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

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.

one thing I'm appreciating a lot this time around - which maybe didn't register with my first reading over a decade ago - is the way Wolfe incorporates and refracts various myths and archetypes into these strange new shapes. I lol'd when I spotted the Marlowe/Faustus quote in the brown book Severian carries. Wolfe seems way more interested in littering his narrative with this kind of thing than in filling a more standard fantasy framework (a nobody goes on a quest, meets companions, gains a magic weapon, faces a nemesis, learns true nature of self etc. - although obviously all of that is present as well!) There's a very meta/postmodern sensibility at work that's constantly highlighting that this story is literally made up of lots of other, older stories, and yet they often appear strange and unfamiliar because of the way they are presented or because of slight revisions.

wait - there's a marlowe quote?!?

I forget where this happens exactly, maybe after he talks to the undine?

Some fragments Severian sees while the wind is turning the pages to dry them: "soulless warrior!" ... "lucid yellow" ... "by noyade" ... "These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient." ... "Hell has no limits, nor is circumscribed; for where we are is Hell, and where Hell is, there we must be." (Note: The last fragment is from Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Noyade is a mode of execution by drowning.)

interesting!

Apparently Dr. Talos quotes Faustus at one point as well but I’m not sure where that is

that i recall

Dicking around with Google books instead of working - "soulless warrior!" looks like it's either from Lucy Larcom's poem Orion or Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning by Richard Hinckley Allen, where the poem is used as an epigraph. Maybe the latter, because "lucid yellow" turns up in William Henry Smyth's Sidereal Chromatics, on star colours. The "ancient times" one is Francis Bacon.

almost to the end, and a couple things sticking in my head a bit

- Malrubius + Triskele are the products of an AI, right? It's kind of implied (esp if one takes a literal interpretation of the "deus ex machina" ref)
- Agia's character (and maybe this gets cleared up towards the end) really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. She's this shopkeeper who initially is enamored of Severian's sword and concocts an elaborate scheme to obtain it, but then it turns out she has this essentially super-powered suitor that can summon extradimensional beings and crazy weapons (so what would she want a big sword for)? And she hounds Severian with them, apparently out of rage-revenge, but instead repeatedly rescues him rather than tortures/kills him? And was also totally unaware of the significance of Vodalus and the Autarch (her murder of Vodalus is referenced but not depicted/described)? You add all those things up they don't form much of a consistent character.

Malrubius + Triskele are the products of an AI, right

no, not really. aquastors are much higher-tech than that, to the point that they're basically just magic ghosts reincarnated by the hierogrammate. it's explained a bit more in book 5, but the answer is really just magic.

from paracelsus - AQUASTOR. - A being created by the power of the imagination - i.e., by a concentration of thought upon the A'kasa by which an ethereal form may be created (Elementals, Succubi and Incubi, Vampires, &c.). Such imaginary but nevertheless real forms may obtain life from the person by whose imagination they are created, and under certain circumstances they may even become visible and tangible.

so yr not a million miles off but it's the concentrated thought power of the hierogrammate that reincarnates them, not the concentrated thought of an AI (book 5 goes into hierogrammates in a bit more detail, they are portrayed mostly in vague terms but they possess near-limitless power from our POV, though not from theirs)

it turns out she has this essentially super-powered suitor that can summon extradimensional beings and crazy weapons (so what would she want a big sword for)

agia seeks power and doesn't enjoy being beholden to hethor. in fact she really doesn't like hethor at all, because he is a creep.

i think agia represents self-interest, in contrast to severian's sense of duty

oh hi, I have read the first two and am gonna get the rest soon, reading the 2-in-1 books that I assume are standard now.

will check back in later

so yr not a million miles off but it's the concentrated thought power of the hierogrammate that reincarnates them, not the concentrated thought of an AI (book 5 goes into hierogrammates in a bit more detail, they are portrayed mostly in vague terms but they possess near-limitless power from our POV, though not from theirs)

this seems like an intentionally obscure way of Gene Wolfe saying "this is me, messing about with the plot". I'm sure there's some literary term for when authors essentially insert themselves into their own work as semi-omnipotent figures, which kind of sounds like what's going on here

hierogrammate literally defined as "A sacred scribe; specifically, a writer of hieroglyphics", and akasha as space/sky (I remember that much from hindu mythology) + the "deus ex machina" refs... all seems to be Wolfe getting a little cutesy with the po-mo literary devices

i lent out my copy of the first two, but maybe when i get a break from this mystery bender i'll do a re-read of the second half. I love this shit.

yr definitely on to something shakey, esp considering that the first time we see a hierogrammate it appears when the autarxh opens a book whose pages are made of magic mirror