{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/5525",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 5525,
    "subject": "'New Sun – Old SF?'",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2009-12-28T23:38:08+00:00",
    "last": "2009-12-28T23:38:08+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<cbf55b100912281538r508c8a82t9eeeb06316ebc2e7@mail.gmail.com>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Gwern Branwen",
        "address": "gwern0 at gmail.com"
      },
      "date": "2009-12-28T23:38:08+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) 'New Sun – Old SF?'",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "An old but interesting posting: http://iansales.com/2008/09/21/new-sun-old-sf/\n\n\"I should add that I didn’t like The Book of the New Sun because it’s\na classic. I still think it’s a very good book. But. One of its\ndefining characteristics is its use of archaic, obsolete and arcane\nwords for various objects and concepts, the conceit being that Wolfe\nis “translating” the manuscript and uses such words because Severian\ndoes. So there are no swords mentioned in The Book of the New Sun,\nthere are hangers and falchions and spadroons (among others). The\nfauna includes merychip, hesperorn and arctother. Ships are caiques or\nfeluccas or xebecs. While this does give a feeling of exoticism and\ngreat antiquity to the story, it also felt in many places intrusive.\nBut perhaps that was because some of the vocabulary was not obscure to\nme. I know what a dhow is (well, I did live in the Middle East). I\nknow what cuir boli is (I spent my teen years playing Dungeons &\nDragons). The words felt obfuscatory rather than clever.\n\nThere’s also an uncomfortable thread of misogyny running throughout\nthe four books. Severian is a torturer, which immediately calls his\nmorality into question. But almost all of his victims are women. When\nhe eventually arrives at Baldander’s laboratory, he writes,\n\n? I saw what remained of a young woman who might have been a sister\nof Pia’s lying beneath a shimmering bell jat. Her abdomen had been\nopened with a sharp blade and certain of her viscera removed and\npositioned around her body? Her eyes opened as I passed?\n\nLater, he adds,\n\n?I was acutely conscious, as I spoke, of the eviscerated woman\nmumbling beneath her glass somewhere behind me, a thing that would not\nhave bothered the torturer Severian in the least.\n\nThis, we are meant to realise, means Severian has grown, become a more\nmoral person. Yes, Severian is a product of his (invented) world, and\nmust be true to it if the fiction is to have any rigour. But that\nshouldn’t prevent a reader questioning the writer’s artistic decisions\nwhen creating that world.\""
        },
        {
          "kind": "sig",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "gwern"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}