On Paths Unknown discussion
GENE WOLFE'S THE NEW SUN
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Discussion: Chapters 3 through 10
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Traveller wrote: "So the society we are dealing with in the story, is far from being an egalitarian society as we might have expected the future to be 40 years ago when the book was written; ."I was alive and reading science fiction 40 years ago, and outside of "Star Trek", I don't recall many serious writers, especially someone conversant with history such as Wolfe, expecting an egalitarian society to be the inevitable future. Quite the opposite. Current "wokeness" has nothing to do with it, historical realities do.
The Byzantine empire was a large influence on Wolfe's society. As happens with all 'great' societies, I think what we're seeing is an empire in decline; with entrenched, out of touch rulers and institutions, and growing civil unrest (as represented by the Vodalarii.) There is war with the Ascians in the north as well. And (I say this with no recollection of how the war plays out in this series), an outside force can be the coup de grace for a teetering empire.
Mod
Well, much of science fiction back then was either Space Opera, or somehow set in an interplanetary future, so in that sense one can also say that Wolfe forecast technical decay to whatever extent the world of the story deals with where Severian finds himself at the start. Though it seems true to me that perhaps just swathes of certain populations in this story are apparently technologically naive and therefore saw any technology as akin to "magic"? I'd have to read more to see how that plays out for me in this re-read where I'll have my eyes open to all the possibilities. (view spoiler)
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You are right- Wolfe is actually a serious writer, though he hasn't really received much recognition for being one, (beyond the recognition of him being allusive AND elusive), (he's actually quite Borgian, and he probably comes close to Umberto Eco in his allusiveness), but yes, if we're looking at 'serious' writers along the lines of Orwell, Zamyatin, Huxley and the likes, we certainly -did- see more dystopias than utopias, though I kinda feel that those writers dealt with the near future, none of them went as far into the future as Wolfe did; -in fact I actually find him being pretty upbeat in the sense that he believes humanity would still be around, but of course, nothing prevents Wolfe from using creative licence in creating his own brand of smoke-and-mirrors pseudo fantasy which makes his writing so fascinating.
Whitney wrote: "The Byzantine empire was a large influence on Wolfe's society..."
I was aware that he delves into antiquity quite a bit with many of his writings - for example Roman antiquity in Latro in the Mist. I was not aware that it was specifically the Byzantine empire with Shadow. (view spoiler)
For the record any (view spoiler) I felt that Severian did not like the lilies simply because he almost drowned and had a crazy vision that he doesn't understand, perhaps some things can be that simple. At least I would like some things to be that simple.
In my first read I completley missed that this was a future Earth. But is it really Earth ? Or a earth like planet, hence the crashed space ship. I am not remembering a description of the sky so far, but I feel like something was off....now have to check.
Also we are all finding different and unusual words that grab us. I like that.
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Also we are all finding different and unusual words that grab us. I like that..."
It is fun, isn't it, Jennifer? I can't remember if you read that Umberto Eco along with us where Eco also played with clues and references - oh that was a separate group, but anyway, it's like Wolfe toys a bit with his readers - he's playing with our minds, and it's rather fun!
Has anybody around here read The Fifth Head of Cerberus or The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories ?
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Wolfe makes a point to make it clear that sadists are not allowed in the guild - when someone voluntarily wants to join the guild, they are refused entry; and all who belong were basically "born" into the guild, and so need to be brainwashed into doing the horrible things they do, since it is of course against any normal compassionate person's nature to hurt, kill and torture.
Part of the success of the brainwashing is that it starts while the boys are still very young: they are exposed to what the torturers do at a very young age already, so this must feel like a part of life for them. (Similar to how in a hunting culture, boys go along with the hunters to get them used to the idea, and girls help the mothers skin and clean the prey brought home for food.)
I find it interesting to see how they have brainwashed Severian - this is partly done with guild rituals, and by not seeing the 'clients' really as human beings but as the subjects of an 'honorable' job that the torturers supposedly have to fulfil with professionalism. Severian even thinks the torturers are kind when they'd only give him a thrashing and not worse.
Any thoughts?
Oh I have thoughts about the toture and that,but its early and I have to get ready for work. I shall report back . It will give ne chance to gather my thoughts. But aren't we all brainwashed to a degree?
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But aren't we all brainwashed to a degree..."
Indeed we are all brainwashed into our specific culture. And my current brainwashing makes me uncomfortable with what goes as acceptable in Severian's world, but of course Wolfe knows that. I'm just finding it interesting how he as a writer pulls that off.
As you, say, Jennifer, it is indeed perhaps a discussion we should have later on, but it is, in my opinion, in the meantime something worthwhile to keep an eye on while we read along.
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Anyway, so I looked up an 'Arctotherium', and it's a potentially huge stone-age bear, either roughly the size of a modern bear or larger. From Wikipedia:
" According to a 2009 study, the weight ranges for Arctotherium were calculated as follows- A. wingei at 51 kg-150 kg, A. vetustum at 102 kg-300 kg, A. tarijense at 135 kg-400 kg, A. bonariense between 171 kg-500 kg, and A. angustidens at 412 kg-1,200 kg"
...so even though Triskele was the smallest of the bodies lying on the trash heap, he wasn't exactly small.
This might also be a good place to note that Severian suspects, from his height and the shape of his nose and his coloring that he might be an exultant, a tall race of people mentioned in the story. To be fully transparent, I am a bit of a Wolfe fan and a few years back joined some online groups, where I saw it being suggested that the exultants were genetically engineered to be a superior breed of humanity, who became similar to aristocrats in the near past of our own world. This of course sets one off to wonder who Severian's parents were, and how they (or his mother at the very least) got to fall into the hands of the Torturers.
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...but anyway, I just wanted to add how strange it is that Severian's world seems full of images of Pleistocene (around 2.5 million years ago) animals, and that Severian actually recognizes what they look like and knows the terminology for them. ...but hold on, the Barylambda is an extinct genus of mammals found as fossils in deposits in North America in the late Paleocene Epoch (58.7 to 55.8 million years ago).
This can't be an accident; I don't think Wolfe would be sloppy enough to simply put that in for fun; but at this point I can't quite figure out why Severian knows about them, and why they feature so strongly. Perhaps the common denominator is that these animals are now extinct?
Is Wolfe perhaps suggesting that extinct animals were genetically engineered and bred again? If so, that would certainly fit in with his death and rebirth theme.
Traveller wrote: "Jennifer wrote: "Oh I have thoughts about the toture and that,but its early and I have to get ready for work. I shall report back . It will give ne chance to gather my thoughts. But aren't we all..."
So the question of torture: Torture has been with us humans since forever I feel, to one degree or another and I think there are truly varying types and degrees of torture. I mean, we have torture in war, torture of political prisoners, torture of a partner, and so on.
So far our expierence with torture in this book has been with one client , it was not explicit and honestly I found the after care of the client to be , well caring. In defense of the Guild, it seems to have always been there, like the other guilds. Part of the society. I actually agree with the idea that women were too cruel. I like at least the appearence of their ethics.
I am not promoting torture, by any means. Lets seehow this all plays out.
Severian can't help where he is at. He was born there .
There is another torturer in a book, who I actually really like. I know I know, Glotka in The Blade Itself and in the rest of the series. He is a very complex character.
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As I mentioned before, I also like the fact that they take care not to enlist sadists who would actually enjoy torturing people and would therefore risk making the torture excessive. They do exactly just as much as they're supposed to, and then care for the patient after the torture or "excruciation" has been performed.
I've read a bit on now, and it's really notable how much all the non-torturers hate the Torturer's Guild. Perhaps being a kind of social outcast like this, even strengthens the guild members' ties and "feeling of belonging" with the guild.
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The girl from the tower that Severian spoke to, said of it, after Severian asked: " "Is that what you call it? The Atrium of Time? Because of the dials, I suppose."
"No, the dials were put there because we call it that."
To me, that sounds a bit like an exchange you'd find in Alice in Wonderland...
Traveller wrote: "Well, much of science fiction back then was either Space Opera, or somehow set in an interplanetary future..."You can go back much further than forty years, find serious/mature science fiction stories, and find very few even half as unabashedly positive about the future as Star Trek. I think you'd have to dig back to pre-World War II sci-fi to find a preponderance of optimism, but you'd find very few people who'd consider most of that stuff serious. H. G. Wells comes to mind as an exception, and.... his work wasn't terribly optimistic, that I've seen.
Wolfe isn't the least bit unusual in being pessimistic, I don't think. A lot of futurists were (and maybe some still are) optimistic, but the output of sci-fi writers usually isn't. Perhaps this is because "dark" stories are more interesting to read about, or write—certainly you don't have to look hard to find interviews where Star Trek writers complain about how it was hard to write stories about a quasi-idyllic future. Or maybe the likes of Wolfe knew something the futurists didn't. Probably a bit of both.
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Puddin Pointy-Toes wrote: "I think you'd have to dig back to pre-World War II sci-fi to find a preponderance of optimism, but you'd find very few people who'd consider most of that stuff serious. H. G. Wells comes to mind as an exception, and.... his work wasn't terribly optimistic, that I've seen. ..."
Ok, you've managed to flush an HG Wells fan out of the woodwork, Puddin, said fan being MOI!
Speaking of SF that involves extraterrestrials, of course there is HG Wells's famous The War of the Worlds first published in serial form in 1897.
I'll sock anybody in the eye who says HG Wells wasn't a serious writer! (Just joking, of course). I read many of his books as a prepubescent girl already, which is probably enough to qualify me as a fangurl, but even as we look back today, one has to marvel at how prophetic and prescient he was.
Of course the other, and probably most well-known, SF writer of the period was Jules Verne, who foresaw much of technology ripen before it actually came to pass.
These were not the very first in the genre, of course, one of their forerunners which quickly jumps to mind, was Edgar Allan Poe.
Want to say lots more but run out of time for now. More later!
Traveller wrote: "I was wondering when would be a good time to address the elephant in the room, being the horrible things that happen in the story itself. From the very start we are introduced to things that are taboo in our own society - meddling with whoever knows what in graveyards, but worse, the fact that the torturer's guild actually does executions and conducts torture, as we soon find out in Chapter 3."It's funny you mention the latter two as taboo, as executions (though increasingly unacceptable now) were on to the rise in the United States at the time this would have been written, after a brief moratorium in the mid 1970s. The usual method at the time (electrocution) was also grisly and could be extremely painful before death.
I'm also reminded how, twenty years ago, I watched Donald Rumsfeld trying to justify the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, and how torture was increasingly normalized in the media with the likes of 24. There it was ostensibly for gathering information, but Wolfe's torturers seem to be commissioned at least as much for punishment of the Autarch's enemies as for extracting information from them.
Severian's guild seems to me an example of normalizing and elevating an evil that is seen as inevitable (the cruelty and bloodlust of rulers) into the realm of nobility in order to limit the damage it can cause. Of course, long-term this can instead serve to legitimize and perpetuate something which has no place in an enlightened society.
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Puddin Pointy-Toes wrote: " The usual method at the time (electrocution) was also grisly and could be extremely painful before death."
Ugh, how could anyone who has ever watched the film adaptation of The Green Mile ever forget!
Yes, now we are starting to touch on the very hard ethical issues. I feel like whenever there's a war going with high stakes, there's perhaps always going to be torture of captured agents/soldiers for intel., and I'm not saying that to excuse it.
But as touched upon earlier, it does seem as if the torturer's guild are an instrument in the perpetuation of terror, much as the SS was for the Nazi's and the KGB for the Soviets. (And I'm definitely not saying these were the only people who ran a reign of terror via the use of fear of torture or pain of death - I'm sure that was a thing even before the Romans started doing it.)
I'd love to discuss this more in the context of Shadow, but I feel it might perhaps be a bit early to start discussing their political system, since at this point in the story we don't know much about it yet.
...and as you might remember from your previous reading, there will be ample time to discuss shenanigans with the dead later on.
I guess what the current discussion at this point boils down to for me, is whether torture can ever be justified, and if at all, where does one draw the line?
Of course, the whole execution thing is just as controversial. On the one hand, I am of course against execution because I pretend to be civilized, and yadda-yadda-yadda. (Also because I hate the suffering of people, and whether the life of a person can or should be taken, is another hard ethical nut to chew). However, I can see that in a society where imprisonment or containment of a person who is a danger to others, that in such a society the death sentence might make sense. I'm not saying that is the case in Severian's society, mind you.
I honestly have no idea what Chapter I am in, but we just had the Feast day. I am reading a little at a time, I find that there are no wasted words. I also keep thinking about Whitney talking about the Citadel and it being a space ship. It kinda blew my mind, I missed that and went back and reread a few chapters. And then thinking about the size of it and how its been just added onto over...centuries. I also then think about the Ships crew , you know the like the ships crew in Star Trek and how that could have became the basis for the Guild System ?? And then I wonder where the torturer guild
came from out of that.
Or maybe I am just in some fantasy and will get a wake up call moew chapters in.
Jennifer wrote: "It kinda blew my mind, I missed that and went back and reread a few chapters."I missed that, too, but I see the clues are everywhere if you look. I might have got there eventually, though as I did find the reference to a "propulsion chamber" odd, and the painting of (presumably) Neil Armstrong did seem to have some particular significance. I think the references to red brick making up most of the citadel led me down the wrong mental path. I'll have to keep an eye out for other hints.
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To just give a small idea of how big it is, in Chapter 4, where Severian talks about the dog Triskele, when he goes to look for him after he disappeared, he says: "The spear-towers of the Citadel rose on every side, so that I knew I had not left it - instead, I seemed to be somewhere near its heart, where I had never been. Shaking with cold I crossed to the nearest door and pounded on it. I had the feeling that I might wander forever in the tunnels below without ever finding another way to the surface, and I was resolved to smash one of the windows if need be rather than return that way.
Earlier on in the chapter: "The Citadel is immense and immensely complicated, with little-visited rooms and passages in its towers, in the buildings that have been erected between the towers, and in the galleries delved under them. "
This bit is just before he comes to the Atrium of Time that I mentioned in an earlier post: "I have no way of knowing how old those tunnels are. I suspect, though I can hardly say why, that they antedate the Citadel above them, ancient though it is. It comes to us from the very end of the age when the urge to flight, the outward urge that sought new suns not ours, remained, though the means to achieve that flight were sinking like dying fires. Remote as that time is, from which hardly one name is recalled, we still remember it. Before it there must have been another time, a time of burrowing, of the creation of dark galleries, that is now utterly forgotten.
So interestingly, what he seems to be describing when he talks about the tunnels that pre-date the spaceship hull of the citadel which rests upon these tunnels, the obsession with "burrowing into the ground" that he describes, I thought could possibly be a reference to mining, and possibly also fracking (the burrowing urge he mentions). (Which would be around our current era, ha ha.) Hmm, did they have fracking back in the 1980's? I see they did. The US started fracking in 1949, apparently.
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Bummer, it would have been fun if the earth was hollow, though I'm not too sure that we'd exist, then, because we wouldn't have gravity, and another downside would have been that we wouldn't have been able to make use of geothermal power. 😋
Puddin Pointy-Toes wrote: "Jennifer wrote: "It kinda blew my mind, I missed that and went back and reread a few chapters."I missed that, too, but I see the clues are everywhere if you look. I might have got there eventuall..."
I hope I didn't spoil anything, the hints are there and obvious but yet...not, if that makes sense. Its a jumbled. Like the Citadel. I did not make the coneection with the picture and Neil Armstong. I have to go back and find it.
Traveller wrote: "PS. ..and of course, since we'd started discussing SF history a bit higher up, I do have to make a mention of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth which, fun as the story m..."The idea of a hollow earth is fun. I love the old movie. :)
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Traveller wrote: "Has anybody moved on to the picture-cleaner and Ultan's library yet? (Chapters 5 and 6, where Severian has to go and take a letter to Ultan the library curator)."Yes ! I just find the whole journey to the library to be...surreal. Like Severain felt it was surreal. It was a whole new expiernce. The long hallway of the pictures. I could smell the ...mustiness of it.
On Paths Unknown
Books mentioned in this topic
Journey to the Center of the Earth (other topics)Journey to the Center of the Earth (other topics)
The Green Mile (other topics)
The War of the Worlds (other topics)
The Blade Itself (other topics)
More...
In the first 10 or so chapters, the foundation is laid for Severian's travels later on.
I'll be back soon to discuss more!
In the previous thread I made an observation that this story has overtones of a dystopia; it's pretty clear from the start of the series already that it's not taking place in a democracy, since so far in the story, we have seen signs of autocratic repression just from the fact that a torturer's guild exists and that there are soldiers to be found everywhere. It's also obviously not an egalitarian society - the discussion of which Whitney and I have continued with in this thread.