Book of the New Sun-Should I keep going?

Christian Claiborn · 12 Dec 1996, 19:00 · from sf-lovers.1996.mbox

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From: Christian Claiborn <clc at adsmart.net>
Subject: Re: Book of the New Sun-Should I keep going?
Date: 12 Dec 1996 14:00:07 -0500
Message-ID: <sflovers-v22-21-18 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V22 #21
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-22a

afn39111 at afn.org (Jeremy P Lakatos) writes:
>Hardly. Though there are swords, and sorcery, there are no quests to be
>won, no dragons to battle, no evil overlords to overthrow.

Um, maybe the versions that you and I read were different?

Of *course* there's a quest.  There are bunches of them.  Severian is
searching for his identity.  He's searching for his and Urth's place in the
universe.  There are evil overlords aplenty, as I recall (although I won't
say who, because I don't want to insert spoilers).

TBotNS is, in my opinion, the greatest quest novel(s) written in the last
thirty years.

>Yes. Except that several types of magic work: There's the mysterious
>witchery of the Claw. There's time travel. There are great solar ships
>like Space:1889. There are souls, which follow a bizarre and unscientific
>course of action.

** SPOILERS ** 

Urth is not a colony world, it's Earth.  I've always figured the Gyoll to
be the Amazon river, but I can't quite remember why now.  There's been an
ice age or twelve since our time, and the sun's gone cold.

>It gets better, though most of the revelations are about Severian, up
>until the Urth of the New Sun, where the mysteries are finally revealed.
>The book, however, is a disappointment after the original series.

I'd argue that the revelations about Urth fly fast and furious throughout
the series itself.  You learn about the witches, about the extrasolar fauna
that Urth has imported, about the future of the planet (the Green Men),
about the political system, about everything.

What I love about these books is that there's so much to discover, and
Wolfe has written the prose so carefully that there is always another fact,
or relationship, or understanding of the culture to discover.  You can look
up every term in mythology references and try to trace the bizarre images
to their source, or you can simply let it sink in and allow the epiphanies
to come naturally.

I'll stop ranting now.

Christian Longshore Claiborn

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