Status Updates From The Urth of the New Sun (Th...

Stavamo sorvolando in un ampio semicerchio un'isola circondata da un mare azzurro esteso a perdita d'occhio. L'isola era evidentemente la cima di una montagna che emergeva dalle acque, verde di giardini fra cui risaltava il bianco dei marmi, intorno alla quale era ormeggiata una collana di piccole imbarcazioni. Non avevo mai visto nulla di così imponente come le Mura di Nessus o la Fortezza Grande.

Era uno sciabecco a velatura mista, basso sull'acqua e sottile come una lama. Il suo albero di trinchetto issava un'immensa vela latina, quello di maestra tre grandi vele rettangolari i cui pennoni potevano essere abbassati fin sul ponte per terzaruolare, e quello di mezzana (il più arretrato) una grossa randa quadrata sormontata da due vele di strallo. Il pennone della randa...

Era uno sciabecco a velatura mista, basso sull'acqua e sottile come una lama. Il suo albero di trinchetto issava un'immensa vela latina, quello di maestra tre grandi vele rettangolari i cui pennoni potevano essere abbassati fin sul ponte per terzaruolare, e quello di mezzana (il più arretrato) una grossa randa quadrata sormontata da due vele di strallo. Il pennone della randa...

Visibile lassù, dicevo, troneggiava un sole quale mai nessun uomo coi piedi poggiati sull'erba aveva visto nel cielo: la nascita di un nuovo universo, l'esplosione iniziale contenente tutti gli astri che da essa sarebbero emersi, il primo e più fulgido padre di tutti i soli.

Io ero l'autarca di Urth. E questo richiede la capacità di mescolare l'arte della seduzione a quella della menzogna. Alcuni la chiamano diplomazia.

Perhaps death is only horrible to watch because it’s a dividing of the terror of life from the wonder of it. We see only the terror, which is left behind.

I felt myself a ghost who might be disbursed with a puff of breath if only the breath muttered words of exorcism.

If the new is to be born, the old must be swept aside. One who plants wheat kills grass.

You can’t order the waves to be silent... They are coming, and they are bitter with salt.

What is perceived is dictated by the instrument. If you had other eyes, or another mind, you would see all things otherwise.

The present, when we leave it before us, becomes the future once more.

The autochthons say that their cattle can speak but do not, knowing that to speak is to call up demons, all our words being only curses in the tongue of the empyrean.

How strange it was that they should have been so brave when they faced a horror, but such cowards when confronted by the palinode of fate.

If you wish to be as the Increate is, I question whether you can do it by acting as the Increate does not.

My life has held many sorrows and triumphs, but few pleasures outside the simple ones of love and sleep, clean air and good food, the things anyone may know. Among the greatest I count the village hetman’s expression when he saw his daughter’s arm.

I was the man I would have been without those (and perhaps other) wounds, and thus it was that my face was the face of that strange being -- for what being can be stranger than oneself, or act more inexplicably?

"Yours is a race of pawns. You move forward only, unless we move you back to begin the game again. But not all the pieces on the board are pawns."

Thus every common man who brings a son into the world must feel himself responsible for his woman's labor and perhaps for her death, and with reason fears that the world will in the end condemn him with a million tongues.

I thought the original tetralogy was a mind screw, but it had nothing on this.

Pain brought me to myself. Perhaps that is what pain is for, or perhaps it is only the chain forged to bind us to the eternal present, forged in a smithy we can but guess at, by a smith we do not know.

In childhood, one imagines that any door unopened may open upon a wonder, a place different from all the places one knows. That is because in childhood it has so often proved to be so; the child, knowing nothing of any place except his own, is astonished and delighted by novel sights that an adult would readily have anticipated.

I was the Autarch of Urth; that required a little lying, if you like. We called it diplomacy.

If Urth was visible at all, Urth would be astern. I looked there and saw, not our Urth, but a growing, spinning, swirling vortex of fuligin, the color that is darker than black. It was like some vast eddy or whirlpool of emptiness; but circling it was a circle of colored light, as though as a billion billion stars were dancing.

I would seriously pay Severian money to never share his opinions on women with the reader ever again

It's good but knowing that this book was awkwardly glommed onto the main BotNS series at the behest of the editor doesn't help it...I keep having thoughts like "did Gene really need to return to Severian's story so that we could read about him having sex with an /alien/ woman this time?" to which the answer is invariably "no." Happy new year!

So far, it's not quite as compelling as BotNS, as it seems to be a strange combination of being both harder to follow, as well as an attempt to more concretely explain what happened in the previous installments. Of course, it's still as beautifully written as is expected from Wolfe.

So far, it's not quite as compelling as BotNS, as it seems to be a strange combination of being both harder to follow, as well as an attempt to more concretely explain wh
Of course, it's still as beautifully written as is expected from Wolfe. at happened in the previous installments.

The universe this story expresses is wholly magical; a full spectrum of possibilities. Fantasy of a universe anyone could work in. much like elves and dwarfs, the structure has been laid, and if someone were to bring A New Sun themselves -elsewhere, there would be little contempt for trying. As the Story progresses, details & layers make up a story of grandeur.
Critics get lost in the garden, missing an epic unique.

Reading more of severian's life from wherever he writes from, is bizarre and dreamy, and always thick with antics the author plays on the reader and their memory and ideas in a pacing fashion.
It oddly to me has that loose murder mystery woven into something flabber-gastingly epic & yet to blossom..... Or that's the feeling im having..
Gene Wolfe always has things about his writing, that saves me & heals with time

🤔🤔🤔