Another nearly 2 hr long video, asking and answering various questions about BOTNS...

Great weekend viewing!

https://youtu.be/NBRZwoYmikg?si=IArTJ91fhhKG_ijE

I'm finding one that's "Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe" edited by J.E. Mooney and Bill Fawcett, AND a seemingly different one that's "Shadows of the New Sun: Wolfe on Writing/Writers on Wolfe", edited by Peter Wright.

The publication dates are different, the number of pages are different. Can anyone confirm that these are indeed two totally different books with the same general name?

If so, can anyone weigh in on if both are worth buying, or should I only get the Wolfe on Writing, Writers on Wolfe one?

Following the unfortunate passing of Gene Wolfe, I have spent more than a few days wondering if his estate might ever organize his notes and drafts into publishable form---at the very least, preserve them for future study. I feel it would be so unfortunate if it all moldered away somewhere or was simply thrown out by uninterested parties. A slightly macabre question, but I was wondering if anyone had heard anything about this.

If you love theological sci-fi (and who doesn't, really?), check this out!

Incensepunk Mag

For Gwern

Like some of you I listened to a redditor that frequents Gene Wolfe's sub, Gwern, give his first interview on Dwarkesh Patel. I was fascinated by his mention of Suzanne Delage as a shorter work by Gene Wolfe.

https://gwern.net/suzanne-delage

He wasn't kidding. It is only 2200 words long, or 63 sentences by Gwern's counting which somehow makes it sound even shorter. The whole work is quoted in its entirety for his review. And I was excited to read the story and Gwern's analysis. So let me just get right into it, answering all of Gwern's questions (well, at least most of his questions) with an... alternative interpretation.

There is a certain sentiment, a banality, of people that doesn't let them recognize an extraordinary time even as they lived through it. This idea is to me best exemplified by the meme "Nothing Ever Happens" so often deployed in places like internet basketweaving discussion forums when people are excited about recent events in the news. While I do have vague recollection of seeing memes to this effect with respect to the recent election, I have specific recollection of seeing it mentioned when Iran was making threats to retaliate against Israel for events in the recent Lebanese conflict; in the context of Iranian reprisals the meme was used to dismiss anticipation of World War III, which seems to be correct.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nothing-ever-happens

But SD is about a man that lives his life by that mantra. A man that has erected a wall between reality and the world of ideas, imagination, and fantasy.

And this is setup in the first lines of the story:

The idea which had so forcibly struck me was simply this: that every man has had in the course of his life some extraordinary experience, some dislocation of all we expect from nature and probability, of such magnitude that he might in his own person serve as a living proof of Hamlet’s hackneyed precept—but that he has, nearly always, been so conditioned to consider himself the most mundane of creatures, that, finding no relationship to the remainder of his life in this extraordinary experience, he has forgotten it.

This theme of the division between the fantastical and the mundane, the ignorance of the common man for his relation to uncommon things, is the center of the story. One potent illustration of this theme is the way the Spanish Influenza was forgotten shortly after it occurred, only to be revived in memory in the 1990s as Gwern describes in his own review. This is why the Spanish Influenza was mentioned, not as a cover for vampiric activity. I personally didn't know this about the Spanish Influenza until after reading the story, forming my thesis, and reading Gwern's take.

But more obviously, in the story the Narrator's mother's antiquing hobby is the perfect illustration of this segregation. The American Revolution, is there any more potent example of the power of man to effect the fantastical? The idea that common men could rise up against the nobles anointed by Holy G-d to lead and govern themselves was a fantasitcal idea bound to the realm of imagination and fantasy, at one point (Ok, yes there were other instances of democracy in the past but The American Revolution was literally revolutionary in every sense of the word, undeniably). And yet the way these women treat it is to isolate and revere it as something detached and above common existence. This is emphasized with the description of the antiques as being kept stored in mothballs never to be used. The idea of change, something extraordinary, is put on a pedestal (or literally in mothballs) out-of-reach of the mundane realities of the everyday.

And that is the deal with the narrator. While he may just be middling in talent as an athlete, maybe he just never really tried to become a star athlete because it seemed unrealistic.

But let's talk about Suzanne and the narrator. Let me briefly preface: this may be more difficult to interpret for people who aren't attracted to cisgender straight women. Suzanne was the narrator's adolescent fantasy: literally he wanked it to her. Many readers here may be unfamiliar with the concept of "gooning," as was I until it recently became part of the wider zeitgeist. It refers to gathering a carefully curated collection of pornographic material in order to have a more intense wank session; while the terminology is new the phenomenon certainly isn't. That is why there was "scrapbooking" with yearbook photos. The "Pie Club" is a metaphorical allusion to the database of images many men keep mentally of beautiful women, sometimes called the "spank bank." Wolfe wouldn't be the first to make a metaphor between the moist warm interior of a pie and ... something else. This somewhat well known photo by Phyllis Cohen of women sitting with Pink Floyd cover art painted on their naked bodies may illustrate why not all the girls in the Pie Club photo were facing the camera:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fcwqe44oqersa1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D2fcaff5dd108931e2a21dbb34372df0f0d737ffb

I think the narrator may have known Suzanne by sight, as a pretty face in the crowd that he fantasized about, but did not think it realistic to pursue a relationship with her. There is subtle allusion to some kind of ethnic or class divide between the narrator and Suzanne with the old woman's hostility to the idea of Suzanne's mother visiting the narrator's mother (this aloofness is a thematically similar stasis-oriented denial that other ethnicities or classes may change social standing, America is a nation of immigrants afterall and the old woman would have been socially excluded herself at one point in all likelihood), but I think many men will relate to the idea that Suzanne was just intimidatingly beautiful. And the irony was that if he actually talked to her or paid more attention he would have realized she had this long history of shared acquaintance with him through their mothers. She would have been a realistic relationship prospect. But he never connects the name to the face until years later.

Let me repeat that: he was aware of Suzanne by name through ambient social connections, particularly his mother, and aware of her by face as an anonymous (pretty) face in the crowd, but never connected the two until the incident at the end of the story.

And instead of pursuing her and finding out how great or terrible a relationship would be in reality with Suzanne he ends up in two failed marriages and presently single. We could speculate that the reality of his marriages did not live up to the romantic and sexual fantasies he had built in his head. He failed to bridge fantasy and reality, as is necessary to do in a successful romantic relationship.

Now, let me say I was blown away by Wolfe's technique in the story. All along I saw this was about the denial of the possibility of change, but I thought it was more abstract about the alienation and anonymity of people not realizing they were connected. I was picturing Suzanne as a girl I knew as a young child because our mothers were acquainted and with whom I attended the same schools, but never spoke to past the age of around six or so. That girl I knew wasn't fodder for my adolescent fantasies so I was caught off guard when the last few paragraphs threw the story into sharp relief as being about a missed chance at a sexual fantasy. Until then I thought it was going to be kept as a more abstract tragedy about the failure of common people to create positive change, like was done in the American Revolution, because they have an illusion of stasis or their own powerlessness. But then at the end he throws this extremely sexual element, drawing a comparison between the awesomeness of political revolution and fantastic sex, turning what could have been a more dry political point into something extremely intimate and personal. Stylistically this is very reminiscent of the idea of kireji in haiku, at least to me.

I know almost nothing about Gene Wolfe other than he is considered one of the only "literary" science fiction or fantasy authors. I was discouraged to read his work when I was told it was about the incomprehensibility of life, which made it sound to me like he writes shaggy-dog stories to parody the genre of SFF. Now I don't think so. SD is an extremely powerful statement about the power of the individual in that it is a thorough ridiculing of anyone that denies that power (as the narrator does). It occurs to me that the difficulty of the literary world in deciphering this story from a respected author which is centrally about a teenage guy's sexual fantasy is poetically fitting to the story's theme about the artificial division between high and low sensibilities.

And while it doesn't appear represented in the story even metaphorically, I do kinda wish Wolfe would have included a statement about such a banal person as the narrator doing something awful because they are so convinced of their powerlessness and the stasis of the world. This theme is also present in Hannah Arendt's work. And while it is bad for common men to avoid doing good things because they are convinced it is impossible to do these good things, what may be worse is common men actively doing bad things because they are similarly convinced it is impossible to do these bad things.

Did the beggar's son replace the protagonist out in the marshes? we're told the boy dies, but we're also told several things about him and his capabilities, that he wants to be an anthropologist, that he mimics Marche's speech, that he reads his books, that his mother was an abo who left when he was young after he has sex for the first time (much how an 'animal' (i hate using this word to describe rhem, but it's how they're dewcribed throughout the book) would). There's several inconsistencies with regards to hos Earth past too, he never really mentions or describes Earth at all besides remarking something about the cost of moving luggage in and out of the system being expensive. also that the abos can even forget who they are aftwrr theyve became someone/thing else. When Number Five meets him he tells him he's not from Earth he's an abo by appearance, when he polishes the bowl in his cell it reflects the green eyes of his abo mother, how he can't properly hold a pen, how he can't properly hold a rifle (yet in the EARLY parts of the diary we're told he's much better with the rifle than the others and hunted regularly eith success). I looked a bit online but cant find this conclusion elsewhere online but im sure of it. In the first part of the book we see Number Five kill and replace his father, in the second part of the book we see Eastwind killed and replaced "you will become me" by his twin brother, so it follows that in the third there will be some more replacement shenanigans going on.

Im convinced the boy killed the anthropologist, or that he came to death via an accident, and after which became him. Maybe without even realising.

I shared the theory with my girlfriend who read the book a month or so before me, she blew up with excitement and we threw theories back and forth and both now firmly think this to be the case!

Did Horn-Silk deliberately stir up Jugano so he would seek to kill him -- to give him the death he sought, but not from his own hands -- not only to abate guilt, but so that he would die with family members and friends joining him there, and so not go into death, alone (see below for his admission that in a dream he tries to drag his wife into his grave)? Is his confession to Remora of his concern for guilt over desiring his own death, cover for the greater crime of bringing into the realm of possibility that in his death, his family would be forced to join him? Silk has done this kind of thing before. He puts attention to one sort of crime he is guilty of seemingly in order to cover for a greater crime, which is meant to thereby become invisible. The great crime on top of the airship was that he gaslit Horn into thinking that only if he allows himself to perform the suicide that Silk wants for himself, take Silk's suicide into himself, so to free Silk of his desperate need to obliterate himself, will he really prove that he loves him. Afterwards, however, Silk tries to make his crime one that follows afterwards, the clearly much lesser one of his allowing Horn to be thought of as performing an action that really belonged to Silk, namely, Silk's, after putting him into a position where he very well could fall to his death, ultimately having saved Horn from this fate. Since this made him (Horn) seem a hero to Nettle, this felt like a bribe, fyi. Here, take this "candy," and don't talk about the rest.

- - - - -
“I explained to her that I was not really in her kitchen at all, that I lay at the bottom of a pit in a ruin of the Vanished People on an island far away, and that I was dying of thirst.

“Oh,” Nettle said, “I’ll get you some water.”

She went to the millstream and brought back a dipper of clean, cool water for me; but I could not drink. “Come with me,” I told her. “I’ll show you where I am, and when you give me your water there I’ll be able to drink it.” I took her hand (yes, Nettle my darling, I took your hard, hardworking little hand in mine) and tried to lead her back to the pit in which I lay. She stared at me then as if I were some horror from the grave, and screamed. I can never forget that scream.

And I lay in the pit, as before. ” (On Blue's Waters)

- - - - -

“None came, and his legs were cold and dead. He felt the thirst of death, and it seemed to him at that moment that he had been cheated, that all his sons should be at his deathbed, and Nettle, who had been his wife, and Seawrack herself. And he raised .” (In Green's Jungles)

- - - - -

“I told him, “If you mean you wish to die when I do, Oreb, I sincerely hope you don’t. In Gaon they tell of dying men who kill some favorite animal, usually a horse or a dog, so it will accompany them in death; and under the Long Sun their rulers went so far as to have their favorite wives burned alive on their funeral pyres. When I die, I sincerely hope no friend or relative of mine will succumb to any such cruel foolishness.” (Return to the Whorl)

- - - - -

“I opposed it, Your Cognizance, in such a way as to stir up Juganu’s ill will as much as possible.” Each hand warred with the other, twisting and tearing. “I didn’t—I’ve searched my conscience on this, Your Cognizance. I didn’t imagine that Juganu would enlist hundreds of his kind for a public attack.”

Remora grunted.

“I believed it most probable that Juganu would come for me alone. I would feign sleep and permit him to drink his fill, which would be much. If I lived, so be it.”

Remora nodded to himself. “But if you, hum?”

“So be it. Possibly he would bring a companion. I foresaw that. Possibly he would bring two or even three; in either case I would certainly die.”

“So—um—et cetera, Patera?”

“Yes, exactly, Your Cognizance. It would be what I wanted. I wanted someone else to kill me, so that I would not bear the guilt myself. You know the result of my folly—the deaths of a round dozen people and hundreds of inhumi.” (Return to the Whorl)

Hey! I'm pretty new here and I've read BotNS not too long ago and immediately became a huge fan, Wolfe now being one of my favorite authors. He is one of those very few authors that I love so much that I plan on reading essentially everything they have ever written.

I read somewhere that the Orb edition of Long Sun changed a word or something, because they thought it was a typo, but that in fact ruins a very good twist. Because the US editions are hard for me to get from EU, is there a safe way to read the Orb editions and still catch the twist as it comes? Otherwise I'll definitely cash out and buy the other editions, because one doesn't find a new favorite author like Wolfe every day and it wuld probably be worth it.

Aside, here is a stupid guess that I have and please don't tell me whether it is wrong or not. In Citadel, there is a bizzare sequence of "memories" of some sort and one thing stood in my mind since I read it, because it just doesn't make any sense to me (tho maybe Alzabo guys will elucidate when I get to that point). It is this: >!Malrubius mentions Severian's Q. Just that. I knew about the typo thing beforehand and so this imemediately caught my attention. I do not know what it means though, other than I assume the true Severian is the Conciliator and this flashback is about the true one. What Q is, I dont know.!< Im sure this is a total miss, but I guess you that are in the know will have some fun.

If you could only read one Wolfe book for the rest of your life, which would you pick? For the purpose of discussion I'll be allowing omnibuses like Shadow & Claw or Litany of the Long Sun, but not one which would include all of Book of the New Sun or all of the Book of the Long Sun. Short story collections are allowed. Fifth Head is allowed with A Story and V.R.T. The Wizard Knight is allowed with both novels in one. I can't think of any other stipulations as of right now.

I might pick Peace for its complexity and stories within stories, or the Best of Wolfe for variety.

there’s so many times where Severian refers to blue things as “like milk”

It’s been many years since I read New Sun, so I might be confusing it with some other sf novel, but I distinctly remember a scene with (I think) three sentient snail creatures out on some rocks in the water and the protagonist ends up killing one of them for some reason. Was this just some fever dream I had or was it in BotNS? If so, does anyone know the name of the snail creatures or which of the books in the tetralogy it was?

Edit for clarification: the creatures living inside the shells were humanoid iirc. I remember they were shy at first, hiding and then peaking back out of their shells. They were teasing the protagonist about something, which he then killed one of them over (I remember it crying something like “You’ve killed me when we were only playing!”).

Can someone please talk to me about this completely boring and totally disconnected story? It's like I should have read 10 other books before this first installment of The empire of the new sun? It's literally pluck my eye brows out boring. It's like the author completely and purposely does absolutely nothing to help you understand this world he is trying to build. Which wouldn't be totally horrible....if....he gave you JUST ONE character that you actually cared about. I assume he is attempting that with Severian. And he is the only reason I've started the next book. But this story (if you want to call it that) is convoluted and so far 11/2 books in BORING. I've used that word like 4 times in one post....OMG! What am I not getting?

It cost me almost a year, probably would finished it earlier if i didn't had to deal with my medical exams and residency process.

I have to admit, i feel like i didn't understand half of the book of the new sun. There were times were my mind tried to find bigger meanings into the text, like when i realised the Autarch has the consciousness/memories of all his predecessors, and for some reason i remembered Master Malrubius apparition with Triskele (the one he tried to give Severian a class of political science), or when Ouen (son of dorcas?) apparently has a physical resemblance with Severian.

Looking foward to re-reading it, as i believe i will meet the other Severians doing so!

Not sure if there are any other post like this but I was looking through this page yesterday and remembered my fav quote from Gene Wolfe. I used to write it on every whiteboard or anywhere I could, lol. What are yours?

"If not for the silence of the void, the roaring of the sun(s) would deafen the universe."

I've always taken the Cumaean's elongated appearance as indicating that she is walking the corridors of time in a way Severian doesn't understand. She's not in any one place, but she is in a number of places simultaneously, so Severian sees her as a kind of human centipede or line dance, with a series of Cumaean "echos" occupying space. She's either stretched out in time, or maybe probability.

I don't think that means she can't be symbolically linked to snakes or Echidna, or whatever, I just don't think she has an elongated body. She's tinkering at the quantum level and Severian just describes what he sees.

IGJ: the narrator remarks to Mora that he has finally realized who she and her father remind him of. i want to hear (read, really) your opinions on who this may be.

go fishing! go fishing! go fishing!

What is a “Kybernetes”? I cannot find this word anywhere online, the closest word is some philosophical thing about cybernetics. Are there androids in Latro books? I thought this one was pure fantasy?

https://preview.redd.it/127dy0mixqyd1.jpg?width=650&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a037a620ec954ca3502ba4b7d4e4aeb5ddbaba54

So I just read an older TB copy of Fifth Head, and the very end has several pages out of order. The second to last page is followed by several blank pages and the very last page is switched front to back. My assumption is that this was simply a misprint but I could find no record of it online, and well...It's Wolfe. I know there is at least one famous case of a "typo" being on purpose, and the last story being intentionally out of order already gives me doubts. Is this intentional and present in other editions?