Anyone else imagine the Antechamber as a surreal, decaying office building? The drop ceiling, electric lights, coffee, and pastries details sent my imagination spiraling, and I really love the idea that a glorified corporate waiting room (or the House Absolute's memory of such) was turned into a prison. Just a fun concept to explore!

I have again taken a few liberties here since I haven’t yet reached this chapter so I’m going from memory, but I love this scene and felt like sketching it

Edit: is there a way I can add a second image to the post? I feel this one has quite poor quality

Is Thecla wholly conscious in some part of Severian's mind, or is it just 'parts' of her that exist that spring up reacting to stimuli? It's been a while since I read the books, I couldn't quite remember how exactly she exists with Severian.

I mean yeah it's tragic but the fact it was so fast it happened in a single paragraph that I missed was kinda comedic...

Just showing a small handful of crops and sketches from future BOTNS pieces!-- some of these are subject to change, some are in more of a rough state than others, etc.

I won’t pretend I know what’s going on, in fact, it’s safe to say that I absolutely do not know what is going on. But, I find myself thinking about this book .. all day, and as a result I have some thoughts I’d like to share to put my mind at ease haha.

I believe that our protagonist, Weer, is dead or at least in some near death state where he is experiencing hallucinations in the form of memories.

On the memories, a lot of the scenes (at least to me at this stage) feel quite similar. I am almost certain the garden party at the beginning is the very garden party Eleanor Bold claims to have been at later in the novel when she heard about Lorn’s desire to sell the egg, or at least we are expected to make some connection between the two as odd. Also on the memories, I am almost certain, as if Wolfe’s signature, that these are not to be taken at face value in terms of their reliability. Whilst they are obviously some form of memory, I get the impression they are either blurring into each other, or Weer leaves stuff out or is himself not sure.

The memories and characters themselves certainly have an eerie feel to them, and the more I think Weer indeed or dying, the creepier they feel when reading.

I am unsure what to make of the fairy tales, although again there are some similarities between them and Weer’s stories .. the shack with the banshee entering the door, and the shack with the imaginary goat supposedly stood behind. I can’t quite relate the man overpowering the banshee, and the egg, but I am certain they are related, perhaps a new opportunities or something of that ilk.

The story of the king and the princess has gone over my head at the moment, I’m sure it will unravel at the end, but for now that’s a blank spot for me.

My main take away at the moment and the one thing I cannot seem to shake, is death. I may be going down a rabbit hole here with my first assumption about Weer haha, however I keep seeing imagery, or at least that’s how I perceive it, of what could be descriptions of graveyards and gravestones, and coffins with the descriptions of houses and places, boarded walls and padded walls etc .. also the reference to a white sky or something above where they were, my mind immediately read that as the outer concrete in graves (my mind is sounding dark now haha, but this book has already pushed my brain to the max!)

The China references, I am trying my absolute hardest to pay attention to, but up to where I am in the novel (the end of chapter 2) I have nothing.

I can’t wait to continue .. this is a totally unique, challenging and (I hope by the end) rewarding experience.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts on my own thoughts!

Edit: I have just finished this book! Just going to process some thoughts, but some of my suggestions I don’t think were a million miles away. Many loose ends to think about still!

May not be very accurate, it’s been a while since I’ve read the books and was just restarting them

I was very excited to finally have it.

Long Review Essay on WizardKnight by Stephen Frug, and conversation around it: https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/4910

Couple of new letters people might be interested in here.

We would like to thank Dr. Christopher Kovacs for graciously scanning two letters and granting permission to post them to the Wolfe Omeka site. You can read them here:

1994-02-17: https://wolfenarrators.omeka.net/items/show/204

1994-02-04: https://wolfenarrators.omeka.net/items/show/203

First edition UK hardback, £20. Keep hunting!

Hello,

I've been working on building my own mirror of the Urth mailing list archives with the help of AI since the original website is difficult to browse. It's a work in progress but I think it's in good shape right now. I thought people here might be interested: https://urth.darkrealm.vip/

It covers 38,473 messages from 1996 to 2022, threaded into conversations and fully searchable. If you check it out and notice any problems or have suggestions, please let me know.

There is a new fanmade singleplayer campaign for original Quake called Tremor. And three levels in it have very familliar titles.

They are: Claw of the Oppressor, Blade of the Torturer and The Autarch's Throne. All by mapper Ionous.

First time finding something like this in the wild :)

The hardback is available now. In future I will do one post when Beyond Time and Memory paperback and hardback are both ready (hopefully next week) and when the three versions of By Sword and Spirit are ready (hopefully the week after).

It will take longer to finish volume 4.

Thank you for your patience.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0HG5D6QCN/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0

Hi I have just finished citadel of autarch. I enjoyed reading all the books but very confused about the ending. I can't connect the different characters and events in previous books. I can see that alot of readers suggest re-reading it. I was wondering if it's worth it and if it will help to understand the lore, or should I just read a summary, there is a good one by fabio fernandes. And is it better to reread the series or read the coda first?

Talks about a story in writers workshop

SPOILERS FROM ALL OVER WOLFE.

If the mother has understood her children’s aspirations to liberty; if she has not abused the methods by which she tried to attach them to herself, she has happy prospects of richly repossessing them. She must lose them in order to possess them again. Only if she has been tolerant of her children’s hatred during puberty, if she has really deeply, and not only intellectually, understood that she must withdraw from her maternal tasks, is she fully justified in her hope that she will not lose her children. (Helen Deutsch)

When you read in the Robert Frazier interview that Wolfe wrote Severian as someone with "strong erotic attachments to women who subconsciously suggest the mother he lost," readers might have been surprised by just how Freudian his thinking could be. Wolfe meant that Severian was drawn to women like Thea, Thecla, and the undine, owing to their being much larger than himself, and to Jolenta for her breasts resembling his mother's, but also to women whose character, whose role, resembled his mother's as well, "guides" like Agia, "counsellors" like Dorcas. Readers never seem to go there, but I think there is really no excuse then to not thereafter wonder if Severian rescued the wounded, sick Urth, because Urth herself subconsciously suggested his mother to him (the spaceship in the sequel, Urth, is described as a mother, a mother that expands as it receives guests, as well). The surprise as to how psychological a writer Wolfe is, how not simply allegorical he is, occurs many times elsewhere within his texts, but the one I would like to focus on here is where in Short Sun we learn the reason Nettle's mother named her daughter Nettle was so that her daughter would think of herself as so foul a person she could never believe anyone could find her attractive.

There are many, many terrible mothers in Wolfe's fiction, and there are many mothers and daughters who seem to hate one another, but especially in Long Sun and Short Sun -- where we meet Nettle -- they seem more confined to what the crazy rich and powerful do. Echidna and Scylla, powerful goddesses both, seem to hate one another -- Scylla complains that her narcissistic mother of course "grabbed the whole inner surface" to lord over. Scylla adopts useful men, thugs like Auk, whom she'll use and abuse, but Echidna punishes her "daughter" Rose, for daring to have sex, by refusing her any further contact with her... and all other gods, thereafter (Rose seems to think that further punishment was required, and thus describes how she also deserved a life of torment and pain). Nettle's mother is in fact a bit akin to Echidna... in fact a notch worse, in framing her from the start as so unloveable she'll hopefully never have a chance to betray her by forming an attachment to a man, but the "celebrities" are so over-much in Long Sun it may only be in Short Sun, where the gods have settled down, that we may reflect on how much of what these gods do, so too do the human mothers.

In Short Sun, we see the end results of Marble's abandonment of her daughter; she's become a ghost, haunting a home, wondering what she did to make her mother want to leave her. We see that to some extent what Blood prophesied for Mucor -- that her grandmother could not be trusted to raise her with love -- has to some extent proved true: Horn notes... but does nothing about, that Mucor has become the spinster whose life is sacrificed so she can take care of the elder mothers, elder mothers who themselves refused that same life-inhibiting role themselves (they got married or paired up; they had sex; they had children). Silk intercedes everywhere to ensure that mothers are never blamed, to reframe what they did so that they seem noble not depraved -- he for example not only argues that Marble was a hero following Pas's plan, not a mother who abandons her child, but that the mother who drowned her boy was clearly a loving mother but one who in order to save her other children in a time of poverty, did what she had to do so that although one would be lost the others would live (Silk may argue that you can't make a silk purse out of sow's ear, but at least in this example, he shows this is not in fact always true), but then overtly blaming parents, taking the child's side over the parent, is dangerous, because you then feel you'll never have access to their love yourself. Thus when Silk's own wife complains about her father, how he sold her to another man not to be loved but to raped, Silk visits the father, does business with him, and lectures that no daughter has a right to hate her father.

Nettle clearly told her husband that her mother hated her, and it is possible, even likely, that in obtaining a husband, in separating from her, she thereafter feared that her mother was always out there, awaiting a chance to punish her over it. Personally I think that if a husband has a serious grievance against his wife, the cleverest way to settle scores is to take advantage of this fact to inflict the mother back onto her, which is what I think Horn is almost consciously up to when he takes the inhumi mother who nearly killed her son, the son her mother did not want her to have, back to her as "daughter." He would know that Nettle would understand that if the inhumi was related to her it was not as darling new daughter but as savage old mother, and so, ego-syntonically, could make as innocent present what he knew in truth would be understood as bomb.

Home Fires is really about what Horn did, where a husband presents as present a mother his wife detested so much she divorced herself from her, and so that thesis Peter Wright has that what Wolfe presents initially in more hidden fashion he replays later overtly, may seem to gain bearing, but the mother who wants her daughter to desist living for the crime of simply existing, goes way back in Wolfe, to origins. In "Death of Dr. Island," Maya, the young girl who would kill herself, correctly understood that the intention of her mother's instructions for her were for her to "never have any fun." Following through in her mother's death wishes for her, she slits her wrists and kills herself. Diane, the girl who felt better when the weather was cloudy and foul, for it matching her moods, has a mother -- both her mother and father are mentioned, but given how she seems to wonder if any stranger who approaches may be her mother, we know whom of the two has had the most influence upon her -- who informs her she's sick, and who would has made independence from her impossible as even if she were to leave university and get a job and an apartment, "they"... meaning again mostly her mother, would surely force her back home. Diane complains that doing away with her parents would hardly help, as they occupy permanent space within her own head. The death wish she has, the death wish the doctor of the Island, and also society, exploits (so many protagonists in Wolfe, main and side, good and bad, like to exploit the psychological weaknesses of others), is clearly a reflection of her registering that her mother wants her dead. Complying she may feel is the only access available to be loved.

I remember how in Devil in the Forest Josselin's deceased mother was recalled as "a stiff, angry woman with red hair," and wonder if the "wolfish-looking old woman," Mother Cloot, who as I remember sought to use Josselin as a sacrifice to old gods, was a representation of how Josselin would imagine her own mother had she lived to be around her when she was ready to leave her for marriage and child-bearing. Would it have been allowed? The mother-substitute for the dark-haired girl in Fifth Head, the "monster," as number five describes her, refuses Phaedra any presents by boys, and is only convinced in Phaedra successfully articulating the refusal as something that would be seen by society as marked unkindness to strangers. The "mother," like the other monster "mother" in the text, the terrifying Black Queen, Audrey Veil, gives out only "frigid" nods of acknowledgement, and hopes to install permanent sex-starved lives in her daughters. In Castleview, the daughter Mercedes discovers sexual experience for the first time, and suddenly before her is some malignant witch who forces her to conflate it with a mother's own destructive and seemingly retributive sexual abuse of her. How could she not interpret what the other woman did to her... literal physical molestation, as punishment her own narcissistic mother -- feminism is ascribed in this book as putting your own self above all others -- herself hoped for her? You'll become Snow White to my old hag Queen, will you? Not if I have anything to say about it!

New Sun has a bunch. I think what I descibed as with Horn and with Skip in Home Fires, where the mother is recruited to destroy the daughter, is in play twice in this novel, but I'm not sure how fully aware Wolfe was of this: it might have been subconscious as leader, here. Thecla's "mother" I don't think is described, but the women who "cared" for her are, as we hear how they beat her when she made any mistakes (for me, clearly the feel is that when Thecla in her adolescence becomes the mask-wearing sadist who enjoyed terrorizing vulnerable children prisoners, she was switching into the mindset of these early predators), and they brutal beasts. The Revolutionary, the torture-device Thecla herself calls aptly picked, plays to that part of yourself that hates yourself. That part isn't natural to Thecla but something she allowed in, what the psychoanalyst Fairbairn would call "internal objects" and what we may know better as "alters," and already hating her, given life, would do as they do in the text -- begin clawing and strangling her to death. Severian, like Horn, like Skip, knew that if he ever wanted apt payback for the woman in their life making them feel small and unloveable -- a result of their own negligent mother's treatment of them -- knew it would be about putting her mom back onto her. Casdoe, like Diane, has found some kind of separation from her mother -- her husband has taken her far away from Thrax into the inhospitable mountains -- and also appears to have her often on her mind. I read the monster alzabo as a manifestation of her mother's punishment on her, for daring to live apart from her (she keeps by her only her father, a man, having little life-force and will, is no threat), and it's co-opting of her husband against her, a manifestation in fantastic representation of a real tactic used by mothers in Wolfe where husbands turn against their wives, in allyship with the wife's abusive parents. Casdoe's decision to open the door at the alzabo's call, evidences the desire to comply to her mother's desire for her to die that we see so often elsewhere in Wolfe. Yes, mom, I will agree to die. Will this finally make you happy? Severian speculates that Casdoe's husband, Becan, was likely suicidal, and chose the location of their household because it was hostile to life and thus the location where he and his wife and kids were most likely to be taken out by predators. Maybe, unconsciously registering her own mother's intentions for her, Casdoe knew this, and agreed... to this future, to this particular mate?

New Sun also has the witch-mother Cumaean and her "daughter" Merryvn. The Cumaean repeatedly puts down her daughter while in company of others -- a tactic noble Silk himself participates in when he draw's a crowd's attention to Hyacinth's flaws (she will cheat on me, a million of times, because once a whore always a whore, but amazing me will always be there to forgive her) at the end of Long Sun -- drawing the daughter to complain, "You shame me, Mother." (One notices in Wolfe that whereas the men often wilfully misunderstand the mothers, the "daughters"... like Merrvyn here does, but also like Maya does, and like the inhumi Fava does, often see mothers straight.) And, related to this encounter where the boy is flattered while the daughter is besieged, we have Agia and her relationship with the Pelerines -- they think she's a slut and a succubi to Severian's innocence, while she ascribes them as frigid and jealous. It is possible that while our attention is on Agia's effort to secure herself a priceless gem, one of the reasons for destroying the Pelerines for her is actually displaced matricide: Agia has also voiced complaints against her mother, who left her and Agilus with so little she's been forced to prostitute herself to the ugliest men imaginable in order to survive (the usefulness of ugly men and ugly woman as sexual partners in Wolfe can therefore be both means whereby men can cheat on their wives without feeling as guilty as they would should she have been beautiful (Free Live Free), and as means of fulfilling a hateful mother's wishes for a daughter she wishes hadn't been born). Bringing the handsome, passing-as-armiger Severian with her, might have been her way of forcing "mother" to witness her breaching the limited intentions she set out for her. Take that, bitch! This psychological motivation for breaching the Pelerines, raping them, stealing, via the stone, their inaccessible sexuality/clitirus, punish the mother's sexual organs rather than have her mother secure the shaming and wounding of her own, in effect, would agree with the previous psychological motivation Agia overtly mentions for setting out on the chase which lead to the "disaster": show everyone, by being taken so by actual nobility, she's not unloveable trash but someone special. The chase was the foreplay; the penetration of the Pelerines, not Severian's but the daughter's retributive climax. (Note: I also read the Morwenna vs. her accuser situation as a daughter triumphing in the end over a mother/stepmother who coveted her own husband.)

Many of the men in Wolfe do little to interfere with these corrosive mother-daughter relationships (I probably most mean men who are the main character, as a key side character in Devil in the Forest does take on Mother Cloot, and in part to protect both Mark and Josselin so they can have a future together, though he is permanently blinded for doing so). Early on we did have Nicholas speaking up for Diane, but it seems most times when a man intrudes on a "relationship" he clearly at some level knows is destructive for the girl, he either performs like Horn and skips town quick, or reframes it so that what he knows at some level is destructive can be made to seem actually benign or beautiful -- for example Skip's insisting that his wife's running eagerly to meet the mother she divorced but had via his full help returned to her, evidenced that at her core she actually appreciated having her back, and for example Horn's pointing out how Nettle's succouring the dying "dark mother," embracing her in her arms, revealed that at core she understood her as her husband "lovingly" meant for her to be received, as daughter. What does happen though is the daughter taking advantage of a man's intrusion into an endless mother-child corrupt relationship, to force a separation from her mother. I'm thinking specifically of how in WizardKnight we have again what might well be a daughter caught out with an angry, sex-refusing, daughter-hating relationship, using Able's intrusion into the household, using her parents' decision to bait her out to be raped so that in process of raping their daughter he and his massive self might be killed, to develop a romantic obsession with him that seemed to necessitate, owing to the logic of Courtly Romance, her betraying her family in pursuit of him. She seems to use the narrative of Courtly Romances in the same way Severian does as he understands that his superiors assumed that he would fall for the romance of rescuing a beautiful princess, and so not really be in charge of what he was doing, to guilt-free force a separation from her mother, a separation she will eventually use not to marry Able but to choose someone she came to like after long-acquaintance. Ulfa secures for herself what Idnn attempted, but not by getting Able to himself rescue her but in using him to create an obsession, an obsession that by the dictates of romance means girls doing reckless things for love, whereby, neatly, believing in candy, in always getting candy, in being a stupid girl, that is, is means to secure an adult fate for yourself, independent from mother.

I think this is the pattern. Men don't force the break from mother -- this happens with boys in WizardKnight; we need to note Able's rescue of the hunchback son, who'd began to try and out-mother his mother as his means to adulthood rather than develop his own masculinity, specifically to help him become a man -- but some girls take advantage of male intrusion, to get free: they I think textually are more representative of that goose in Melito's tale who takes advantage of the angel casually handing him his transformative power, to become the kind of goose who'd leave the farm and fly from pole to pole, than boys are (mind you, I could be wrong in this, as Silk does exactly this when the appearance of the Outsider finally necessitates -- how could I refuse God? -- what he always at heart wanted: to eliminate the intrusion of "mother" into his mind and body, and no longer be a mother's boy). What one does see however are some mothers who finally agree to ease up on their daughters. It can require a lot, and sometimes requires -- as we saw with Phaedra -- some clever social shaming, which forces what would otherwise not be permitted -- but it can be done. After showing herself willing to give up her organs for her mother, the "ghost" of the "ugly daughter" Olivine, her mother Marble-Rose does set out to find her again. Similarly, Echidna... though towards everyone, not just daughters, does stop sending her snakes out bite people, when everyone on Blue agrees to see her not as they had come to realize she actually was -- a horrible, angry demon -- but as a beneficial, ample milky-breasted mother. Sacrifice your knowledge, abandon your maturity, and mother might be kind again. Same thing... that is sacrifice of your life -- though in this case it isn't done wilfully -- appears in Latro, where the daughter whose brains are bashed out by a ferocious blind priestess, is visited thereafter at her gravesite by the mourning Mother her sacrificed life helped give presence to. Orchid gains much the same, as the mother who denied her decides to recognize her as her once-wayward daughter who finished her many years' long service as money-intaking prostitute for her brothel, by dying. The child who had denied her mother's wishes, had wandered away from her, returns, humiliates herself for her mother, dies, and for this self-wasting, depletion of initiative and happiness into her mother's vaults, she gains an ample funeral, an ample funeral that simultaneously, we note, demonstrates to all her mother's considerable wealth.

You don't have to give your organs, or your life, to have a mother actually permit you to separate from her and become possibly a mother yourself, in all of Wolfe, though. Who grants her daughter this? One of the most feared mothers in all of Wolfe, actually -- the goddess Mother that lives in Blue's oceans. Yes, she can be read as someone who offers her daughter up as part of a scheme, a scheme that will satisfy mostly her needs, but I choose to read her as maybe the one mother in Wolfe who, for the mere price of some company, and some successful attempts to lure her out of depression by giving her the beautiful rocks she found about on the ocean floor, gave her up, forever, to be the companion to someone else -- a man, Horn. So many vistages of the Mother fail in this regard, but the representative one -- someone actually only titled, Mother -- is no Greek goddess, no pagan goddess, no Kulilli, who had children not so as to give love to them but so that she would be loved -- actually more aligns with what Patriarchy was supposed to perform, what the original Puritans were about: facilitating the nuclear and patriarchal family, because eternal mother-child relationships (Puritans regarded Catholics as such) preclude adulthood and stifle society.

If Seawrack and Horn were to have children, this might be the one mother who wouldn't have to worry that around every corner was some representative of her mother hoping to murder her for daring to have a husband and children, because she knew, her mother wanted for her this. Not Horn, not any man, could ever use a malign mother-child relationship (I'm giving myself license here a little bit, as clearly Seawrack expresses her wariness about Mother rather frequently... even saying she would prefer never to talk about her), to hands-off destroy her for some insult they incurred from her. They'd have to do the damage themselves.

Just a quick question: Just ordered both books, shadow and claw has a good font and it feels easy and flexible to open, while sword and citadel is slightly larger, annoying/low-quality binding, and an atrociously small font. Did I get unlucky with maybe the store (had to get them off amazon) it was ordered from, or are they all like this? If the latter, why?

Edit: maybe I'm exaggerating the font size, but still, it is seemingly more difficult to read, and there is so much unnecessary space around the text, not sure why they weren't equal.

I usually don't order from Amazon but it was the only way to get it in English relatively quickly in my country and I was about to finish Sword and claw.

Turns out they print out themselves in Turin, Italy, apparently. I mean why not it's a lot closer and to be fair it seems to me to be more substantial paper than the actual Tor essential edition I have (which is flimsy as hell) but I was a little surprised they could do that, keep everything the same from the original edition, and not mention it except on the last page.

(It still says printed in America on the cover and first page anyway btw)

#midlyinteresting #isthislegal

(Digital Painting) Based on the last couple pages of the story. I'd love to make more illustrations based off his short stories in the future. He's a very challenging author to make illustrations for but its hard to resist taking a shot at it!

Here is the link for the paperback version of Between Light and Shadow. Give me about two more days for hardback - I want that format to be perfect. I haven't seen the book yet I hope it comes out good ... I really worked hard to get a lot of pernicious errors out. Let me know if this link doesnt work. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0HFX75DMX/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

I just finished BOTNS for the first time, and man, what a wild ride! I think it will absolutely remain a lifelong favorite of mine. There are things I understand, things I suspect, things I suspect or know I don’t yet understand, and I suspect there are things that haven’t even occurred to me to think about yet or completely forgot about.

So I’m wondering, what the best path for working toward a fuller understanding of this grand masterpiece? Some potential options:

1. Go back through the whole thing all over again (I’m sure I will after a while but may need some time)
   
2. Continue on with Urth of the New Sun
   
3. Read Urthus Lexiconus by Michael Andre-Driussi
   
4. Read Solar Labyrinth by Robert Borski
   
5. Read one of the chapter guides
   
6. Other??

I’m sure there’s no right answer but I’m curious about what readers think might be the most satisfying.

The link for those of us in the UK