Jlawrence’s
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(group member since Mar 08, 2010)
Jlawrence’s
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from the The Sword and Laser group.
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Yes, me too. That's a good one.
Great categorization of common and less common tropes throughout the series. Some spoilers on the page are handled by a "mouse over and select if you want to see the spoiler" way, but be warned there are also spoilers on the page that are not hidden:
TV Tropes New Sun page
One of my favorite observations there: Abaia as Cthulu. Monstrous and sea-dwelling Abaia does indeed send dreams to Severian and others he wishes to recruit...
That's an excellent example and I agree with your interpretation of it - there are repeated cases of him letting something slip that reveals he omitted something else earlier. We touched on the omission you're talking about it in Severian as an unreliable narrator thread.With the help of various posters here I caught more of these "revealed omissions" during this re-read as opposed to my first read, but I still didn't notice many in Sword & Citadel, so I think there's part of this pattern I'm still missing.
The play has kind of mutated echoes of many things that happen in the books before and after its presentation.The story about the dream son shows the way Earth legends and history have become mutated and mixed-up in Severian's time. The story mixes the myth of Theseus fighting the Minotaur in the labyrinth with the U.S. Civil War naval battle Battle of Hampton Roads, a first battle between ironclad warships, one of them being the USS Monitor. Monitor <--> Minotaur.
Granted, I only picked up on the Theseus part while reading it, the Monitor part I learned from one of the discussions here. But it's pretty fun once you know what's being mixed up.
Severian also refers back to the idea of the giant thumb-print map in one of the later books, I forget when...
If you put "(spoilers)" in the topic *title*, then I agree, spoiler tags should be unnecessary. It sounds like the whole deal with the Wise Man's Fear thread could have been avoided if a new topic had been created called "Wise Man's Fear (finished the book)" or "Wise Man's Fear (spoilers)". That has been done plenty of times before in this discussion group, and makes total sense in a place like this where discussion is not occurring in real time but stretched over across weeks, with people in all kinds of different states of how far they've gotten along in a particular book.Things get more complicated when you're talking about a series - then I can see more leeway for spoiler tag use if a thread started about book two of the series, and then someone else wanted to bring up a related point about book three. But again, any need for spoiler tags can be avoided by just starting a new thread with "(spoiler, book X)" or the link in the title. That's how we handled discussing 4 different books in the Shadow & Claw group (even mentioning chapter as well), but usually it wouldn't be that complicated.
Agreed, it's impossible to have comprehensive discussion of a book without spoilers, but there's also been plenty of discussions on this board that *don't* involve spoilers, or have spoiler warnings/spoiler tags once they do veer into spoiler territory.
I strongly suspect that the spoiler-lover's annoyance with spoiler warnings/tags pales next to the spoiler-hater's despair at being surprise-spoiled. This is perhaps why at least putting spoiler tags in thread titles is one of the paltry three rules of this discussion group:
"Please don't post spoilers unless explicitly stated in the heading of your discussion!"
I liked him the first time I read the series - this time, less so (I paid more attention!). I think Wolfe was going for a complex, morally-compromised character that you would nonetheless stick with. I think throughout Wolfe intended to create some distance between the reader and Severian, so the reader would think critically about how Severian is presenting the world. But I think Wolfe may have underestimated just how much distance he would achieve for some readers, given Severian's personality and choices. On the other hand, without getting into specifics, Severian does go through some changes in the books that make him more sympathetic, at least to me.
Chris about their vision, (view spoiler)Well, the force-field part really is just pure speculation, but since its an obvious piece of high-tech still left standing, and the traditional use of a wall around a city is protection, it makes sense to me that it could possibly have the power to extend a protective shield further vertically with a energy dome-shield, since having rockets around in the Citadel introduces an extra dimension that would have been important to the city/spaceport it once was. And (view spoiler). Maybe more of that entire expanse of land was considered important at one time -- it must have been, if the wall has any protective purpose.
For being functionally connected to the starport - there are all those underground tunnels beneath the tower-rockets - they could conceivably lead to inside the Wall, and, as Adrienne pointed out, Severian does see cacogens inside the Wall, through its (apparent) windows.
Yes, the drug extract is from an animal called an alzabo, which takes on the personality of the prey it devours, and the ritual is indeed cannibalism (Vodalus and crew are the "corpse-eaters" that the librarian Ultan told Severian about in ch 6 of Shadow).There's an involved discussion of the feast in this thread.
Tom wrote: "Veronica is the Autarch!"...whose thoughts are the music of her subjects.
Oh, I just mean I find the idea of it also being the base of a force field around the old starport logical, but I'm guessing that aspect of it is no longer functional (view spoiler). Yes, it's definitely otherwise in use. In fact, in this thread we discussed how Severian and Dorcas' "vision" of a building hanging over the city in chapter 31 of Shadow is likely a rocket ship taking off, so it could be that while most of the rocket-towers are defunct, Nessus is in part still playing its old role of spaceport. The cacogens in the Wall are possibly being ferried to certain gates/exits, just like in an airport.
I still like Tom's speculation that it's the outer circle of the starport that Nessus used to be. If it is that, I could also imagine it having the ability to generate a force field to protect the city (from nova or attack or a runaway rocketship) - that would help explain its size - but I'd expect that the force field doesn't work anymore.
Adrienne wrote: "I wondered (if that's indeed Catherine) if she was a khaibit of the actual Catherine."Andre-Driussi considers this too - some of his speculation involves how Catherine could have been a khaibit and a virgin: "yet a virginal khaibit seems possible only if, hypothetically, her 'original' died at an early age and the khaibit was released from service to the throne into service with the Pelerines. This could give the government reason to pursue a woman who had left an order of monials: to control exultant bloodlines and punish breach of contract." I don't really get where Catherine being a virgin having importance comes from, unless the Pelerines only accept virgins and I've missed that.
Anyway, he also considers "Perhaps Catherine was not really a monial at all, but only a khaibit who escaped the Well of Orchids (or the opening night of the House Azure) while in costume, in the same way that Cyriaca escaped Thrax. An escaped khaibit, impregnated by a commoner, might be enough to warrant her stay in the tower."
Adrienne wrote: "But the Katharine = Catherine explanation seems little too obvious for these books. I'm suspicious."
Well, I would agree, if only I had remembered the maid at all by the end of the book! I mean, I remembered her participating in the feast day ceremony because she's the only non-client female we ever see in Matachin tower, but I certainly had forgotten that she was tall, dark complexioned, etc. Maybe in this one case Wolfe was being kind with the hint of Catherine playing Holy Katherine. ;)
The new book pick and it's totally free? Woot!
Adrienne wrote: "unfortunately my interpretation puts us squarely in a time loop, if you take our current understanding of causality as fact: one problem is that he has to somehow convince the undine to save him from drowning after he's already been saved."Well, here's a thought that just started to coalesce this morning. Severian says the other Severian "was not returned to his own time" -- I think that refers to after the "other Severian" took the trial - he took it and failed, and the sun was not brought back - so then he became a walker of the corridors of time (or more simply put, a skilled time traveller) in an attempt to rectify his error. From the information available in the four books, it seems this mostly involved him becoming Apu-Punchau, trying to bring light to a civilization of an earlier time. There's where he went, seperate from other time travellers who witnessed him gaining the throne. "Those who walk the corridors of Time saw him gain the Phoenix Throne, and thus it was that the Autarch having been told of me, smiled in the Houste Azure, and the undine thrust me up when it seemed I must drown" - this suggests that it's other time travelers who witnessed the other Severian and when they "walked back to the time he [the other Severian] was young", what they carried was information about the Autarch-to-be. Then the current Autarch and Abaia acted on that information independently.
Because I agree, even with two parallel time lines running side by side, clearly the other Severian had to survive drowning in order to live on to claim the throne. So how and why would the undine be intervening?
My suspicion is this: the "other Severian" did drown in Gyoll, but his power - the power that he directly brought forth later by focusing on the Claw -- was awakened and revived him, the same way it did when he should have died by being struck by the Agilius' avern (we've seen with Triskele that he did not actually need the Claw for the power to act). So by saving him, the undine delayed our Severian's awakening and understanding of his power. If his/the Claw's power is indeed time-related, that would perhaps explain the "other Severian" blooming into a full-fledged time traveler. However, if Severian's power is supposed to be gift from the hierodules for *passing* the trial, then of course it doesn't make sense that the "other Severian" would have the power at all, given my above theory (but I'm not sure that is supposed to be where his power comes from).
Adrienne wrote: "However, if the past, present, and future actually exist at the same time (maybe in some extra-dimensional universe that we only perceive as having 3 spatial + 1 time dimensions), it's less of an issue."
Well, from Ash's tapestry metaphor, it seems that past, present and future do exist at the same time, but there are infinite number of variant time lines all running parallel to each other (the threads in the tapestry). Those who time travel can move up and down a thread as witnesses, and can intervene, which presumably creates a new thread / new alternate time line. But regardless, it is clear that in both our Severian and the other Severian's time lines, he had to have survived drowning in Gyoll.
Adrienne: "We've talked about Severian's supposed powers to heal people as actually just a rewinding of time. I'm not sure there's any evidence, other than the healing/resurrection miracles, that he can walk through the corridors of time."
It's Dorcas who explicitly suggests that the healing/resurrecting power is the rewinding of time, during their parting scene in Sword. Severian doesn't comment positively or negatively on that theory, but I think the strongest argument for it being the case is that, otherwise, the power has to come from some technology completely unmentioned in the books, or is actually magical/metaphysical. Eg, a science-fiction explanation could be there's forgotten nano-bots in every Urthian's blood stream that Severian is commanding -- but there's no hint of such a tech in the books. There is, however, *lots* of time travel.
I've only just begun Urth, so I'm still just commenting on what's in Book of the New Sun. We do have the examples of the Green Man and Ash as time travelers - if they're relying on some kind of ship for their time traveling, we're not shown it.
Adrienne wrote: I'm willing to buy that the mausoleum is Severian's, but I'm curious about whose coffins are in it. Are they all Severian's? Has he died five times and left five bodies that just happened to all make it there? Why are two of them open? Were there ever bodies in them and if so, what happened to them?
Andre-Druissi thinks there is indeed more than just one alternate Severian, but from brief glimpse at that entry, I think he's mostly basing that on passages from Urth. I'll read that theory of his in full once I've finished Urth.
Adrienne wrote: "Finally: I'm not sure how Gene Wolfe originally expected us to make any sense of this book without Urth of the New Sun. And that only helps occasionally."
Well, I have to disagree a bit there. During my re-read of Book of the New Sun, I remembered basically nothing from Urth of the New Sun (other than I didn't like it as much). But I nonetheless drew many more connections between elements in the books than I did in my first read and feel pretty satisfied with the four books forming a whole, despite remaining ambiguities and mysteries. I like thinking about what is still mysterious, and I even like the fact that Book of the New Sun leaves it open whether Severian will pass the trial (though it seems likely given the Green Man's survival in Severian's time vs. Ash's winking out).
Good point about the "presentiment of my future" / "presentiment of his future" parallels - I completely missed that! I'll have to think about that...
Severian's time on the frontline of the war was the least engaging portion of the book to me (my attention really started wandering). I think it was a combination of not feeling much was at stake (he wasn't really connected to anyone since losing little Severian) + not really getting much out of the scenes. And I found little in them to connect to the rest of the books. I guess you could say Wolfe was going for a general "purposelessness of war" kind of feeling, but if so, it felt like could have been communicated in a stronger way.Likewise, right before his entering the war, his returning to find the lazaret completely destroyed could have been a devastating scene, but I didn't feel it had much impact, once again, because of his detachment. He had listened to and faithfully recorded the stories of the soldiers he'd stayed with, but that had seemed more out of politeness than a true connection that would have made the lazaret's destruction tragic. (Its destruction does rob him of purpose, true).
Fortunately, once he meets the Autarch, we get hit with revelation after revelation, and I got sucked back in.
What do you think? Did you get much out of the war scenes?
Warning: long post trying to unravel the "other Severian" idea introduced in the last chapter of Citadel.Throughout Book of the New Sun, we are gradually introduced to the idea of not only time travel, but time travel to variant futures and pasts.
The Green Man is the first big indicator of this, a man from a Urth future where the sun has been reborn and Urth revitalized.
Countering this is the future seen at Ash's tower in Citadel. Each level of the tower exists in a different time period, each one progressively further in the future. The top level looks out upon an Urth where the sun has continued to die, and the entire landscape is covered in ice.
When Severian forces Ash to leave the tower (to take Ash back to the Pelerines as Severian was ordered to do), Ash warns him that he will only be able to exist in Severian's time if the probability is high that Severian's time leads to the same future Ash comes from (the future scene from the tower).
As Ash puts it: "You think that time is a single thread. It is a weaving, a tapestry that extends forever in all directions. I follow a thread backward. You will trace a color forward,w hat color I cannot know. White may lead you to me, green to your green man."
Severian's future indeed seems different, since Ash progressively winks out of existence as they move away from the tower, and finally he disappears completely.
When the Green Man reappears to Severian near the end of Citadel, he says, "I have been running up and down the corridors of Time, seeking for a moment in which you were imprisoned, that I might free you."
This ability to travel forward and back in time, and enter alternate time-threads, and apparently make changes that will lead a certain thread to a different future convinces Severian at the end of Citadel that "those who walk the Corridors of Time" saw him gain the throne, but in some way different than what we are shown. What these time-travellers saw reached (directly or indirectly we don't know) both the Autarch and at least Abaia, who both started intervening in the way things had previously unfolded, to their own ends. This is laid out here:
"...I am not the first Severian. Those who walk the corridors of Time saw him gain the Phoenix Throne, and thus it was that the Autarch, having been told of me, smiled in the House Azure, and the undine thrust me up when it seemed I must drown."
Likewise, when the hierodules meet Severian in Baldander's castle, they bow to him as if he is already Autarch.
Severian also theorizes that the "other Severian" "was not returned to his own time but became himself a walker of the corridors." He believes this other Severian travelled back in time and became Apu-Punchau ("I know now the identity of the man called the Head of Day"), which explains why when Hildegrin fought Apu-Punchau, Severian had this flash as if he were Apu-Punchau, struggling with Hildegrin. When he saw Apu-Punchau, he recognized Apu-Punchau's face as the face carved in the mausoleum that he played as a kid, thus "I have disturbed my own tomb, and now I go to lie in it." Also, it can maybe now be inferred what the symbols carved in the tomb mean - "that little building of stone with its rose, its fountain, and its flying ship all gaven." The rose -> the rosebush that holds the Claw (thorn), fountain -> the energy-spewing end of a wormhole that's promised to reignite the sun (if Severian passes the trial), the flying ship --> the hierodule's ship/the ship he will take to his trial.
It's interesting that his revisiting the Atrium of Time is the last scene of the book. What did you think of the "disembodied voices, hundred-tongued" that seem to come from the walls of the Atrium of Time when Severian asked for Valeria? Some kind of automated system of a time machine recognizing the Autarch?
What do you all make of the time-travel / "other Severian" idea?
Ok, here's Andre-Driussi's theory: Severian's mother is the young maid who plays the role of Holy Katherine during the guild feast-day ritual, the ritual that elevates Severian to journeyman in Shadow. The ritual re-enacts the legend of the saint Catherine. In legend, she was condemned to be put to death on a device called the wheel, which broke when she touched it, so she was beheaded instead. Severian performs a mock beheading on the young woman in the ritual.
The maid who plays Katherine every year: "Each feast found her in her place, and so far as I could judge, unchanged. She was tall and slender, though not so tall nor so slender as Thecla, dark of complexion, dark of eye, raven of hair". Ouen describes Catherine as dark-complexioned. "
Andre-Druissi writes: "She appears at every feast for around twenty years and does not seem to change, which strongly suggests that she is traveling through time, presumably by way of the Atrium of Time...that she is tall means that she is of exultant blood to one degree or another. She may be of an impoverished exultant line that has fallen out of the exultant class...or a true exultant who is so young she has not yet reached her full height. The 'not so slender' part may point to a waistline altered by motherhood."
He has various theories as to what could have got in her trouble (mostly disgrace to a bloodline for sleeping with a commoner) and imprisoned in Matachin tower.
It's interesting, but I'm not sure I buy it. The part about her visiting the Atrium of Time I have some trouble with, as I don't think there's any support for it in the text (unless there's something in Urth of the New Sun), though some kind of time travel would explain why she doesn't seem to age year after year.
For me, the best fiction (films, tv series) is that which you don't want spoiled when experiencing it for the first time - because you're so engrossed by seeing how things unfold - and which when you re-visit, you still enjoy and can get new things out of, even though you know what's going to happen.In terms of discussions here, spoiler warnings were specifically asked for by several people in the Shadow & Claw section - they wanted to participate in the discussion but didn't want to be spoiled by stuff they hadn't read yet.
A spoiler warning seems the best policy and really serves both parties: those who don't care about spoilers will read it anyway, those who care about spoilers can avoid and won't get pissed off.
Re-organization city! I like it!
Kevin, I forgot it was you who said it, but I did give voice to your wanting to poke your eyes out rather than read Wolfe again during the podcast. ;)
