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

i'll take your word for it, i think

these guys are the six leftover gods

oannes - severian, death, dawn
dorcas - mother, life, moon
thecla - temptress, sex, moon
odilo - father, autarch, sun
the sun - god, life, sun
eata - atheist

i guess the six caskets are the five severians + the open casket of TIME

i like the way you think.
if i had any knowledge of the new testament at all (lol jews) would this stuff seem more apparent to me? because i wouldn't say much of this stuff is obvious on the surface to me.

yeah i have some knowledge of this stuff

there are a lot of hints in lexicon urthus, also remember i've reread it a bunch of times!

finished. sorting thoughts. ending improves sequence significantly. but still doesn't explain away episodic narrative. something about teleology and dr. talos.

word

now ... reread!

oannes - severian, death
atheist - eata, nihilism

just realized that the aspects here are equinox (severian) and eclipse (eata)

a lot of the mystical stuff that's hinted at in the first four books (for example, what happens when the sun comes back and what kind of godz humanity has in the age of new sun) are fully explicated in "urth of the new sun"

actually that's backwards, apu punchau causes the eclipse, the equinox is when they're in eata's boat

*crickets*

who are people's favorite characters?

put me down for palaemon and malrubius, jonas and the archivist

to suspend the flow of time, to meditate, to be places i haven't been, to commune with other minds, to engage w ideas
--the late great

I like Jonas! I didn't realize how much I liked him until he was gone. And I didn't realize the extent to which he was a humanizing influence on Sev (ironically, I guess...). And I liked sad Jolenta. I think I missed some of her story? She was the waitress who served Talos, all glamoured up by the good doctor homunculus. Then she died. In between, she may have been raped by Sevarian. Yes?

you got it

severian def has sex w passed-out jolenta but it's not clear how she feels about it (i don't recall her bringing it up but when they get back they're embarrassed)

Time to list Father Inire's numerous appearances?

no no no wat a few days.
i am almost done.

ultimately glad i read these, not planning on a re-read at least for a few months. i have too much other stuff to read. like the "new" ed sanders book and a stack of charles williams paperbacks and that byrds bio i stalled on 4 months back.

lg: is inire a hierodule?

yes, as is the cumaean

who are people's favorite characters?

there are no characters in this book, thats part of the reason its so annoying

i am trying to reread this but its p stultifying and sort of empty, like i get excited about the book reading the late greats posts but i dont think the novels really bear him out they dont really seem to about anything even while signifying so much, like how much of this stuff matters?

so what book do you think i'm reading?

in search of lost time?

needs more elric

finished this last night, finally.
good book.
should re-read. will re-read. but not right now.
picked up in the last four-five chapters, but i still would not consider this to be like, one of the best things i've ever read or anything. gene wolfe must've been real proud of himself for crafting such a fine puzzle so full of references to itself and to science and etc but i still find the structure of the book and its pacing to be v problematic for me personally.

i spent enough time thinking 'maybe i will reread this' that i could probably have read another, smaller book in that time

i read three other books during my reading of the book of the new sun. whenever i would get bored or feel like it was going nowhere i would read a nice short detective story full of action and adventure

you know, there is a sort of tradition in writing of "the encyclopedic novel", starting w/ don quixote, where the author attempts to include, well, everything!

i think book of the new sun falls in there

now whenever you feel bored of whatever you're reading though you can dip in to one chapter of book of the new sun

:)

have you read book of the long sun/short sun etc? what do you think

i keep starting long sun and i can't get farther than a few chapters. i am not sure if there's problems with the OCR in the ebook i got or if there's just weird language and formatting issues going on. it has a very different feel to book of the new sun, i'll tell you that. much lighter, i think. i guess it seems more like a standard sci-fi story and less of a weird, elegaic meditation on humanity and its executioner

also short sun looks like bog-standard sci fi stuff but i still plan to read it

i think a major part of the book is just that theme of how much of "everything" is in the particular event. are all events linked? is it all part of god's plan? is the design of the rose, of the whole rosebush, hidden in the thorn? what things are part of severian's destiny and what things are accidents? what details are illuminating, yes in the sense of medieval illuminations?

i think of it actually as a novel of religious and philosophical ideas. my parents have always been into christian history and apologetics and my sister is a prof of medieval art, so i mainly enjoy it on that level rather than the mystery. i think after a few readings this is what the mystery becomes about, not whether that was father inire we glimpsed or just a hunchback in a cowl.

i mean the book even includes a book-inside-the-book that purportedly holds the sum of human wisdom (orange catholic bible?) but every time severian opens it's totally obscure what it's getting at and very ambiguous about how it relates to the present i think that's the real mystery of book of the new sun. is oannes a loving god or a cruel god? which characters in tale of frog and fish are human and which are cacogens? what does the parable of fechin represent. what does it say about art and reproduction that the fechin story is the last story dude tells in his life - and then the alzabo shows up!

i appreciate your insight into this, i want you to know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqY0dCmAyNM

awesome!!!

:-D

lol

shredding guitar kills ms every time

what does it say about art and reproduction that the fechin story is the last story dude tells in his life - and then the alzabo shows up!

nothing ever really dies, i guess

i wonder if i will re-read this.
i want to
but i have so much to read.

you have time

Read Book of the New Sun in chunks over a couple of years, and loved it. One of those books that is too huge to really take in at once, but it wins on language and weirdness and the satisfaction of piecing together some of its mysteries. Now just d/l Shadow and Claw onto my ereader, and after going thru this thread, sorely tempted to have a second go at the series.

also, the late great should totally write a reader's guide to these books, IMO

aw thanks but there's already a very good one called "lexicon urthus"

read 70% of the first of these today (lol kindle measures). i like the style, found it tough to get into a few months back but it's flowing for me now.

is the endless war of ascia vs the commonwealth actually a secret plot to depopulate the earth?

woah interesting idea!!!!!

MASSIVE SPOILERS

was thinking about abaia, erebus, scylla and how they apparently control all of the autarchs except the free autarch of the commonwealth (who is in league w/ the hierodules as opposed to "actual" cacogens like abaia, erebus, scylla, undines, etc)

it's clear abaia at least sort of wants severian to be autarch, and at the end sort of revealed that it's because they're working to the same ends as the hierodules all along - finish the old urth, so a new, better one can take its place

severian pretty much accomplishes the depopulation of the earth and the rebirth of the human race and the undines seem happy about it - so perhaps part of the idea is to prepare the old urth for the new earth by creating conditions of endless war and deprivation to clear out space for the undines, pale warriors, etc

This thread has made me revisit the series again, finished Shadow of the Torturer a couple of days ago. Much much much better the second read through. Good value for money, these books...

cool

While Baur was the true inventor of the Pringles crisp, according to the patent, Liepa was the inventor of Pringles.[9] Gene Wolfe, a mechanical engineer-author known for science fiction and fantasy novels, developed the machine that cooks them.[10]