/lit/ - Literature

I have severian's avern done on my arm

Why is he so horny? Good Lord Severian is a horny bastard.

I'm surprised you don't see more tranny discourse around Book of the New Sun. The plotline of Severian absorbing Thecla's inner self almost seems like it would invite it. So many occasions where Severian seems to very pointedly embody Thecla in all her female-ness, after ingesting her and the Claw doing its thing.

>>19198083
Honestly, the cloak's a bit too colorful, too. The whole point of fuligin is that it's supremely black.

I wonder if the artist somehow got it mixed up with Severian's autarch cloak.

Does anyone else just really like "distant future" sci-fi in general? It feels kind of rare, but it's good to see all the examples of it in this thread. So often sci-fi stories seem to be set a few decades in the future, a few centuries at most. I love the idea of sci-fi set thousands or even tens of thousands of years in the future, to the point where it feels like an alien world, except it's OUR world.

I guess I like the "dying Earth" subgenre for that reason, too. Sci-fi set so far in the future that the Earth itself has grown old and begun to decay.

>>18977313
Why does everyone hate the vignette, episodic element of the story? To me that is one of my favorite parts, and the thing that draws me to the story. It feels very "real." Life isn't one grand narrative, more often it's a series of episodes, and BOTNS does a good job of depicting this. Of course, the fact that Severian's life actually does have a grand narrative in spite of all he encounters is just the icing on the cake.

It's also a great story for the ways in which it swings between extremes of emotion. The story has great beauty, great ugliness, great terror, great sadness, and great joy all in its midst. And this, too, is realistic. For life is never completely good, or completely bad. Never completely sad, never completely joyful. BOTNS to me contains the great extremes of human life in their fullness, and this is what makes it realistic to me despite its sci-fi setting, and it is the thing I cherish most about the story.

Tolkien, Chesterton, Waugh, Wolfe. They're my big four.

Have read Graham Green as well but am not quite sure what to make of him.

One person on /lit/ once said something that's always stayed with me: that BOTNS is a very religious, very Catholic book, but not as much in its content as in how it makes you FEEL. The mood, the mindset, that reading it engenders in you. Something about Severian's narration, the way he tells his own tale, gives you a sense of what it means to be religious, to have faith. I actually agree with that, and it's a big part of what makes the book so interesting.

Not to mention I actually think it's a bit Proustian in the way it dwells on the slow passage of hours, days, and years.

>>16682619
The Book of the New Sun
Moby-Dick
The Sound & The Fury
Dubliners
The Scarlet Letter
A Brief History of Seven Killings

All books that habitually make lists on /lit/. But they show up on the lists, over and over, for a reason.

All right, you fuckers, I've been a horny little shit lately and I've been getting aroused by the most random thoughts, so I finally took the shameful initiative and measured.

>between 6.5 and 7 inches
>Book of the New Sun

>>15901753
OP I genuinely have to commend you, that is a fucking amazing and excellent piece of art you've got there.

It took me a minute to figure out what that was, but once it clicked for me I literally felt my spine curdle and my skin crawl, remembering that dialogue from SOTL. I'm not used to depictions of the Alzabo looking that terrifying. Usually they have a very catlike quality to them. The ratlike quality of this one lends a disturbing quality to it that most depictions of the beast do not have.

And considering how fucking horrifying the entire Alzabo scene is in BOTNS, I'd say that's a job well done. Nice work. Good shit.

>>15640839
Nothing is wrong with it, as far as I'm concerned. I love it, and I'm sure OP does, too. OP is taking issue with the idea that it's "unfilmable." And I honestly agree with him, I read Dune and it never came across as impossible to film. Sure, it has visions and dream sequences and the weird inner world of characters sometimes (like Jessica and Paul), but those have been depicted well on film before.

When I think of "unfilmable" science fiction books, the one that alwas comes to mind for me is The Book of the New Sun. I truly think that actually is unfilmable, because so much of its power comes from the huge amount of uncertainty in its narrative and plot. We're never quite sure if Severian is telling the truth, we know he's ignorant and misunderstands multiple things throughout the plot, and the deep future world he inhabits is so alien that we're sometimes not even sure what, exactly, he's describing, what it could possibly look like. These are all part of the appeal of BOTNS, and they'd be ruined if you tried to film it. This is not the case with Dune. Herbert is always pretty straightforward about what things look like, feel like, etc..

>>15462023
Catholics write such great science fiction. It's really pretty interesting that they can do it. All the best sci-fi writers are either weird atheist/pagan mystical types, or they're Catholics.

ITT: extremely horny main characters