First Mail

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 16 Jul 2002, 18:27 · from urth-v0207.mbox · original

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: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (urth) First Mail
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 11:27:59 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0207-1403 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0207/1403.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Mantis replied...

> Hello there Dave Baird, and welcome aboard!

Second that.

> >So, a bit of guidance from those of you that know  better than I - what
is
> >the complete list of books related and what should I  read next?

> Yay, an easy question!

Actually two questions, of which only the first is "easy" (and even that
somewhat quibblesome):

> 1) THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN
> 2) THE URTH OF THE NEW SUN
> 3) THE BOOK OF THE LONG SUN (four volumes)
> 4) THE BOOK OF THE SHORT SUN (three volumes)

... plus various short stories scattered across a variety of
anthologies, collections and magazines ...

... plus THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS, which, if very unlikely to=20
be set in the same universe, is at least thematically related to=20
the Books of the <Foo> Sun, a/k/a the Lupiverse, a/k/a the Briah=20
Cycle ...

... none of which, however, addresses Dave's _second_ question,=20
"what should [he] read next?"=20

Dave, if you want to continue with the main line of the Lupiverse,
you should definitely move on to the Books of the Long Sun and the
Short Sun, in that order.

tBotLS is set in the same universe, but in terms of plot, is=20
related only tangentially to the adventures of Severian.

tBotSS is a direct sequel to tBotLS, and also relates more
directly to tBotNS in terms of plot than does its predecessor.

(At least one short story, "The Map," deals with a character
from New Sun. At least one, "The Night Chough," deals with a=20
character from Long/Short. I believe -- though I haven't=20
tracked all of them down -- that the other short stories set=20
in the Lupiverse are simply that -- "set in the same universe.")

***HOWEVER***, this assumes that "what should I read next" is=20
a simple question of continuing in the same universe. Wolfe has
written a number of other novels ranging from "superb" to "Huh?
What was _that_?" (and one which he himself considers an utter
stinkeroo and will not allow to be reprinted, OPERATION ARES,
though I rather like it). Which descriptions fit which of these=20
novels is a matter of some debate.

If you want to branch out of the Briah Cycle, I would highly
recommend either the short story collection, "THE ISLAND OF=20
DOCTOR DEATH AND OTHER STORIES" AND OTHER STORIES, or the
novels FREE LIVE FREE and PEACE. Others will have other
ideas on the subject.

--Blattid

--=20

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