/lit/ - Literature

I once read like the first four sentences of this

I'm halfway through the claw and I'm really enjoying it. But being paranoid about what I am reading all the time it's kinda weird, and I feel there are things I'm not noticing.

>>14529908
There definitely are. Don’t sweat it too much, wolfe likes to throw puzzles into his books but they aren’t 1000% necessary for understanding most of the plot.

Sword and citadel is significantly better than shadow and claw imo btw, definitely stick the series out

>We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.

Can someone explain in plain English?

>>14529711
Yes, that is true about every book, and is the reason we are all on /lit/ right now instead of reading, as are we all every day.

I really wish there was some annotated version of it. Amazing series, but i'm sure i missed of lot of its meaning.

>>14530738
Symbols are more real than the people, things, events and places that convey, embody, or share those symbols. Kind of like halfway between Landian hyper-reality and the Platonic theory of forms.

I really liked the part where severian practices his trade in the village.

>>14530738
>it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them
Have you seen the movie They Live? It's just like that. You think you are an autonomous free agent, walking through the world of your own volition. In reality you are a slave to symbols. That's what the movie is about. Zizek's analysis of it is pretty spot on too.

>>14530738
this is an example of a moment in reading where my eyes will glaze over in confusion until i bulldoze through it in order to get to the next lasergun fight.

>>14529711

Read it again.

ew i didn't know you guys read YA shit

>>14531833
What do you mean

>>14531670

i was the exact opposite with this series. the action tended to be pretty boring desu

>>14532237
Yeah I'm with this dude.

>>14532237
'cause there's no story

>>14531617
>You think you are an autonomous free agent,
No I don't.
Fucking philosophers and their assumptions.
NEXT

>>14532430
It's extremely rare for someone who doesn't believe in free will to also have the IQ requisite for literacy, so it's fair enough to assume that the reader believes in free will.

>>14532729
i think of myself as an npc consoomer. like a gear. i exist to serve a master whos serving a master whos serving a master...
the only reason in my life is to do what im told

Were Dorcas and Jolenta really his...?

>>14532758
Do Torturers really...?

>>14530738
This is some bong-ridden bullshit. Glad I've never read this book. Gene Wolfe fans are insufferable.

>>14532918
I laughed, Anon. Holy shit, you're a gas.

>>14532918
Yeah, fuck those guys!!!

>>14532751
Stop posting on 4chan.

>>14529711
It's one of the best series ever written, if not the best. The book itself has inspired thirty years of speculative fiction

give me granny gf

>>14529711
I love BotNS, but I love it for the puzzles and symbolism, not for the story. The story is pretty shit, because it's just there to serve as a means to deliver all the puzzles and symbolism. Sadly, the characters were all pretty shitty and at least for me hard to relate to. I still absolutely love the book for what it is tho.

>>14532751
wew

>>14532994
>>14533977
Hes right

>>14533956
>tfw Dorcas will never cook you a healthy meal and then cuddlebang in some inn.

>>14529711
I know how you feel.

>>14532729
People who believe in free will are retards.

>>14534679
That doesn't even make sense. Without free will they would never have had the choice not to believe in free will. Why then call them retards?

>>14534703
It is their destiny.

>>14532430
I didn’t assume anything about you and neither did Gene Wolfe. You do realize “you” can be general right? Gene Wolfe was just pointing out the obvious, that symbols are our reality yet aren’t reality.

Is the print supposed to be messed up on some of the pages, or did I get a bad copy?

>>14535442
pics? I didn't have anything noticeably wrong with mine.

>>14535506

Severian is dump Gary Stu and the book is bad.

>>14533956
lol your book is fucked. why would that be intentional?

>>14533973
the characters are great for what they are, they just lack depth and nuance (except for severian obviously.) i don't think super deep, complicated nuanced characters were part of gene's intention.

>>14535850
he lays mad pipe and you're jealous

any other books where the MC is a pedophile?

>>14532758
I know dorcas was his grandma but jolenta was something too? I thought she was just the random waitress they met?

>>14536710
jolenta is one of the candidates for his sister, I don't particularly buy it though. one of the others is one of the witches, and a character from long sun/short sun. either of those two is more convincing to me

>>14535822
>Katana as a bookmark
A bit much anon

>>14536710
>>14536731
I should add that Valeria is another candidate for his sister, which I think is more convincing than Jolenta or Merryn

>>14529711
citadel kind of drags at parts but shadow, claw, sword and urth all slap

>>14530738
>WORDS which are waves which are fields
>IMAGES which are objects which are particles which are carried by fields
matter as images (the flesh) and ideas as fields (the word).

soldiers are given an image of themselves in exchange for their word. they are a coin, a currency, to be spent, bargained or traded for. in ancient times coins were often recollected, melted down and restruck with a different metal composition, especially during times of economic hardship when the silver or gold content had to be reduced. their word is their ideas, their thoughts, feels, their soul. it is the immaterial part which they pledge in exchange for the material which they forfeit - the coin is their life. this concept still remains today in the dog tags soldiers receive when they enlist.

between life and death is the meeting and exchange of physical and nonphysical. the real and local vs the surreal and nonlocal. this pops up in religion, quantum mechanics, relationships and the creative process in general.

wolfe heads, thoughts on pic related?

>>14537008
the OG weeb

>>14536886
Urth is kinda gay...especially the start. Citadel is much better

>>14529908
you're missing 90% of it, don't worry about it

Thoughts on pic related? Thinking of picking this up for my reread. Surprisingly its 440 fucking pages. At first glance I thought it would just a short supplemental thing to help understand a lot of the bizarre vocabulary wolfe uses in the book.

>>14537809
http://www.mediafire.com/file/p213aybe4d986t6/SCCC-GW.zip
There's a searchable epub of it in here, along with copies of all the mainline books. I thought it was pretty interesting, if sometimes heavily dependent on the author's own reading of the book. Wolfe wrote the introduction, so it's certainly closer to being "canon" than any speculation you might read on the internet.

>>14529711
The Fifth Head of Cerberus is way better.

>>14536682
lolita

>>14532758
Really his cocksleeves? Fuck yeah they were. It's amazing how incredibly horny Severian is in this book. I never expected to get a boner reading this beautiful, dense sci-fi story, but when Severian fucks/rapes Jolenta out on the lake at the House Absolute I did get a bit hard. There's something so rawly erotic about the entire sequence.

>>14536682
Babyfucker
Yes that's the title.

>>14537008
It's absolute kino.

>>14532237
Same. I noticed that the action was always most compelling in short, intense forms, like the section with Tyrone or whatever his name was. Some of the action segments are messy as fuck and Wolfe's style isn't a sufficient enough excuse to pardon it.

>>14535850
Severian is really retarded and gets himself into dumb predicaments that any non-retard could easily sidestep

>>14539284
The first part of that book is great (the titular story that was published separately and launched Wolfe's career,) but the other two parts are mediocre in comparison and feel like an anticlimax.

>>14536886
Urth fucking sucks compared to the previous entries. I hate using the term "jumped the shark" but it came to mind during the final segments of the book.

>>14538566
Did he just pull that orb out of his ass?

>>14531388
A guy named Michael Andre-Driussi recently published a chapter guide. I don't know if it's any good but the same author also published "Lexicon Urthus" which is a great resource for the Urth Cycle.

Do I need to read Urth after New Sun, or do I skip to Long Sun? I've heard Urth is less necessary and more of a publisher requested addition to New Sun.

Is Short Sun strictly a Long Sun sequel? Or another separate series?

>>14530738
We do not create the sign but are created by it/them. If you take this to its obvious conclusion then the birth of the human and the birth of the first sign would be one and the same. This is generative anthropology.

>>14539385
100%, the way he keeps describing her fat fucking tits almost busting out of her clothes in that wonderful prose just makes me rock hard desu.

>>14537008
the title is a little too on the nose but if its woolfe its kino

>>14536710
FUCK i read your spolier without thinking of what any of the words meant like a robot and then the meaning set in. what the fuck?

>>14541658
>Do I need to read Urth after New Sun, or do I skip to Long Sun?

Read New sun twice then read Urth.
Take a break. Read Long Sun. Take a break. Read Short Sun.

Long Sun and Short Sun both feel very different, but it's all connected.

>>14541119
>A guy named Michael Andre-Driussi recently published a chapter guide. I don't know if it's any good

It's pretty cool. It's written loosely, but the commentary is structured around the chapters of the story. It's full of pointers if you know what I mean.

Here's a section from the very beginning of his book:

>>14529719
how?

>>14529908
Worry not, it will all be there waiting for you when you reread the books... The best books are always showing you something new every time you read them. In large part it is because as you grow and change as a person you become wiser and able to understand more. When you realise this you start to enjoy being old and looking forward to, not senescence of course, but the greater understanding that you know age will bring to you.

Pannobhasa Bhikkhu (/ourmonk/) weighs in...

>If the world of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four were allowed to endure for thousands of years, we might have something like the nation of the Ascians: a kind of government-controlled hive mind. The author was obviously offering a glimpse of a dystopia far beyond Ayn Rand’s Anthem, maybe about as bad as Huxley’s Ape and Essence (which is way beyond Brave New World). The dystopia is a result of an authoritarian government controlling what people are allowed to say, and thus also what they are likely to think. Wolfe was prescient in this, considering that attempts to limit speech in America and in the west generally are evidently much worse and more advanced now than they were in the “golden age” of the 1980s. Just consider political correctness hysteria today, with people losing their careers, reputations, and friends for stating their honest opinions about, say, whether men identifying as women are really, truly women.


https://politicallyincorrectdharma.blogspot.com/2020/01/on-dehumanized-ascians.html

I read Shadow of the Torturer, but found it rather dull and uninteresting. I can barely remember the events of the plot now.

I think I’ll go back and reread it this year to see if my option changes.

>>14529711
I love his prose...

>>14530738
You can really see the influence of G.K. Chesterton here...

is this an allegory to capitalism?

>>14530738
It seems perfectly clear to me, what part don't you get?

>>14530738
Let's break it down.
>We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us
People are formed by symbols, notably (as the rest of the paragraph will discuss) via society, which is an abstraction created and sustained by a library of symbols.

>When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch
When soldiers take their oath they're given a silver coin with future-Caesar's profile on it. By implication: coins in the far future still look the same as they do now and did in the distant past.

>Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life
Taking the coin is the ritual act which affects a change in the individual's relation to society, corresponding to the speech act of "I do" in a marriage ceremony or the signature of a contract.

>I did not know that then
At that time, Severian did not know about the ritual of enlisting as a soldier.

>but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them
You don't have to read the contract to be bound by what it says, if you signed it. By analogy, symbols and rituals still affect you socially and even subconsciously even if you're unaware of them. Severian in suggesting that on some level, he knew that by accepting the coin he was agreeing to become Vodalus' man even though he didn't realize that this as an established ritual.

>and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic
Muh unbound agent free will rationalism is the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. (This is objectively correct.)

>The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge
Only a Wizzerd™ Ocultits thinks that his knowledge can affect the world just by sitting there. By implication, Aleister Crowley was a fucking retard. (This is objectively correct.)

>rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.
Hard to phrase that any clearer or more directly. I'll just note here that this is to some extent irony on Wolfe's part and arguably even on Severian's part. Remember that the Severian writing the book knows a bunch of shit that the Severian experiencing the plot does not – obviously including how the plot turns out.

>We believe that we invent symbols

There's a hidden religious meaning too as our priest shows.

>>14535442
>>14535822
No, this is a misprint caused by a folding problem in the rolls of the printing machine.

>>14542821
>is this an allegory to capitalism?
More like society as a whole...

>>14542659
Based

>>14543566
Interesting!

>>14537008
isekai trash, im sorry but it is.

>>14539497
The 2nd one is the best thing Wolfe ever wrote, get some taste.

>>14530738
I find it interesting that this is the quota everyone goes for when talking about Wolfe, but the below I think is hinting at why Sev wrote the book:
>Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them.