Wolfe's "New Sun": Severian Unmasked!

The Cutest Man on The Net · 21 Sep 1995, 16:03 · from sf-lovers.1995.mbox

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: eaobrien at ebi.ac.uk (The Cutest Man on The Net)
Subject: Re: Wolfe's "New Sun": Severian Unmasked!
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 1995 16:03:28 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v20-370-1 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V20 #370
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-20b

raibeck at tiac.net (Andy Raibeck) writes:
>I have been trying to get started with this series for quite some
>time. It's supposed to be one of the masterworks of the field. Yet, no
>matter how hard I've tried, I just can't get past the first 30 pages or so
>of the first volume (The Shadow of the Torturer). Obviously this is not
>light reading.

   Very true. One of the things that has cropped up in a couple of email
discussions about this book I've had recently, is that it takes a long time
for things to fit together. For example, the scene in the start of _Shadow_
where Severian is saved from drowning isn't really explained until quite
late in _The Claw of the Conciliator_, so on the first read through at
least, things can seem quite disjoint..

   So what I'm saying is 'it reads best when you have already read it'
which isn't much help.. hmm.. it's certainly the only series that makes me
want to reread it immediately I finish it every time - six so far.

>I like to think I'm at least half-bright, but this book has me
>stumped. How can I best approach this series? Is there a particular
>background I need?  (Wolfe's extensive vocabulary doesn't make things any
>easier; even my Random House College Dictionary doesn't have a lot of the
>words.)

  The vocabulary is one of the many things I like about the series, in that
every obscure word is both real and used appropriately.. some of the beast
names are prehistoric species names, for example. There is a piece in
_Castle of Days_ where Wolfe goes through the obscure vocabulary in
_Shadow_, I think someone has done a _Lexicon Urthus_ but I'm not sure
exactly what it entails - and it is rather expensive. I don't think there's
any specific background you need to appreciate it, but I certainly have
taken more out of it as I brought more to it, there are many levels in
there.

  It's quite a contrast with the Long Sun books, where things seem to
develop in a much more linear fashion.. is that just me, or does anyone
else have the same reaction ? I think the Long Sun books would certainly be
more accessible to a first-time Wolfe reader.

Emmet

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net