Book of the New Sun

I just finished it. Its a masterpiece. Wolfe does clever things with language, setting, and allusion. There's a lot of philosophy that most readers might not catch.

Also, I don't think many people realize how difficult it is to render such a complicated setting through first person narration. Severian's characterization was interesting, but since most readers these days read like young adults you get idiots like who don;t understand the nuances in Wolfe's philosophic discussion within his series.

I'd be more specific but I'm short on time at the moment.

>There's a lot of philosophy that most readers might not catch.
Where was Kant in it?

You may be short but it should be precise enough for me to locate it within the narrative.

Wolfe unironically writes the best women in science-fiction.

Return when you have more time. There is no such thing as too much praise for Gene Wolfe.

...? No. Why didn't you finish the actual novel?

Kant wasn't in it, but there's a lot of general Catholic theology and Aquinas. He talks of formal and efficient causes in some places and as a whole it is littered with ideas on Providence.

It intentionally confuses the reader. It does so in a strong way.

I don't know all the reasons why it does this. In fact I think there are too many reasons why to bother trying to explain it.

>An ape with the head of a dog ran down the aisle, paused at my bed to look at me, then ran on.

The whole premise of his eidetic memory making him a reliable narrator is matched by the realization that he lies, can only tell you what he thought he saw, and makes careful omissions all the time. It annoys me to the point that I'm on my 4th reread.

Severian generally avoids writing about how he really felt. He doesn't often tell you the real reason WHY he does something. His narration constantly alternates between what he observes, then what he did to what he observed. But he rarely stops to justify to you what he did, even though he'll go on big tangents on about whatever else. It can make you think he is like a child at times, or sometimes a robot, but it's a mistake to think either of those things. The less he wants to dwell on an action he did, the shorter his description of it, or in a few times he'll omit his action altogether and only through narration later does it reveal what his actions were. This is a clever way to show us either Severian's guilt or pride.

Even though it is first person narration, unlike a common shallow young adult novel, Gene Wolfe does not throw away the deep complexities of self-image. Severian generally refuses to talk about how he sees himself directly, but his writing style alludes to what he's really like, and we also have how the other characters treat him, which we must rely upon heavily to really know Severian.

>There is a dialogue in the brown book somewhere between two mystes, in which one argues that culture was an outgrowth of the vision of the Increate as logical and just, bound by interior consistency to fulfill his promises and threats. If that was the case, I thought, surely we will perish now, and the invasion from the north, that so many have died to resist, is no more than the wind that topples a tree already rotten.
>Justice is a high thing, and that night, I was young, so that I desired high things only. Perhaps it was for the same reason that the love of living things, which I had felt so strongly as a child, had declined until it was hardly more than a memory when I found poor Triskele bleeding outside the Bear Tower. Life, after all, is not a high thing, and in many ways is the reverse of purity. I am wise now, if not much older, and I know it is better to have all things, high and low, than to have the high only.

tl;dr Book of the New Sun is about a boy and his dog.

It took a whole day, but here are some thinking wolfefags.

I always wondered if it was possible to make an adaptation of The Book of the New Sun

Hell no

Think about how much would have to be cut out

Yes it is, but compare the Dune novel to Star Wars. Multiple levels of meaning would need to be relegated and only hinted at.

that's not even the real reason. the book doesn't work without its words

>Chilliarch
>mispelling of Earth as Urth
>Orichalk
>It might have been the snarling face of Jurupari, or perhaps a map, and it was wreathed with letters I did not know. I rubbed it away with my foot.

when read, all these intentionally mysterious things we do not understand form these vague allusion spots in our imaginations.

You can't adapt that.

May anyone spare a link for a humble poorfag?

It's on tpb and libgen and just about everywhere. Just Google it.

>It might have been the snarling face of Jurupari, or perhaps a map, and it was wreathed with letters I did not know. I rubbed it away with my foot.

What is he referencing when he says this?

>the orichalk was gone. In its place - and no doubt with its edge - a design had been scratched on the filthy stones.

end of chapter 29. it had to have been something Agia had done- but what exactly is a mystery

it is partially to indicate how spooky agia and agilus are. the act of creating the glyph reveals that they are superstitious people who dabble in urth's answer to voodoo, in contrast to their relative gregariousness earlier in their meeting with severian. it's a form of degeneracy that comes with a decaying world.

>gregarious
let me correct myself, i was referring to agia, not so much agilus, who is a creepy sociopath, who only dispenses a torrent of words when trying to dupe people into his autistic worldview.

there is an element of Severian's vastly different alien understanding of things to us

>an armored figure standing in a desolate landscape. It had no weapon, but held a staff bearing a strange, stiff banner. The visor of this figure's helmet was entirely of gold, without eye slits or ventilation; in its polished surface the deathly desert could be seen in reflection, and nothing more

a picture we would instantly recognize, and the effect would be lost in a physical adaptation

it's not good

/thread

Agia is nutso

if you actually believe this, then you are indeed merely a fan, and relegated to experiencing great works with the intellectual limitations of indeed a mere fan.

I'm confused. How is he wrong?

i quoted the wrong user, i meant him and the other user's interpretations of those characters and passages are not what's wrong, it's 's autistic insinuation that the movie adaptation would have to have a 1:1 correlation to the books, which is of course, fucking stupid.

is Book of the New Sun an optimistic sci-fi or a pessimistic sci-fi

pessimistic in broad terms

optimistic. the wicked are punished and mankind thrives in harsh times after eons

>mispelling of Earth as Urth
it's not a mispelling

how is it not a mispelling

Is it in the far distant future or a universe that existed before our own

The implication seems to be that Apu Panchau and Korea are both things that existed before Severian's time. Either the witch's ritual could make things from other dimensions appear and this other dimension had its own Korea or it's our world's future. Also English or a language bearing an uncanny resemblance to it had to exist at some point. Somewhere in Thecla's memory an ancient language is mentioned that uses the same word for 'current time' and 'gift', of course meaning 'present'.

And of course I forgot that Jonas recognizes the roots of classical Greek mythology in the story Severian tells him. But considering that he explodes himself out of existence using mirrors shortly after this I think that Jonas knowing about the same things we do can be used as evidence for both theories since I have no idea where the hell he goes.

does severian fucking his grandmother have any significance or is it just shock value?

I've always wondered this too. Severian unintentionally rezzing Dorcas right at the beginning of the story is an early hint that the abilities he attributes to the claw are actually his own and the instinctive closeness they immediately feel towards each other is explained by their being related but beyond that I don't really know at all. I doubt it's shock value though, Wolfe doesn't really do that.

it's very much a far distant future on earth, 5 to 8 billion years in the future.

no it isn't, your time frame is way off. read the book.

>an ancient language is mentioned that uses the same word for 'current time' and 'gift', of course meaning 'present'.

ah shit, how didn't i picked that

Perhaps I'm just not clever enough to appreciate the deeper layers, but I found it pretty boring.

It's genuinely 200% better in subsequent readings when you understand what Wolfe is getting at from the start. Of course there's lots of supplementary stuff that can aid your understanding too. I think that reading Chesterton makes Wolfe's work much more enjoyable.

terminus est is fucking wicked dude. I totally wish I had a fuligin cloak. Its hella cool.

The only people who wear fuligin don't get to wear shirts. It doesn't sound worth it. And Terminus Est is just a big sword that's well made. It's so mundane that I at first thought that your post said 'is fucking wide dude.'

suns running out of fuel, and the ages are defined by the points in time in which the planet runs out of a primary element, such as sulfur, helium, or whatever. All "mines" are excavations of old human ruins. entire ecological systems have formed and migrated over vast distances, and mankind has traveled to the far stars and back.

if you read wolfe and make comments this idiotic, i recommend dropping wolfe and reading sanderson instead.

where does the tradition of not wearing shirts come from?

why do you think terminus est is mundane? in our world's history, there is no sword with an internal cylinder of quicksilver that fluidizes the swing of the blade.

>no shirt tradition
I figured that it was to show off the torturer's physiques (which would presumably be strong from the work they do, making them scarier) and also making them seem like detached hardasses who don't give a shit about the cold. I think that it's just practical reasons for their image.

As for the sword, it's neat but I wouldn't call it wicked. As far as craftsmanship goes it's probably one of the best swords in the commonwealth and would be the best on our earth for sure, but functionally it's a sword that's particularly strong and swings well. Considering that it's the signature weapon of the man who would become the autarch and bring about the New Sun it doesn't seem that remarkable. Most authors would probably make it shoot pure light out of the tip or something, not that that's necessarily a good thing. I actually like how low-key Terminus Est is.

>in our world's history, there is no sword with an internal cylinder of quicksilver that fluidizes the swing of the blade.
that's actually not true

Terminus Est isn't just low key mundane, remember it actually gets destroyed.

>it's not true but i won't substantiate anything

>deconstructions of the invincible sword archetype are mundane, that's all to it

Billions of years is definitely a stretch. The sun isn't running out of fuel, its implied that a black hole was placed inside the Sun during the Age of Typhon, speeding up the process.

>suns running out of fuel
No its not, it had a black hole in it
This was humanities punishment

Speaking of which - what had mankind done wrong, I never figured that out

Don't forget that the torturers seem to have a lot in common with catholic priests

Terminus Est is unusual - pattern forging a sword with a sealed hollow channel filled with mercury should not actually be possible

I think it all has to do with Typhon. He's so heavily implied to be a devil figure that it seems he's the source of this new-age sci-fi Original Sin. I haven't read Long Sun or Short Sun, supposedly his reign is given more detail in those.

What's the explanation for that? Is their patron Saint Katherine the same Saint Katherine that Catholics today know? Were the Seekers of Truth and Penitence once a branch of the church?

here is a picture of a real-life functional 19th century sword that has a center core filled with ball bearings

I say functional and not a fighting sword because while the sword was designed to withstand abuse and is insanely sharp, much like Terminus Est the effect on its weight makes it good for executioner-style chopping while too unwieldy for actual fighting

instead of a single sealed hollow channel, some chinese swords had a single hole in the blade which was filled with quicksilver and then stoppered. The complexity of this led to other chinese swords imitate with a single hollow cutout which a core could be inserted, but those were all in all fragile and poor.

...

So while there are some features to be found in real swords, there are none with a technical aspect exactly like Terminus. You only proved my point.

It's the same concept, stop being autistic

Every time Severian mentions his perfect memory, without exception, there is a mistake in his narration less than two pages worth of text away, and it starts on the very first page, when he attributes a spoken line to the wrong person. It was Roche, not Drotte, that mentioned the pikes.

That's because Severian is a bitch boy

Can you provide additional examples?

I'm not sure it's a mistake as much as it is Severian lying about certain things. Valeria asks him about a "tower where everyone who enters dies in pain in agony" somewhere in the citadel, and Severian says it doesn't exist.

That tower doesn't exist of course, but the Matachin Tower does.

Also the admission of having sex with Thecla is a fairly big one.

I remember that one, though it didn't appear to me entirely as a lie on the surface. If memory serves, this admittance is made by Severian after the false Eucharist where Thecla's conscience is fused with Severian - from here I assumed the two interacted within Severian's mind and in his dreams, at times amorously.

Alternatively, I thought he may have mistakenly conflated the real Thecla and the imposter from the house azure, with whom he did have sex.

After he crashes with the autarch he mentions experiencing the first memory loss of his life, shortly after the mentions his perfect memory once more.

I read Shadow and Claw. Pretty meh. Sort of reminds me why I don't read genre fiction. You can follow the twists and turns of a well-crafted story for 400 pages, but in the end it's only worth diving deeper into it, breaking it down and analyzing it, if it's crafted around some sort of perspective or idea. There's just too little philosophy. It makes it impossible to justify reading the thing in depth.

>too little philosophy
ok bud

It's worth it if it expanded your horizon. Don't be a bildungsroman drone.

>Too little philosophy
He spends pages explaining the thomistic views on laws, justice, state, metaphysics and so on.

>says there was too little philosophy
>expecting philosophy in science fiction
>completely missing the heaps of philosophy in the first two books
>complaining about the lack of philosophy despite his lack of reading comprehension and childish expectations in the first place

jesus christ i hate people on lit sometimes

>you will never have the intellectual education and literary experience required to appreciate the full depth of wolfe's short stories in new sun

I can never get a thread going about this.
Am I the only one who read it?

p-pls respond

You actually are Combiner

There are at least 5 known wolfefags on Veeky Forums, which probably means there are 30 in total, though only a few are smart enough to talk about his work.

Are you a Wolfefag then?
I have some questions about the book.

Okay so to be quite honest, I read and read and reread The Book of the New Sun as both awed by it and because I'm inspired to understand it for Wolfe's meaning, but I am terrible at understanding what Dr. Talos's play is about.

It just completely loses me. I've reread Dr. Talos's play more than any other part of the books and I understand the least of it.

Okay throw them at me then.

I'll be back in about an hour f a m.

BotNS's fanbase is one of the most autistic I've ever seen. Every single criticism of the series, even minor ones, are instantly attacked by multiple people, mostly with ad hominem and glib comments instead of actual arguments. I will never read it because I'm either going to not like it, or I'm going to become an unbearable sperg. Lose-lose, man.

>Sheep will bait this poorly.

Have you read Urth of the New Sun? it's been a few years since my last reading of the series but if I remember correctly Talos' play is literally a reenactment of the future.

There is a series of scenes where the Urth is flooding because the new sun has arrived. I think at some point Severian mentions his intention to throw his journal into the black of space or something after chronicling his final adventures and somehow the book falls into the hands of Talos in the past. Giving him the inspiration for the play which Severian unwittingly stars in.

Honestly typing this all out makes me want to dive back in. Thanks fellow Wolfe anons

>BotNS's fanbase is one of the most autistic I've ever seen.
>ad hominem and glib comments instead of actual arguments.

(You)

Did /sffg/ stop replying?

I'll be lurking off and on but I'm sleeping soon.

this hurts too much

I am not sure if i am spoiling myself something but i am reading sword of the lictor and i am the part where severian encounters typhoon Where the fuck was he, it was a launching pad for ships? what is with the statue? Rip little severian ;__;

If any of this gets answered in the third book then don't bother:
I understand how the chariot race at the end of the second book ties into the politics but how does it tie into the bigger subplot of Gaea vs Artemis?

What is the significance of the dream involving Polos Latro seems to share with Pasicrates and why does it change the Spartan's mood and behaviour so much?

Did the Spartans kill all the slaves after the ceremony that was supposed to free them?
Why?
Why was Latro spared?

I might not remember this correctly but what happens with the oracle that Pausanias(?) will lead the slaves of the rope makers to freedom? I mean the one that happens after the child sacrifice scene in the first book.

It was a monument for that dude he meets there.

manga when

I can't get over how damn ugly these covers are compared to the original Japanese set. The OG Japanese covers for Sword of the Lictor and Citadel of the Autarch are easily two of the best that have ever been made for Wolfe's work.

Amano is roughly at the same technical quality as the Obata covers. I don't see much of a problem with either, other than that they're not realistically drawn.

Why don't you like the new artwork? It's baroque for a manga style cover for sure.