Subject: What The Book Of The New Sun Means To Me (In 25 Words Or More)

From: TuckerDH <dht at druri.uucp>
Date: Wed, 05 Feb 1986 23:23:03 +0000

Well, I thought I'd stay out of it for awhile, but I can't resist
any longer...

Gene Wolfe is demostrably one of the finest (if not the finest) writers
of fiction in the world today. He has a mastery of his genre that few
others in many other fields ever even hope to acquire. Like Joyce, he
can turn his conventions, our conventions, on their heads, and achieve
a beautiful resonance that goes beyond mere head-turning. Every sentence
he writes in The Book Of The New Sun drips with meaning, throbs with
resonance of ideas and images gone before, or to come. Like Eco, he
can make a novel of ideas and mood and atmosphere and history become
a novel of actions and deeds and words and movement with a stroke of
the pen or the turn of a page, without seeming disjointed, without (in
many cases) the reader even being aware. Like Lem, he can take a set,
mundane situation and make the reader see how much the perception of
reality affects reality itself, to illuminate the distinction between
what it real and what is perceived, to illuminate that there is sometimes
a difference between them, that there sometimes is not.

The Book Of The New Sun is arguably science fiction's crowning achievement
to date, in its scope, its innate understanding and subsequent casting-off
of forms and accepted precepts. Certainly, it is difficult at times, and
while science fiction readers have grown accustomed to their own special
vocabulary and accepted the making-up of words to describe things for which
there are no words ("Grok", "Slan", etc.), Wolfe, in a very simple and 
subtle manner, turns even this convention on its head with his use of
archaic words, and Latin usage, words that have rung in other people's
ears and have come out of other people's mouths (like "destrier" - a medieval
term for a knight's horse). Science fiction readers don't generally like
long, mellifluous sentences of this nature; we want Hemingway-esque,
Heinlein-esque sentence structure. Gritty, to-the-point, advancing the
story with every clause. We don't like Melville or Marquez, with their
two-page sentences that are like mazes of apposition, predication, and
subject-verb agreements a mile long. Wolfe, in turn, writes sentences 
that are paragraphs and paragraphs that are sentences, turning the long
into the short and the short into the long. He brings back to modern
literature the sheer joy of reading for reading's sake, something that
the "good read" and the "great story" generally don't offer. Each page
reveals something new, some surprise, some totally different way of 
looking at reality. 

In the larger scale, beyond his minor triumphs of structure of clause,
phrase, sentence and paragraph, Wolfe presents a world that evokes so
many different things to so many different people that this one quality
alone makes the book deserving of great praise. To some, Urth is medieval.
To others, it is Egyptian, Byzantine, Roman, Foundation (Asimov), Future
History (Heinlein). Urth reminds me of Jack Vance's deeply symbolic societies
where form is more than function, of Smith's Instrumentality where what is
best for Man is to remain ignorant and keep knowledge, true knowledge, in
the hands and hearts of a select few, of Louis XIV's Versailles, of Eliza-
bethan England, of Renaissance Italy, of Macbeth. And more, although the
primary accomplishment is that Urth is none of these things, that it is
a construct of Wolfe's, as real and vivid (see, Charlie?) as 20th Century
America. Urth is so strange, so wonderful, so alien, and yet the fundamental
nature of human beings, the fundamental flaws of man, are still the same,
and still worked out on a tapestry of incredible imagery and breathtaking
scope.

Most definitely, The Book Of The New Sun is difficult to read, in places.
We often tend to forget in this age of television and speed-reading courses
that there can sometimes be merit in slowing the reader down, in forcing
the act of reading to be noticed, in allowing a reader to take time to
savor the individual moments and concepts of a single page. We read at
a chapter's pace, and Wolfe forces us to read at a sentence's pace. This
is uncomfortable, just as riding in a horse-and-buggy from Lancaster 
County to Philadelphia is uncomfortable - we can get there so much faster
by car, or plane. But as many of us would admit, there is beauty and
something extra in going by the landscape at ten miles an hour that we
could never hope to experience at sixty. The same is true for books.
The Book Of The New Sun is difficult to read because there is so much
more in it that people are used to - page for page, Wolfe attacks more,
cajoles more, surprises more, and accomplishes more than any modern writer.

What is The Book Of The New Sun about? I don't really know. I do know
that it fascinated me more than any novel I have read, that it left
me with a feeling of dislocation in this world that I have never experienced
from a book, that feeling of having lived another life with which I have
nothing in common, of having been someplace that I could never imagine
being. We can all imagine spaceships now, and sandworms, and the infinity
of space - it's part of science fiction history. But Wolfe has given us
the infinity of the mind, the infinity of dreams layered over dreams, 
covered with time and dust, resting on a precarious foundation of
shifting perception. There is a puzzle, there is a puzzle of puzzles,
there is a morality play and a homonculus who is ruled by the giant he
thinks he possesses (yet another twist among the thousands), there is 
an order of nuns who guard a jewel that is worthless and yet beyond
price, there are cannibals and revolutionaries and palace intrigues,
there is a good bit of film noir double-dealing and sleight-of-hand,
reminiscent of "Body Heat" and "Double Jeopardy", there is loneliness
and self-realization and swords and wizardry, demons of the desert
and of the mind, time travel that is used for different purposes than
anyone could ever imagine, backwardness and incredible sophistication
of the intellect and the society, war and hatred and duels, myths from
our present that are changed around to present the symbology of different
times, often with the opposite moral than we would draw from them, there
is death and rebirth, imperfection and strangeness, there is hope, there
is confusion, there is decay and degradation. There are at least ten
great novels in here, in different parts, and a multitude of great, truly
great short stories cast off like litter by the side of the road. There 
is more in The Book Of The New Sun than any one person can understand,
appreciate, or see in one reading, or in ten. Wolfe has managed to build
so many layers on top of layers, like his necropolis, that it is an
incredible literary archeological attempt to unearth them all. And like
cutting though a pearl or an onion, no one layer is more important than
the other, though some may be more central.

In the immortal words of Marty DiBergi "But hey - enough a my yakkin...
Let's boogie!"

Davis Tucker

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From: William Ingogly <wfi at rti-sel.uucp>
Date: Fri, 07 Feb 1986 23:21:34 +0000

In article <53 at druri.UUCP> dht at druri.UUCP (TuckerDH) writes:

>being. ...

In Gene Wolfe's "The Fifth Head Of Cerberus," there is a passage in
which the son of the joyhouse owner (can't remember his name) recalls
leaning out his bedroom window ringed with alien flowers to look out
at the bay; as he does so, he observes a plume of water rising where a
starship has fallen into the ocean's water. Above the city hangs the
planet's companion, a world of watery meadows and legendary aborigines.
I remember first reading this passage and reacting to it in the same
way you describe your reaction to BotNS, Davis: recognition. A sense
almost of deja vu, something I get rarely from SF (uh, oh: watch those
flames, buddih!). Wolfe makes these worlds live for us, and by doing 
so brings us to new understandings of our own world through his 
universe's similarities to and differences from our own. His characters 
and landscapes truly have the feel of REALITY. Thanks, Gene. And thank 
you, Davis, for a beautiful description of your own appreciation of 
Wolfe's work.

                           -- Cheers, Bill Ingogly

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From: Daniel G. Winkowski <lazarus at sunybcs.uucp>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1986 05:13:03 +0000

Wolfe succeeds where Delaney attempts to travel.
[=]
Today we live in the future,
Tomorrow we'll live for the moment,
But, pray we never live in the past.