Subject: (urth) 'New Sun – Old SF?'

From: Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:38:08 +0000

An old but interesting posting: http://iansales.com/2008/09/21/new-sun-old-sf/

"I should add that I didn’t like The Book of the New Sun because it’s
a classic. I still think it’s a very good book. But. One of its
defining characteristics is its use of archaic, obsolete and arcane
words for various objects and concepts, the conceit being that Wolfe
is “translating” the manuscript and uses such words because Severian
does. So there are no swords mentioned in The Book of the New Sun,
there are hangers and falchions and spadroons (among others). The
fauna includes merychip, hesperorn and arctother. Ships are caiques or
feluccas or xebecs. While this does give a feeling of exoticism and
great antiquity to the story, it also felt in many places intrusive.
But perhaps that was because some of the vocabulary was not obscure to
me. I know what a dhow is (well, I did live in the Middle East). I
know what cuir boli is (I spent my teen years playing Dungeons &
Dragons). The words felt obfuscatory rather than clever.

There’s also an uncomfortable thread of misogyny running throughout
the four books. Severian is a torturer, which immediately calls his
morality into question. But almost all of his victims are women. When
he eventually arrives at Baldander’s laboratory, he writes,

? I saw what remained of a young woman who might have been a sister
of Pia’s lying beneath a shimmering bell jat. Her abdomen had been
opened with a sharp blade and certain of her viscera removed and
positioned around her body? Her eyes opened as I passed?

Later, he adds,

?I was acutely conscious, as I spoke, of the eviscerated woman
mumbling beneath her glass somewhere behind me, a thing that would not
have bothered the torturer Severian in the least.

This, we are meant to realise, means Severian has grown, become a more
moral person. Yes, Severian is a product of his (invented) world, and
must be true to it if the fiction is to have any rigour. But that
shouldn’t prevent a reader questioning the writer’s artistic decisions
when creating that world."

-- 
gwern