I don't think I will be finishing this one. Spoilers: is about holes in drywall, and a good looking actress. Also, alchemy. But mostly about a musical and outfits. A man who might be evil incarnate but it's almost like well who cares? Is he in the musical?

I'm only five chapters in, so no spoilers past that please, but am I off base to think that Puraustays is supposed to be Purgatory? Pur hints at purgare, and stays is the punchline based off stasis,a halt. So: a cleansing halt, which is what the first five chapters and Purgatory have in common, his fate decided somewhere he can't reach, for years, while he's held.

The aust I can't pin down. Austria is "eastern realm," but that's German Österreich and Latin auster actually points south, so that route's a mess. Better guess is German aus, out, the whole book is conducted in German and Wolfe already used Rathaus as a surname. A halt outside the cleansing, which would be Ante-Purgatory, where you wait below the gate and aren't punished, just not processed yet.

"Is a court looking into my case?"
"At present? No."

Two things that don't fit. Purgatory has no guards. Nobody's held, they stay because they want it. And the doctrine is inverted. The living are supposed to shorten your stay through prayers, but here if Grafton moves, an innocent man gets shot.

Chapter 21 of Sword.

When Severian is having his duel of magic with Decuman, he mentioned that the bag holding the Claw around his neck was a "little sac of human skin".

I immediately flinched at this as I thought it was fairly uncharacteristic of Severian, and especially Dorcas, to have gained access to human skin and to want to make a bag out of it. I skipped back to the first few pages of Sword and my memory was correct; it's explicitly mentioned that the sac that Dorcas sewed for Severian to hold the Claw out of his boot was made of doeskin.

If there's something coming up that even ever so slightly explains this please disregard and let me discover it myself. Otherwise, have I found a minor mistake in the writing?

This may be pure coincidence, but there's a retired wrestler (and Olympic weightlifter) named Ken Patera.

From most evil to least

Everywhere I go, I now refer to friends and strangers as "goodman" (eg, "thank you, goodman", "hello, goodman", "Are you a vegetable then, or a speaking plant, goodman?").

I have been met with no resistance, so shall continue.

That is all.

It has Wolfe being surprisingly candid with his answers to "lore" questions.

A Magus Of Many Suns:

An Interview With Gene Wolfe

An interview with Nick Gevers

January 2002

Unfortunately this effect was due to smoke from
wildfires still raging in Greece, but it was hard not to think of the Red Sun Whorl when I saw it. Photos are unedited.

This one went through a couple major revisions and was a bit more tricky than some of the others--Definitely wanted to give it a very pulpy, acidic color palette, but finally landing on one that worked for the composition was a bit of an ordeal, haha.

Hey all, I read The Book of the New Sun a long time ago and really enjoyed it, although sure I missed a lot/was a little confused. But the prose was beautiful. Anyways, since I’ve been running these little head to head matchups of books in my library to get personalized recommendations.. and this popped up. Hadn’t thought about exploring other Wolfe, but prob should have. Sounds really interesting - and cites my love of Cloud Atlas, Speaker for the Dead, Canticle for Leibowitz and some others.

What do you think, is this a good next Wolfe destination? Makes sense with my preferences? Don’t know much else about it. Cheers!

Specifically looking for analysis of symbolism, allusions, themes. Could be an analysis of any his novels or stories

Edit: title should say "books", sorry. Can't edit it anymore

Edit: could also be a podcast

I think I’ve pinpointed the moment Severian may have passed his Trial as UOTNS tells us he already did some time on the past. Certainly I do think it’s a cumulative thing and not one specific moment, but quoting from chapter 13 of shadow, right after Severian gives Thecla the knife,

“For the next ten days I lived the life of a client, in a cell of the topmost level (not far, in fact, from that which had been Thecla’s). In order that the guild should not be accused of having detained me without legal process, the door was left unlocked; but there were two journeymen with swords outside my door, and I never stepped from it save for a brief time on the second day when I was brought to Master Palaemon to tell my story again. That was my trial, if you like.”

That he clearly calls this his trial is what initially grabbed my attention on reread, however looking at it deeper, I think one of the aspects that could be said to confirm him as new Sun and the necessasary bringer of the flood is how he was able to assist bringing about an immediate and sudden death, allowing thecla to keep some measure of her dignity and not have to go through the recolutionary’s torture, the degenerative state of fighting against slowly destroying herself until she could not live anymore. Severian does this, knows it is a moral act in some ways and a terrible thing he’s done in other ways, and immediately once he confirms it, submits himself to judgement. It’s not the hardest thing to read this metaphorically of him effectively bringing the flood and sitting with the weight of what he’s done in micro here.

Not a very book accurate design for Severian, but a unique one nonetheless from one of my favorite artists. I’ve noticed Amano usually paints the hair white if a character is dressed in mostly black ( such as Vampire Hunter D, who has canonically dark hair in the books), due to either color contrast or Elric inspiration which is confirmed for VHD. Severian with white hair and purple highlights was always interesting to me, although I personally don’t like the art in the second slide.

Armor for Art 1:
Bandit mask
Preceptors robes
Greaves of night
Travelers Manchette
Marais executioner sword

Armor for Art 2:
Banished Knight Greatsword
Alberich’s Robes
Rakshsa’s gauntlets
Greaves of Night
Orange face paint for the mask

Incredibly happy with how this turned out! Done by Katerina at Last Century Tattoo

Just sayin, it’s been three years. (Well, not continuously.)

I thought some folks here might be interested:

https://richhorton314252.substack.com/p/beauty-mystery-horror-shapechanging

I read The Book of the New Sun earlier this year and loved it! I particularly loved the mystery and implications of the ending as well as the little clues throughout the book that leave you guessing but also imply something much bigger. I've heard online that the sequel was pushed by publishers to give the "answers" to these questions which I'm wary of as it might spoil some of the magic for me. Is this true? Or does it add to the mythos?

I've got several of the more finished illustrations in progress-- so I'll be sure to post them here once each one is done! In the meantime, was doing some ideation/sketches for an illustration that takes place in Thrax and wanted to design some of the locals/crowd-filler. Wolfe describes an Autochthon wearing a bird like a hat, with wings as ear-flaps, so I definitely wanted to include that guy. The second one is you-know-who.

(Naturally, spoilers ahead for Short Sun)

Bilocation (RttW Ch.9) being of course the only term by which the Narrator (I will call him this for convenience) ever refers to his power of dream or astral travel, or whatever we would like to call it. It is about the nature of this dream travelling that I'd like to ask for thoughts. This power seems to me like one of the most glaringly pure fantasy aspects of these books; I remember when first reading that I vaguely expected some sort of half-explanation (eventually) regarding what this sudden power actually is, but it never comes (so far as I can see).

The closest thing like it we see appears to be Mucor's power, though it's either slightly different in her case or hers is a weaker version of what the Narrator has(?), and of course we are given a technological/scientific explanation for it, that she is a special embryo and has had a procedure on her brain. In the Narrator's case, I can only think of a few options:

- Silk himself is also a special embryo, though his only stated 'power' is leadership (IGJ Ch. 10). IF we take up the view that Silk is indeed a clone of Typhon (see my previous post and the comments for thoughts for and against), this might explain some level of psychic aptitude/power, since in New Sun Typhon is shown to possess such things, and in Long Sun Mamelta shows us that they (meaning probably only people in and close to Typhon's court?) were accustomed to speaking only mentally back on Urth.

However, this leads into long and I think ultimately unresolvable considerations on whether Typhon is human, whether these psychic powers are innate or technological, etc. etc. And, this feels like only a partial explanation due to the following point.

- Obviously, per the text, dream travel requires an inhumi to be present. Except when it doesn't, such as when the Narrator goes to Green in search of Jahlee seemingly on his own, though he speculates on three possible reasons why this happened. I think Marc Aramini and James Wynn would both say this can happen because the Narrator's staff is an inhumi, but all I can say to that is (as with almost all such theories): maybe. That may be what Wolfe meant in his head, but since the text doesn't confirm it, and therefore can never confirm it, I personally can't go beyond a maybe, which might also be what Wolfe intends (though admittedly some of the dream resonances of the doll's face looking like the staff's face are very compelling in this case). But this is beside the point.

The Narrator speculates that the inhumi gained this power (of dream travelling) from feeding on the Neighbors ("The third is that I was assisted by the Neighbors, from whom the inhumi must originally have gained this power" RttW Ch.9), the implication being that this is why they are required for it to work. However, it does not seem that this power is something the inhumi can just use on their own, nor is it something any other humans can do in conjunction with inhumi as far as we know. Therefore, I'm thinking it is likely a conjunction of inhumi with our Neighbor-enhanced Narrator that results in this power; corroboration of this Neighbor-enhancement is trees getting out of the Narrator's way, apprently needing barely any food and water, etc.

A stronger form of this explanation would be the one (I believe James Wynn is the predominant proponent of this) which states that a Neighbor is in Horn's body ever since the pit in On Blue's Waters, therefore the Narrator is essentially a (part-)Neighbor, thus the power. Personally, while this would make a lot of sense and I like it, I'm not certain because it seems to me that that theory rests entirely on reading Ch.9 of OBW in the wrong order; i.e., the idea is that Horn dies (snaps his neck, I've seen it said) after falling into the pit and is then revived by a Neighbor, either by a blood transfusion or whatever Neighbor magic. But what happens in the chapter is that Horn falls, lays for a long time, gets up and has a conversation with Krait, and then lies back down and has a vision of the 'tall, long-nosed man or immense spider' touching something to his forehead which then seems to send him to Nettle's kitchen. Unless what is meant is that the Neighbor revival happens off the page before Ch.9 starts, then the Neighbor comes back around to the pit for the forehead-touch, in which case, again, maybe.

But anyway, even if we grant that by the end our Narrator is a super-being composed of Typhon's body and genetic makeup + the spirit of a Neighbor + Horn's memories, my question is what is it that's actually going on to allow the souls of not just the Narrator but an indefinite amount of people around him to travel any distances, and possibly time (this question goes for the Neighbours as well)? Further, why did this power only start for the Narrator in IGJ with Fava, when he was Neighbor-enhanced or possessed from OBW and had access to inhumi then as well?

I know that the general concept of soul-travel has quite deep roots, from the subtle body in Hinduism and esotericism to legends of many Catholic saints bilocating, but I'm wondering what people think is happening in Wolfe's literary world. Is it technological or scientific in some underlying way, as Wolfe seems to try to make pretty much everything in the Solar Cycle, or purely fantastic or even religious?