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The Book of the New [chat]
Jacobkosh
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
wiki wrote:The Book of the New Sun is a novel in four parts written (1980–83) by science fiction and fantasy author Gene Wolfe. It chronicles the journey and ascent to power of Severian, a disgraced journeyman torturer who rises to the position of Autarch, the one ruler of the free world. Severian, who claims that he has perfect memory, tells the story in first person; the books are presented by Wolfe as a translation of Severian's writings into contemporary English. The series takes place in the distant future, where the Sun has dimmed considerably and the Earth (referred to in the series as "Urth") is slowly cooling.
A few of you (JamesWMoar, MaxCairnduff, RobKill, AddisonSteele) had warned me not to tackle Wolfe while I was still reeling from the intense Elizabethan-style English of The Worm Ouroboros (or his "linguistic porridge", as AddisonSteele put it – true, but I do like porridge). I imagined that I'd be glooping along through olde worlde syntax, but Wolfe isn't like that at all. Yes, there's plenty of odd words – "fuligin" for black, "carnifex" for torturer, "destriers", which are sort of super-horses. But I found this all added to the other-ness of the world Wolfe has created; I didn't exactly understand some words until I looked them up but I knew what he meant by them, and I loved his "note on translation" at the end of the first book, when he tells us how he went about "rendering this book - originally composed in a tongue that has not yet achieved existence – into English". Did you warner-offers find it irritating? I really enjoyed it.
Also, while The Shadow of the Torturer won the World fantasy award in 1981 and has the trappings of fantasy (young man, long sword, mysterious destiny), surely it's really science fiction? Set a million years in the future on a world with a dying sun, where the moon is green and irrigated, daylight is red, and "rotting jungles" circle "the waist of the world", it follows the story of Severian, a torturer in the decaying Citadel who shows mercy to a prisoner he's fallen in love with. Rather than being killed for his crime, he's exiled, given an ancient sword (Terminus Est) and sent to the distant city of Thrax. On his way out of the vast urban sprawl of Nessus, his adventures include fighting a duel with a flower (more deadly than it sounds), accidentally stealing the Claw of the Conciliator (a glowing, seemingly magical jewel) from a temple and fishing a girl, Dorcas, out of a lake where the dead are sunk.
The story is recounted by Severian himself from a position in the future. He is, I suspect, brilliantly unreliable; as well as the challenge of picking through his statements, this is a world which Wolfe never explains directly – the reader has to piece its realities together, which is hugely satisfying.
He goes on to perform a couple of executions, meet a mysterious troupe of travelling players, escape underground man-apes who have mutated from their human origins through "eons of struggles in the dark" and take part in a cannibalistic ritual which confers the substance of a dead person's mind to the eater. We even get a bit of Christopher Marlowe. I'd worried that Severian's occupation would mean endless gruesome descriptions of torture, but this isn't the case at all – apart from a leg-peeling, a excoriated dog, and Severian's few beheadings, Wolfe steers clear of the grisly, and manages to make his torturer-hero if not sympathetic, then definitely charismatic. (Unlike Terry Goodkind, who seems to revel in his Mord-Sith's perversions – although mentioning Goodkind in the same blog as Wolfe feels a bit sacrilegious, so apologies for bringing him up.)
I loved Shadow and Claw – was blown away, in fact. The whole thing is dreamlike in quality, unfathomably large in scope, deliciously, slyly puzzling. It's enormous fun picking away at Severian's ideas about the past of his far future Urth, at the mysteries of his companions Jonas (why does he have a mechanical hand?) and Dorcas (was she resurrected?), at what the Claw might actually be – and at how truthful and accurate our narrator, for all his protestations that he remembers "every rattling chain and whistling wind, every sight, smell and taste", really is. "Trust the text implicitly. The answers are in there," Gaiman tells us. Then "do not trust the text farther than you can throw it, if that far. It's tricksy and desperate stuff, and it may go off in your hand at any time." I think a second read is definitely going to be in order; I'm also champing at the bit for the second half to arrive.
Jacobkosh on
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then I will complete all the quests
then I will buy all the houses
then I will devote my time to filling an entire room with jewels and shiny things
then I will...
"read all the books" needs to be on this list
Like, I'm narrating all the characters in Skyrim and watching their lives.
Spoiler
Americacentrism might be more appropriate.
RACISTS
Because I think Ridley Scott would have had foresight to set it much further into the future if it were up to him.
I wanted to get a couple things done before bed when I got home.
So the whooooooole day.
It was especially annoying, as the servers would shit down and then you'd have lost the last hour. Sometimes this would lead to weird bugs too, like item duplication and so forth. And if you were caught with identical items you could be banned. It was a well thought out system.
*calculations*
11am EST?
Crap.
I will log out someplace, usually by a quest giver I just picked up the quest from. Then when I log back in, I will be the nearby Cantina. Last time it happened, Sunday, I ended up with 86k rested XP.
Then on Monday, I logged in and had a pair of Orange Sith heavy armor pants in my inventory. They were lvl 19 and I was lvl 36, so I know I didn't pick them up from a mob accidentally.
Played it for nostalgia not too long ago, like last year or 2009 or something.
Relatedly, I wonder how much of the Internet Armchair Austrian Economist fad is due to terrible economics education.
So, one of the others. Trafford centre is horrifyingly large. It might also be very busy.
Pretty good specs for 40,000 monies, I'd say.
The cool stuff should NEVER be only available on the open market.