master of the mysteries: the life of manly palmer hall
it’s a little sensationalist but it’s the only book i could
find on the subject that didn’t seem shady
i honestly am pushing through it so i can finally get to
the book of martyrdom and artifice
hopefully i’ll actually finish both
I mean generic Gene Wolfe advice, just be ready to read it twice.
I just started on Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer and it’s the most Tulpa thing I’ve ever read.
yeah I quit after 50 pages, proving that torment marinara does have value if you can’t stand the source material
that is an intensely Felix comment
I’d approach Book of the New Sun as a texture read; enjoy each sentence and drift along the fragmented plot without worrying about putting it together. Pay attention to the emotional reads you get on the chapa[pso9
sorry, the fire alarm just buzzed in the office
once
…emotional reads you get on the characters; let those suspicions tumble around. Then read it again a month later.
I think your terminal colours are gonna be messed up now
To be clear, I actually am enjoying the book so far. The writing has this annoyingly pompous and obscurantist quality to it (e.g. referring to water lilies exclusively as “nenuphars.” Come on, dude!). He’s extremely particular and fastidious about building a certain atmosphere and he has no interest in meeting the reader halfway. But there actually is an evocative beauty to the prose. Wolfe seems like kind of a pain in the ass, but he’s not writing checks he can’t cash.
So yeah, tentative recommendation so far but we’ll see how I feel when I get beyond chapter 3.
you’re starting to realize Wolfe was really born under the astrological sign of the Shrug
it’s the new yorker fiction issue this week!!!
Protip: he is often doing this because they are not water lilies.
The first book’s appendix on “translation” is a useful guide to what he’s doing + a sign that Wolfe’s not nearly as self-serious as Severian.
the tulpa/shrug venn diagram overlaps quite a bit
This is spelled out in the appendix to shadow of the torturer and its well worth reading over that to get a sense of one of the things Wolfe is doing in the writing. FWIW, Wolfe is one of the few writers I can think of who pulls off the ‘obscurantist language for atmosphere’ trick, both because he uses that language very well and because there is a greater purpose to it than just style.
There’s a pair of cliches in sci fi writing, “Call a Rabbit a Smeerp” and “Call a Smeerp a Rabbit”. They’re pretty self explanatory. Gene Wolfe’s cleverness in Book of the New Sun is that he makes you think he’s calling a Rabbit a Smeerp when he’s actually calling a Smeerp a Smeerp and any references to rabbits are just there to help you imagine what it is he’s actually describing.
Autokaufen
this kind of take makes me think that we are mutually alien to each other as far as writing taste goes
oh yeah for sure
if you’re asking me to accept that much artifice without a single sex scene I’m out
if you wanted sex scenes, I could’ve told you to keep reading
Severian fucks his way across fantasy south america
I’ve never gotten all the way through the books but every time I make an attempt I get farther and get new stuff out of them.
They’re absolutely incredible.
yeah, the truth is that I just don’t like fantasy or sci fi that much without a videogame for it to hang off of, I don’t mean to shit up the thread. the only big sci fi novel I’ve ever gotten through is like, dune, and I was in eighth grade so all bets are off. I remember people recommending neuromancer and Lem and the elrik guy to me on the assumption that I needed something more wry and I eventually realized that a hundred percent of the time I’d rather read 19th century novels or MFA shit; there’s no helping some people.
If anything, Severian needs to fuck less than he does.