The Book of the New Sun First Read and Re-read project [spoilers]

[Wilbur]

8 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Jonas' "love" rather than desire for Jolenta, and hers for Talos, is linked to her becoming at least part android.  And the references to her odd, bumpy style of walking seem to be more than just the chafing of fuller thighs. 

I also thought that Jonas' being an andriod was why he was attracted to Jolenta, since she had also been "improved" into a form that was partially robotic.

[Fragile Bird]

I am reading along, but right now I'm putting together my income taxes... 

[Iskaral Pust]

Things are flagging while we wait for FB's tax filing.  I'm going to start on book 3 this week.  This is where I abandoned it before.  Much stamina needed. 

[Wilbur]

So on a scale of 1-10, 1 being none and 10 being extra, how would you compare the two:

The sense of overwhelming depression engendered by GRRM's Thousand World stories.

vs

The sense of disoriented confusion engendered by Wolfe's BotNS.

I give the win to Wolfe, Confusion Level 7 to GRRM's Depression Level 6.

[Jo498]

I never read Thousand World (never heard of it). After one read through all 4 Vols. of Book of the New Sun and a re-read/discussion of Vol.1 I am still in two minds about that opus. I do not mind the weirdness although I find that there seems quite a few things only for weirdness' sake. I don't think everything has to be resolved but the resolution(s) at the end are not very convincing (or simply too hard to understand). There seem to be many red herrings (or weird for its on sake). The atmosphere and mood is pretty cool in most of the book and Wolfe's imagination is sometimes stunning. But another weakness are the characters, I think. There is only one developed character, Severian, everything is centered around him. An while I think a "sympathetic torturer" is a fairly interesting conceit (more interesting than e.g. Glokta), not much comes out of that in the end. There is hardly any dynamics between characters.

So while it is a cool and worthwhile book with lots of imagination, I can hardly agree that it is a great book completely "transcending" the SF/Fantasy genre.

[matt b]

So things seem to have stalled out without FB's chapter summaries. Did anyone catch where Severian turned water into wine at the beginning of book 2? Like many things in Wolfe, it happens offscreen, and you have to put together a couple disparate lines to make sense of it. In Chapter I he mentions discovering wine in his water ewer and then in Chapter V he mentions that it happened after he had examined the ewer with the Claw. Took me 4 or 5 reads to pick up on that.

[Fragile Bird]

I'll be posting chapters this weekend, as many as possible.

[Iskaral Pust]

4 hours ago, matt b said:

So things seem to have stalled out without FB's chapter summaries. Did anyone catch where Severian turned water into wine at the beginning of book 2? Like many things in Wolfe, it happens offscreen, and you have to put together a couple disparate lines to make sense of it. In Chapter I he mentions discovering wine in his water ewer and then in Chapter V he mentions that it happened after he had examined the ewer with the Claw. Took me 4 or 5 reads to pick up on that.

I got that, and the Christ allusion, but it seemed clear that the Claw did it without his intent.

Severian's messianic miracles -- healing, resurrection, water into wine, etc -- seem to come from the Claw and are done by him either unintentionally or with no understanding of process or certainty of outcome.  He seems more like a hapless bumbler with a tool of great power than a messiah drawing on his own faith and power.  I guess if we later find that he was the Conciliator and created the Claw, then it retcons his messianic credentials but as we read this account there is no sense that he believes in any higher power or is anything more than a victim of circumstance.

[Wilbur]

3 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I got that, and the Christ allusion, but it seemed clear that the Claw did it without his intent.

Severian's messianic miracles -- healing, resurrection, water into wine, etc -- seem to come from the Claw and are done by him either unintentionally or with no understanding of process or certainty of outcome.  He seems more like a hapless bumbler with a tool of great power than a messiah drawing on his own faith and power.  I guess if we later find that he was the Conciliator and created the Claw, then it retcons his messianic credentials but as we read this account there is no sense that he believes in any higher power or is anything more than a victim of circumstance.

And even if he DID (or DOES) create the Claw, still in this iteration of his life path, he is a "hapless bumbler with a tool of great power", since these things happen without his intention at this point in his timeline.

[matt b]

19 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I got that, and the Christ allusion, but it seemed clear that the Claw did it without his intent.

Absolutely. Whatever the exact mechanism, these miracles that Severian seems to be performing with the Claw are almost certainly happening of their own accord.

[Wilbur]

On 4/6/2016 at 0:32 AM, Jo498 said:

I never read Thousand World (never heard of it)...

Sorry, I should have been clearer.  I was referencing the multiple (24 or 25) stories that GRRM wrote in the 70s and 80s set in a common science fiction milieu often referred to as "The Thousand Worlds".

This page gives some idea of the individual stories that are generally considered part of The Thousand Worlds.

http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/866/what-stories-are-set-in-george-r-r-martins-future-history-universe-the-set

And Preston Jacobs has been using The Thousand Worlds to better understand ASOIAF, reviewing each book online with some character from GRRM's writings.  I think they provide some nice insight, and reading GRRM's old books gives me a better appreciation of GRRM as a writer, as some of these books are tighter (duh) and better than some work in ASOIAF.

NOTE: Preston Jacobs kindly provides links to both the audio and the ebooks in his review videos, so you can listen or read the books easily.  This is especially helpful, as finding some of these books in print is nearly impossible today, given how old they are and where some of them were first printed (magazines).

Anyway, GRRM's gloomy worldview is on display in all of these books, and his mood of gloom is almost equal to the sense of confusion driven by Wolfe's writing.  In the end, I would rather be depressed but know what was happening in a GRRM world than be happily ignorant of what the heck is going on in a Wolfe world.

[Iskaral Pust]

Discussion has petered out while FB works on that pesky tax filing.  Are others still reading?  I just picked up vol 3 -- finally in Thrax!

[Wilbur]

I am waiting until FragileBird starts up again, so as to keep the chapters fresh in my mind to react to the commentary.

[BookWyrm2]

18 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Discussion has petered out while FB works on that pesky tax filing.  Are others still reading?  I just picked up vol 3 -- finally in Thrax!

Iskaral, I'm right behind you

I just finished the Claw last night and have gotten some supplementary material on the BotNS that looked good (Castle of Days which has a bunch of BotNS-related essays in it).

[Darth Richard II]

Oh, Castle of Days is great. Some of the short stories in there are my faves.

[Darth Richard II]

Random link for randomness: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2007/gwng0704.htm

 

Man, this entire site has been dead as fuck lately, did the rapture happen?

[Wilbur]

2 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Random link for randomness: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2007/gwng0704.htm

Do I agree with number 7 in the list?  I am not always certain.

[Darth Richard II]

Usually I'd agree with it, at least with his novels. Some of those short stories though...

 

i will say the first time I thought I knew what was going on in a Wolfe novel and ended up being correct I did a little dance

[matt b]

7 hours ago, Wilbur said:

Do I agree with number 7 in the list?  I am not always certain.

I certainly agree with it. Reading Wolfe encourages me to learn about EVERYTHING because I never know what little tidbit of information might be somehow relevant.

[Wilbur]

5 hours ago, matt b said:

I certainly agree with it. Reading Wolfe encourages me to learn about EVERYTHING because I never know what little tidbit of information might be somehow relevant.

Gaiman writes, " 7) There are two kinds of clever writer. The ones that point out how clever they are, and the ones who see no need to point out how clever they are. Gene Wolfe is of the second kind, and the intelligence is less important than the tale. He is not smart to make you feel stupid. He is smart to make you smart as well."

The idea that I am uncertain about with Wolfe is the quote "...the intelligence is less important than the tale."  My subjective reaction is that Wolfe drives so much "intelligence" into his stories that the thread of the tale is easily lost.  Now this is a characteristic of writing in a lot of authors that I enjoy: the author lards the story with plenty of non-tale information, and this tasty fat sometimes detracts from my ability to stay on the narrative roadway from start to finish.  I have to take some of the exits along the narrative freeway and explore these side attractions.

So Rex Stout will take the reader on an excursion to the wonders of haute cuisine or other cooking quandries (something GRRM is not immune to, either) en route to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin solving the mystery at hand.

And Jack Vance will ensure that the protagonist of his story has a well-described journey by boat, listens to some sort of strange band, and definitely engages in multiple, irrelevant-but-humorous social discussions with other characters en route to solving the scientific problem, getting off the planet, or finishing the quest.

Or William Gibson will describe in exquisite detail the provenance and original purpose for the re-purposed technology used by the protagonist as he or she survives in a near future world.

So these three exemplars of the author's trade all lard their stories with stuff that doesn't necessarily push the story forward to the conclusion.  For me, however, I enjoy a random, funny discussion or a detailed explanation of why tarragon is a requirement for good egg salad mousse or a deep dive into the different flavors of Unix available to run a server as a part of a story, and I often feel that these excursions deepen my understanding of and identity with the protagonists presented to me by these authors.

But with Wolfe, I don't have Gaiman's level of trust in his excursions as being useful for the narrative.  Often my reaction to understanding the reason for a Wolfe-ish allusion is, "Sure, I guess, but that is quite a stretch for some pretty thin returns."

Aristotelian criticism says that the useful aspect of literature (specifically tragedy) is that it is a purgative.  Aristotle is a sort of elliptical writer, but he seems to assert that the poet sweeps up the reader into a height of emotional response to the story, and then at the climax, purges the reader of the emotions, allowing the reader to walk away from the book or theater with the calm of release.  Part of sweeping up the reader is the process of anagnorisis, the gathering of knowledge of the situation, the moving from ignorance to knowledge.  For me, learning that Nero Wolfe has had an argument with his partner Archie Goodwin about what to eat for dinner heightens my knowledge of their mental state when the main suspect arrives at the brownstone for an appointment that reveals the solution.  When the peripeteia comes and the villain is revealed and Nero appreciates the work Archie did, the purging of emotions also includes the reconciliation of Nero and Archie over the matter of the tarragon.  The tension of the mystery of who murdered the elevator operator is entwined organically with the tension over the preparation of the salad, and the catharsis I feel upon the solution to both mental contentions is that much enhance by being a double release of conflicts.

But I do not read the "intelligences" of Wolfe's writing as necessarily being organic to the story.  They do set up an atmosphere and build the world Wolfe's characters inhabit as much as a drinking game that involves lowering the lengths of chain on a kitchen hallway shutter in a caravanserai tavern do for Cugel the Clever, it is true.  But for Cugel, escaping the wrath of the tavern owner who bashes his head on the now-too-low shutter while carrying multiple dishes provides me with an understanding of Cugel's hamartia, or critical flaw (he is a reckless, amoral adventurer too willing to gamble everything on a silly game).  Vance has clearly shown me this flaw in a humorous way that sets up the continuing rivalry between Cugel and the master of the riverboat that will culminate in a final climax, and the chapter seems to be an organic part of the whole story, although if the episode was missing, I probably would understand the story just as well.

How often does Wolfe use his "intelligences" in TBofNS to effectively frame his ideas and story progressions?

OK, there is my contribution of mildly controversial ideas for discussion while FragileBird gets right with the government's fiscal authority.