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

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.

As a child I had been taught a code of conduct: I was to be courteous and considerate, and most courteous and most considerate of those less strong than I -- of girls and women, and of old people especially. Less educated men might hold inferior positions, but that did not mean that they themselves were inferior; they might be (and often would be) wiser, braver, and more honest than I was. They were entitled to respect, and were to be thanked when they befriended me, even in minor matters. Legitimate authority was to be obeyed without shirking and without question. Mere strength (the corrupt coercion Washington calls power and Chicago clout) was to be defied. It might be better to be a slave than to die, but it was better to die than to be a slave who acquiesced in his own slavery. Above all, I was to be honest with everyone. Debts were to be paid, and my word was to be as good as I could make it.

sounds pretty good

Does it? Has there ever been a time where "everyone agreed as to what good rule was" and could distinguish between "legitimate authority" and "corrupt coercion"? Very much doubt that was the case in "Christianized barbarian society".

Also, does a desire for progress inevitably lead to the destruction of the planet and Ascian slavery?

Also also, is there something a bit patronizing about his comments on women and the working class?

Might as well have stopped at the second sentence: The king might rule badly, but everyone agreed as to what good rule was.

ORLY.

Whole essay is the worst kind of rose-tinted harking back to the good old days.

nah, it's not that bad

Best thing in it is that cs Lewis quote which I'd never read.

Did anyone dig The Wizard Knight? I never proceeded to the second half, I just could not get a bead on the thing.

i was so let down by the long sun books that i haven't followed up on anything beyond "5th head of cerberus"

maybe i will give it a shot

Yeah the only things I've read that can contend with the new sun are his amazing short stories and novellas. But I've never read the soldier books or a bunch of his standalones.

even if true communication w them is near-impossible

actually iirc at the beginning of "urth of the new sun" severian references making peace with the ascians and living among them for a year

actually it is at the end, but i misremembered the quote, he just mentions living among them. i think i filled in the bit about making peace with them. maybe he is referring to the war?

It was the longest day of my life. If I had been merely awaiting nightfall, I could have wandered in memory, recalling that marvelous evening when I had walked up the Water Way, the tales told in the Pelerines' lazaretto, or the brief holiday that Valeria and I had once enjoyed beside the sea. As it was, I dared not; and whenever I relaxed my guard, I found my mind turned of its own accord to dreadful things. Again I endured my imprisonment in the jungle ziggurat by Vodalus, the year I had spent among the Ascians, my flight from the white wolves in the Secret House; and a thousand similiar terrors, until at last it seemed to me that a demon desired that I surrender my miserable existence to Apu-Punchau, and that the demon was myself.

Finished it last night, and had to read the Triskele chapter again this morning for the scene in the Atrium of Time. Is the final bit with Valeria when the engines start up and he begins his journey to Yessod?

I'm going to start on Urth of the New Sun later this year (haven't read it before) but giving myself a break to read a bookabout Christianised barbarian society...

no he doesn't leave for yesod for 10 years after that

i'd given the copies i read to a friend but the other day i found four matching hardcovers of this in the kona-side location of the bookstore whose hilo-side dvd shelf ought to be named after me, and bought them all with my gargantuan reservoir of store credit; i am rereading them. i am imo in general a poor first reader and an above-average second one, so this has been revelatory not just in the obvious ways (secrets i know, e.g. the nature of talos/baldanders) but in mundane and embarrassing ones (i much more clearly and perceptively visualize everything that happens; i would attribute this to the strangeness of the world [well worse than strangeness, right--uncanniness] and the various apparatus of alienation and occlusion in the text, except that this happens with everything, elmore leonard, robert jordan, everything). an early reverie of severian's (triggered by the sense that dr. talos has the face of a stuffed fox, that on some simultaneous and "more profound" level of reality dr. talos' face is a dead fox's face hanging on a wall) likens the layers of reality to the archeological layers in urth's much-used soil--i'd forgotten this but it's absolutely central, the concept comes up all the time, both for severian (the hut in the botanical gardens, the house in the fog, the house absolute and the second house, the question of whether it is the autarch or father inire who rules, the concealed natures of basically everyone he meets) and for us (the archaic words that have been "translated" from unknown far-future ones, and the gimmick in general of the book's coming on like the past but being the future). there is a sense particularly that stories--the thanksgiving myth that's also about alien contact (or something? memories vague); the mutated theseus legend; the dying angel who echoes the dying sun ("you have observed the wasting of my blood--do you not observe also that it no longer issues in straining spurtings, but only seeps sluggishly?"); the transmuted xtian theology that's everywhere, encrusted by layers of undocumented future history; even the claim of the prostitute to whom severian loses his virginity to be the chatelaine thecla--accrue layers of meaning+truth like the soil accrues history. my memories of most of the series are bad but halfway into a reread of book one this seems to be right up there with severian's agent of death/agent of resurrection dialectic as structuring idea of the story. i once read a definition of history, i forget where (eliot?) as being (paraphrased) "the simultaneous sense of the presence and remoteness of the past"; something like this is all over BOTNS i think, pervades it thematically/structurally/mechanically in that real daunting modernist way.

still understand people who find it frustrating; it's one of the most picaresque books i've ever read. stuff just keeps happening to this guy, and then he moves on to new stuff; he often feels blown about passively, like a leaf (like the dead leaves he dreams as a child of vivifying, with a thorn); and all the stuff is so weird. i mentioned this to my friend i lent the books to, who just finished 3, and he said "well except every now and then he suddenly murders someone." he acts in odd places. from the very beginning, i suppose.

anyway roberto spiralli has kindly provided a tl;dr of this post upthread:

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

totes!

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

― the late great, Wednesday, May 23, 2012 8:49 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this really does work btw

i've been rereading these on and off for a few months and i still kind of feel what i felt to begin with -- that they're an impressively constructed exercise in worldbuilding and narrative, but that's all -- but, on the other hand, man they are really good at being that

i'd forgotten most of book four (i remember, broadly speaking, how it ends) and i'm really charmed that as of a third of the way in severian is still sitting around the pelerines' tent with shit-all to do. also, the translation of the ascian's story is pretty virtuoso -- i think he got better at the embedded stories as he went along; the theseus/thesis minotaur/monitor one made me want to throw the book out the window

I'm doing a re-read, and getting close to the end of book 1.
I definitely appreciate and understand wolfe's pacing of the series much better now.
catching a lot of things but still get the feeling i'm missing a lot as well.

hey guys

I'm almost finished with Claw of the Conciliator, and this is book has it all. I can't believe I almost missed this, I only discovered it because of this thread.

Was just trying to talk my wife into reading this the night before last. She loves Wolfe's short fiction but wasn't feeling the newsun last time she tried it

How far did she get into it? It took me three attempts before I made it past the first 20 pages. It starts off like a boring medieval fantasy story ... then the fun starts. Glad I pushed through.

barelling through a re-read of these, just started Claw of the Conciliator. The transition from the end of Shadow of the Torturer to Claw of the Conciliator is so jarring and disorienting. And then it takes several chapters to get up to speed on where Severian is/how much time has passed.

one random thing that's stuck out at me this last time around - have people terraformed the moon? There's a reference to the moon's "green" glow, and then later a reference to the "fabled emerald forests of the moon". Just one of those weird details thrown in in the background with no further explication, easy to gloss over but curious to ponder.

also really enjoying reading these with the internet handy, cuz now I can look up all the weird words thrown about (most of which, like the thing with the moon, don't seem particularly critical but do add a compelling level of detail).

I can think of few other writers who do such an incredible job of keeping the reader off-balance - you never know what's going to turn out to be significant in the narrative.

yah the moon has been completely forested

wait til you get to the bit abt mountains

And yes I found that transition very jarring too And I’ve never quite been able to figure out what he’s going for

Hopefully I am not spoiling too much if I tell you that there is a similar transition between each book

Does it? Has there ever been a time where "everyone agreed as to what good rule was" and could distinguish between "legitimate authority" and "corrupt coercion"? Very much doubt that was the case in "Christianized barbarian society".

Also, does a desire for progress inevitably lead to the destruction of the planet and Ascian slavery?

Also also, is there something a bit patronizing about his comments on women and the working class?

― Mercer Finn, Sunday, August 31, 2014 1:32 PM (three years ago)

wolfe is a believer. for him "legitmate authority" is authority you feel in your heart, cf the bit where malrubius asks severian about forms of the government. malrubius asks severian to list the types of authority (or something like that, maybe it was types of power) in terms of development. severian starts with personal attachment to a deity, moves on to attachment to a monarch, then attachment to an elected body, then attachment to an abstract set of laws, etc. something like that, i'm paraphrasing here. and he asks severian which is the best and severian cites the last one. and then he asks severian which type triskele (his dog) feels toward him, and whether he thought it was better or worse than attachment to an abstract set of laws. so for wolfe legitimate authority is ultimately with god and everyone has to suss their relationship with god's authority out for themselves, since god (like the hierophants in yesod) is more or less infinitely far away. that's actually a big theme in the books, right? "following your heart" toward some distant goal or whatever rather than the torturer's code?

on the second point, i think you're misreading it. ascians are not "political correctness run amok" or something wingnutty like that. there are many various fallen civilizations on urth beside the ascians and the autarchy, all of them are implied to have sought progress in one form or another and fallen into degeneracy for their own reasons (prodded by ecological disaster). remember wolfe is christian, so this is a resurrection parable. it is about a dying sun (son) so civilization is going to die one way or another (it has to, to reborn). it's not a desire for progress ... there's no way in wolfe's mind a civilization could stop progressing, any more than a person can stop aging. it's about the cycle of life or whatever, not a critique of the direction of civilization.

on the third point yes, but when hasn't a crusty white sci fi writer man been patronizing

i mean i get as an atheist one might find this stuff to be corny bullshit or whatever but lighten up, it's sci fi literature not a manual for living

also like a fair number of other sci fi writers you just have to ignore the stuff that isn't sci fi (the tolkien essay)

just like you have to ignore when stephen hawking talks about politics or whatever

does a desire for progress inevitably lead to the destruction of the planet and Ascian slavery?

to continue w/ this a bit more 1) the planet is not destroyed for another few billion years, when the sun swells up etc and 2) near the beginning of book 2, at the fair at saltus we learn the ultimate fate of the human race and not only is it destruction or turning into ascians or something awful, it's actually pretty fucking cool and utopian

*not only is it not destruction*

following your heart" toward some distant goal or whatever rather than the torturer's code?

this is kind of interesting because he takes thecla out from under the authority of the other torturers, and then submits himself for torture in her place. instead he gets exile, and then all this crazy shit happens to him, these epic trials and all this fate and destiny stuff. so he's really being interrogated by god over the course of story, and he willingly submits to it. so i feel like wolfe is saying there are legitimate and illegitimate types of the authority, the legitimate ones being the ones that people are compelled to submit to willingly.

so i mean, if you want, this story about a torturer is literature about submission, not liberation.

As a child I had been taught ... It might be better to be a slave than to die, but it was better to die than to be a slave who acquiesced in his own slavery.

^^ make this ironic, right? because this is a roman-a-clef where severian decides that submitting to god by willingly offering yourself up for punishment is the best way to die

you will spot this theme many places but i don't want to spolier

"following your heart"

^^ without getting directly into spoilers, this is relates to the claw (the artifact itself)

is anyone here knowledgable about catholicism? i would love to learn more about how the imagery in these books relates to catholicism (and i guess christianity in general which i don't know *that* much about)

it's funny, the one episode that really stuck with me from Sword of the Lictor (which I'm about 2/3rds of the way through now) was not the stuff in thrax or the alzabo or little severian or baldanders - it was the Typhon and Paiton chapters on the giant statue. Something about that whole sequence, while not seeming to have much significance in the larger narrative, is so compelling and otherworldly. Maybe it the religious-revelation trappings, scaling a mountain while starving and meeting a god - it has all the rite-of-passage trappings of archetypal mountain myths, mount analogue, holy mountain etc.

it is a very significant sequence!

It might be, I just can't tell yet! I'm discovering that I remember very little of the final book besides certain elements of the climax. I just got to the part where he relinquishes the Claw to the Pelerines.