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

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]

well, as usual, i'm sorta with it because i'm reading through these (just finished the citadel of the autarch aka BOOK TWO) and at the same time not with it all, because i'm like a year too late for you all.

so far, i think my favorite part may have been the botanical garden chapters in the first book. honestly, i could read an entire tetralogy based on that concept alone - entering different sections of the building, dripping in and out of time and space. i'm hoping that they return there for some reason during the last half of the book of the newsuuuuuuuuuun.

i was really thrown off at the beginning of the second book (citadel) because gene apparently skipped forward a decent amount of time in the narrative without explaining why. suddenly, jonas is tight with him, and dorcas is his sex porpoise. speaking of, major lols at the part where he's like "i love dorcas. she is the best and i love her so much. she is my porpoise. <3" and then literally 2 paragraphs later he's somehow alone with jolenta and he's like "her breasts were like giant melons that i wanted to slurp left and right, i freed her perfect thighs and steamed up the boat in public. 2 hours later we returned to the campsite with melon juice all over us and for some reason dorcas was angry. i love dorcas so much."

i also enjoyed the weird witch/town resurrection thing at the end of book 2, although i didn't really understand what happened. i started to read the part of this thread that dealt with that but quit because i don't want to ruin anything.

anyone else still in the middle of this thing? are you all reading book of the old sun now? "where are they now?"

keep reading

i read "urth of the new sun" (book five) and loved it

then i tried the long sun series, found it boring, abandoned it in the middle of book one

lol me too

keep reading!
i bought urth of the new sun, but i still haven't read it. it is next to my bad in a pile.

i finished a book last night so maybe i will read it... now.

'next to my bad'

;_;

I'm pausing briefly so that I can read Desert Solitaire before my Utah vacation in a couple weeks, but then I will be back in the thick of it. Can't wait!

it is next to my bad self

urth of the new sun is crammed with so many WTF moments

you know that bit about sufficiently advanced tech seeming like magic? urth of the new sun pulls off that trick better than any book i've ever read

btw if you really love BoTNS and plan on multiple rereadings I'd highly recommend you pick up "lexicon urthus"

I'm sort of addicted, have done five rereadings and just reread citadel of the autarch again

I think I'm going to start a religion based on BoTNS, engine summer and delany's triton, i just keep rereading those instead of new books

I got to echo lamp upthread, i really wish i had found these books as engaging as i find reading late great's summaries and theories of them. Reading them was a grey and flat experience and i cant remember a thing nor even how far i got, two or three books.

But thread makes me want to try again.

The ones i compulsively re-read are the six robin hobb ones, decent thread idea imo

Reading them was a grey and flat experience

i would describe it as morose and dry, but very very funny and genuinely stirring.

No doubt that you're gettin something from it i'm not, i wish tbh.

it's because i read it out loud in a comedy voice

ysi?

i'm with darragh but want to believe that the fault lies with me and not the text. i mean, i wouldn't describe them as "flat and dry", but the central character and his quest didn't engage my interest. midway through the second novel, i realized that i was reading only for the islands of strangeness (often quite beguiling). also, i became obsessed to a debilitating degree with researching and documenting the definition & etymology of every single unfamiliar word. stopping was a medical intervention basically.

just started reading for second time. enjoying clues to things i know about from first time, e.g. talos. also things that seemed mystifying/tangential -- e.g. jungle hut in botanical gardens - now have a relevance. was expecting to have missed stuff but surprised by exactly what. totally missed that the citadel is like a launch site or space port, and the towers are disused rockets, even though it is explicit said, at least of the torturer's tower. of course, i have as many unanswered new questions as i had first time, if not more.

one thing that i really love above these books is how wolfe uses language that 1) creates a setting both familiar and strange, appropriate to a world we know but far distant in time; 2) dislocates the narrative in time, which is obv important thematically

what are your thoughts on the jungle hut?

i think first time i conceived of the jungle room as an exhibit, artificially constructed. now knowing elements that are introduced later, it is clear that they enter a physical space that exists in the past, early 20th c with the prop plane i guess.

one thing i noticed is that the shaman guy talks like someone from severian's present. i don't know if there is anything that suggests whether that is from exposure to visitors or if he is actually from that present. i had looked up his name and it is a general term for a shaman from south africa. with nessus seemingly located in south america, i don't know if this supports the idea that he is from that present arrived from africa (more likely than he'd traveled from 20th c africa). the africa thing could be a total red herring though, the name could just be one of the translation quirks.

probably the big question to answer is why does the woman not see sev and agia. this has me stumped. are the shaman and the guy just 'sensitive' as suggested? something, maybe the vibrations of the hut, made me think it was more that she was not seeing them for some reason. it feels like there is something more significant to it, but i wonder if part of wolfe's genius isn't just suggesting significance where it doesn't really exist.

and overall there is the question of why, why are the botanic gardens there at all. it seems like a big production on part of inire. do these windows serve a practical purpose for him; is there some resource he is accessing? the idea of people getting trapped in the rooms is intriguing and possibly a clue to their purpose. is there a motivation to trap 'sensitive' people. is there specifically a motivation to waylay sev?

anyway, even as i think and type i feel like i am either missing some key elements revealed later that i haven't connected back, or else i am missing the point by thinking in more practical rather than thematic terms.

so, this is just me muddling through. is there an accepted reading of that scene?

good questions!

at first, wolfe's prose seemed distressingly dense and even somewhat comically pretentious

i actually think severian is supposed to be somewhat comically pretentious

Almost at the end of a second re-read. Pottering around on the internet I found this, Gene Wolfe on J.R.R. Tolkien: http://www.thenightland.co.uk/MYWEB/wolfemountains.html

Striking especially after reading the final words of the Autarch: "Until the New Sun comes, we have but a choice of evils. All have been tried, and all have failed. Goods in common, the rule of the people... everything. You wish for progress? The Ascians have it. They are deafened by it, crazed by the death of Nature till they are ready to accept Erebus and the rest as gods. We hold humankind stationary... in barbarism. The Autarch protects the people from exultants, and the exultants... shelter them from the Autarch. The religious comfort them. We have closed the roads to paralize the social order... Until the New Sun..."

I'm basically a progressive atheist, and all this stuff rubs me up the wrong way. I love and admire the book a great deal, but am wondering if some of their political / religious content is uncomfortable or troubling for other readers?

i don't mind the words you quote, since they're from a place of great weariness that comes from this ruined palimpsestic world sev+you have been immersed in -- and because there is a sense in some of the scenes w the ascian soldier (iirc?) that the dogmatic ascian language/culture is maybe not as impoverished as it seems to the southerners, even if true communication w them is near-impossible -- and because i do kinda think that our various social utopias require a fundamental change in human conciousness expressed here thru crypto-xtian eschatology (although irl i don't think we'd get to it by waiting around in barbarism) -- but the straightforward feudal nostalgia in that tolkien essay seems p dumb. idk why he thinks other people's wealth was "a spur to ambition" under feudalism, unless he means ambition to go on a crusade. which is what sam does.

anyway i've only read the book once so i am a lil foggy on it, may well be misrepresenting it.