Shadow, Chapter X

Gwern Branwen · 19 Nov 2008, 01:00 · from 2008-November.txt.gz

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: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:00:09 -0500
Subject: (urth) Shadow, Chapter X
In-Reply-To: <W315002510453461227031732@webmail15>
References: <W315002510453461227031732@webmail15>
Message-ID: <cbf55b100811181700g6538651fr8ead945869411028 at mail.gmail.com>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 1:08 PM, Son of Witz  wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEAREKAAYFAkkjZRMACgkQvpDo5Pfl1oLIoQCeLB/HUtdIoyxwj34P/nq8/JL3
KlcAn280Fr7jDVqoE3ycu4pFKCQ6lGl+
=Did5
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

...
> I don't think we're in disagreement here.
> I was unaware about the Hellenic vies, but my point was that, unless you look at this with the eye that everything was adjusted and manipulated by higher powers, it just seems like he stumbles into exactly where he needs to be.  Lacking that justification, it would be very unbelievable.  I wouldn't fault anyone who read BoTNS (without Urth) for thinking that, because it wasn't until Urth that I saw the backwards timeline and began to grasp the depth of the manipulation of Severian's life.

Have you considered that that's just how the story has to go?
....
A little while ago, I mentioned that one of the two essays by Wolfe in
_Shadows of the New Sun_ that I liked best was "Nor the summers as
golden", but I didn't quote it then because I had forgotten to make a
copy of it. But the final two paragraphs are relevant; the context of
this 6-page essay is Gene discussing storytelling and how multi-volume
works are more challenging than single novels (pg 213):

"I said the end of the overshadowing story would provide an end for
the final volume. Perhaps I should add, 'if you are lucky'. It must
wrap up its own volume, obviously. It must also wrap up the entire
work in a satisfactory way. In general, it should not undercut the
endings of any of the earlier books, rendering them, in retrospect,
trivial. Rather it must validate them, assuring the reader that they
were indeed important points in the overshadowing story - that you did
not cheat. Thus in _The Book of the New Sun_, Severian leaves his
native city at the end of the first book, reaches the distant city in
which he is to be employed at the end of the second, and reaches the
war toward which he has been inexorably drawn at the end of the third.
At the end of the fourth book (when he returns to his city) I
attempted to show that all had been significant, moulding his
character and contributing to his rise to the Phoenix Throne.
There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume
work from a short story, a novel, or a series. The ending of the final
novel should leave the reader with a feeling that he has gone through
the defining circumstances of Main Character's life. The leading
character in a series can wander off into another book and a new
adventure better even than this one. Main Character cannot, at the end
of your multivolume work. (Or at least, it should seem so.) His life
may continue, and in most cases it will. He may or may not live
happily ever after. But the problems he will face in the future will
not be as important to him or us, nor the summers as golden."

--
gwern

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