(urth) Weekly blog links

[David Stockhoff]

I find BotNS has a comic aspect that has receded with each Sun novel since. Almost every scene in which Severian deals with other people is either a hilarious set piece or a riff on a well-worn tale: Severian in the catacombs with Ultan, Severian in bed with Baldanders, Severian on stage with Dr Talos. Shadow keeps me in a constant state of chuckling.

I miss this tone in the later books. Silk's tale sometimes has a sly sense of humor, but SS seems to have almost no sense of humor at all, as far as I recall. I assume this is partly because a comedy of manners is hard to pull off when the society itself is formless and the "manners" unspecified, as among the isolated farms of Blue. Or else it's just harder to detect.
It may also be because Wolfe started to treat his subject more seriously, if he did do so.

But another likely factor is that BotNS was written with dozens, if not hundreds, of literary predecessors in mind, and fantasy and satire are rarely far apart. Urth's society is recognizable; the Whorl's is not, or at least not so readily. And the later books' antecedents seems to lie less in Chesterton and Vance than in older myth. IMHO.

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Message: 4
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:11:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: Stuart Hamm <hammstu at sbcglobal.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Weekly blog links
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <648691.66443.qm at web81408.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
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I agree FWIW
I am a big fan of the short stories (earlier than later), and TBotNS got me hooked for life...but for my "Desert Island " book I would take? Long Sun and Short Sun as 1 book and be happy to read it over and over and over and over and....

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--- On Tue, 4/14/09, don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com> wrote:
From: don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Weekly blog links
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 6:55 PM


Doggerel
www.don-doggett.blogspot.com


> > Many people find Long Sun accessible and satisfying because
> > they think it has a generally reliable narrator and the
> > narrative is not so occulted. They are wrong. I think the
> > most valid criticism of Short Sun (I don't agree with it) is
> > that it's very well crafted but it's just tooooo Wolfean:
> > It's a bridge too far. Yet, many of the puzzles in Long Sun
> > that readers didn't know were puzzles are resolved in Short
> > Sun--can ONLY be resolved in the Short Sun--and the answers
> > go right over those readers heads because they weren't
> > looking for answers. So is that a defect in the books?
>   

I agree, and I would go a step farther and say that LS and SS are really one
novel. SS is basically a continuation of the epilogue in LS and doesn't
stand at all on its own. And LS is brilliantly written (better than New Sun,
really) but the plot is unsatisfying without the revelations of SS.

Don



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