gene wolfe's book of the NEWSUN!!!!! reading club

In one of the early chapters, Severian tells you straight up that he is insane and the jumble of memories in his brain are impenetrable even to him, he admits that he may not be lying intentionally, but i still think he often does. So i'm not trying to take mental illness lightly -- but it's something he acknowledges. He also contradicts himself in the text occasionally, usually in the manner of "I remember everything!" "oh, i don't remember what happened next..."

re: pederasty - there are allusions to this happening though iirc nothing super concrete. i'll look out for it during this re-read. here's a reddit thread on the topic - https://www.reddit.com/r/genewolfe/comments/bzerhz/severian_the_pederast_does_wolfe_not_situate/

Even w/o pederasty in the guild it's an incredibly fucked up environment. He never saw a woman until he was god knows how old (whenever he was old enough to go to the witch's tower i suppose) -- he has very little idea how to interact with the outside world at all and women in particular imo. Being raised in an environment where violence is cold and common and, in fact, your duty, is also very traumatic probably.

re: sanity,

"I realized for the first time that I am in some degree insane … I had lied often … Now I could not be sure my own mind was not lying to me; all my falsehoods were recoiling on me and I who remembered everything could not be certain those memories were more than my own dreams.”

^ very end of chapter 3

damn that’s an airtight argument

incredible given that even ursula leguin was tricked by this snake

she called him “the melville of our time” by which i am
sure she meant damn this dude seems weirdly sympathetic to this killer whale and this killer whale killer prep the cancel culture harpoon

:shrug:

i’m not trying to be insulting. i’m just saying i agree that a person who is a literal torturer, trained to inflict pain — and more crucially to reject compassion, since he is told to think of the pleas and bargaining and begging of those under torture as like the squeaks of animals that signify nothing but pain — is going to remind us of people that treat us poorly

also he lives in a world where growth is stilled because the sun is corrupt and every mountain has been carved into the likeness of a murderous male autocrat obsessed with power, and this is normalized to the point where people call them mountains and not “the mountain that looks like the old autarch so and so” and the reader has to figure it out

i’m with you, it sounds like a shitty place to be and for that reason i try not to imagine myself as actually in the story or those ppl actually in my world.

but that’s a general reading tactic of mine anyway

if people want to get mad at a book about a decadent lunatic with a huge sword who destroys the world, that’s fine! the author wants that

and when you figure out what kind of “hero” he is you’ve (and remember it’s a bildungsroman so the story only ends when the narrator is no longer himself … and he has photographic memory and relives his experiences like an alzabo, so has no agency to retell his dark past as a better person) unlocked the theme of the book

so anyway yeah stories about these cursed sword dark
edgelord heroes are not for everyone, and its a bit embarassing how many postcolonial voices or whatever stan for him. maybe you’d like elric novels better, simpler guilty pleasure and also good reading

finally if you wonder why i might read like that … it’s so i can compare books like sundiver vs xenogenesis or foundation vs triton on merit of ideas first, since it is sci fi … and i don’t look to art for practical guidance, i have enough immediate accountability in my life (since i get publicly evaluated, by govt name, by children with microphones, in front of mayors and state assembly leaders for years and years now) … like just personally have enough to worry about without muddying the issue

that’s all i’m going to say on it and afaict that’s definite so i’m done for awhile. this is the only corner of this board i feel useful on anyway, and not at all on an affective or social emotional level, just a sliver of personal knowledge i’ve earned at ruinous cost to myself

definitive* not definite … and only fair since i kicked off this whole mess

do you think it's a mess? this is a book you love and you understand and here comes this weirdo who, like, openly admits to not understanding the book and interprets it through her own biased lens. idk, i know that's a flaw of mine, i come off as more authoritative and sure of myself than i actually am. to be honest i don't read a lot of fantasy novels at all - it's not a genre i'm familiar with. so it's not surprising that i'm maybe a bit ignorant of what's going on in this particular book! the next fantasy author on my to-read list is tamsyn muir and not moorcock. i heard tamsyn muir's books have more lesbians.

i mean, what can i do here, retract my opinions? does it even make sense for a person to retract their _opinions_?