terms of understanding the earlier books.

oh yeah, did that make sense?