Finally... UOTNS has arrived

Adam Stephanides · 02 Oct 2004, 16:25 · from 2004-October.txt.gz

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From: adamsteph at earthlink.net (Adam Stephanides)
Date: Sat Oct  2 16:25:11 2004
Subject: (urth) Finally... UOTNS has arrived
In-Reply-To: <002a01c4a71c$221ff8a0$4108a9c0 at pointserve.com>
Message-ID: <BD84A0B3.49FD4%adamsteph at earthlink.net>

on 9/30/04 1:34 PM, James Wynn at thewynns at earthlink.net wrote:

>>> Jonathon McKitrick <jcm at FreeBSD-uk.eu.org> wrote:
>>> Really?  Hmm.  That could be interesting.  I really can't see how BOTNS
>>> could stand on its own.  There is just so much left unexplained.

UotNS does more to raise new enigmas than to resolve old ones, imho.

>> Christopher Culver:
>> Wolfe originally intended to let the story stand on its own in those
>> four books. The only reason he wrote UotNS is because of pressure by
>> his editor.
> 
> Which doesn't mean that stopping the story with "Citadel of the Autarch"
> would have been the best plan. I didn't get idea from Wolfe that his editors
> wanted an extra novel only to sell more books. They seem to think more
> elaboration was needed. I agree.

Iirc, Wolfe said somewhere that his editor had originally wanted him to add
a paragraph or so to the end of Citadel spelling out that Severian went to
Yesod and brought back the New Sun, and eventually agreed to let Wolfe leave
the ending as it was if he wrote an extra volume to explain what happened
after Citadel. (I thought I remembered this from Castle of Days, but I just
went and looked, and it doesn't seem to be there.)

--Adam

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