Gene Wolfe
Page 11
The Solar Cycle
In the 1990s, Wolfe returned to the universe of the New Sun books in order to tell a different story in two linked series, set in a star system far away from that of Urth.
The Book of the Long Sun (1993-96) a four volume series (Nightside the Long Sun, Lake of the Long Sun, Caldé of the Long Sun, and Exodus from the Long Sun) set on a vast generational starship launched from Urth, long before Severian’s birth. The starship is a big cylinder housing an internal world, like a continent on the inside curve of a can. This tube-land is politically divided into isolated city-states, each one following a god or goddess from a pagan pantheon. The hero is a priest named Silk who is enlightened by a different god, the Outsider, and finds he must work with criminals in order to save his neighborhood church.
The Book of the Short Sun (1999-2001) a sequel to The Book of the Long Sun, this three volume series (On Blue’s Waters, In Green’s Jungles, and Return to the Whorl) is about the two colony worlds, named Blue and Green, settled by the starship dwellers. The story is about Horn, the author and publisher of The Book of the Long Sun, and his quest to find Silk, a journey that takes him across several worlds.
The Wizard Knight
The Wizard Knight (2004) is a two-book series, The Knight and The Wizard. Able, a boy from contemporary America, wakes up in a weird world of chivalric knights, marauding giants, and strange fairy creatures. Able learns how to be a chivalric knight through theory and practice, through hard knocks and failures, as Wolfe applies himself to the Norse mythology and romantic knighthood, once again taking the familiar and rendering it hauntingly alien and vibrant.
“Singleton” or secret companion?
Pirate Freedom (2007) is said to be a singleton, but I consider it to be a companion to The Wizard Knight. A dark companion, or shadow, if you will. Again, an American boy is dropped into an alien world. But Christopher is not dropped into an imaginary world of high chivalry; he is stranded in the historical Age of Pirates, a time of raw brutality. Rather than struggling to learn how to be a good knight, Chris must resist becoming the bloody pirate that the times require. All the sanitized and child-safe versions of piracy, from Treasure Island to the latest Disney movie, are quickly made to walk the plank. You will never look at pirate fiction the same way again.
Special Focus on The Book of the Long Sun
Although it is set in the New Sun universe, the Long Sun series is not in the relatively rare “dying sun” mode of science fantasy. It belongs to the much larger “generation starship” tradition, a subgenre of science fiction that has seen work by Robert A. Heinlein, Harry Harrison, and Brian Aldiss, to name just a few. What really sets it apart from the New Sun books is the style: rather than the baroque form of a decadent, quasi-medieval civilization, the Long Sun is written in the clean prose of an early 20th century Western civilization. Where the New Sun’s hero is the dark torturer Severian working his way up, the Long Sun’s hero is the sunny priest Silk who is working his way downward.
Silk becomes a detective similar to G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, and “Father Brown in Space” is an excellent first handle to use, not only for the mystery aspect, but also the style of narration. But Silk is not a Christian priest; he serves an imperial pagan pantheon that uses TV screens to address its worshipers. And he is not a lofty philosopher who never soils his hands; he is a butcher of animal sacrifice who reads their entrails for messages from the gods.
I have been reading Gene Wolfe’s work for almost thirty years, and yet I envy you. You are about to read a great work for the first time. It has the intrigue and combat of Operation ARES, with some of the ambiguity of Peace, and the mystery of The Devil in a Forest, all cast in an imagined techno-classical world of historical validity. If you like it enough to read it a second time, you will find that it rewards rereading.
So have fun reading, and should you decide to join the international community of Wolfe fandom, we will welcome you with open arms (and plenty of outrageous theories).
Japanese Lexicon for the New Sun
In the fall of 1987 I found myself with a new job in a rural town, where one Sunday I visited the local shopping mall, and there in a dump of used paperback books I found a copy of The Shadow of the Torturer. It was auspicious, I thought, to find an old friend in a new place, especially since it was a Japanese edition. But then again, I was living in Japan at the time.
To be clear, I couldn’t read Japanese very much at all, but I could spot the “Sci Fi” symbol on the book spines (a planet Saturn), and I could read the phonetic writing they use for foreign words and names, such that “Jiin Urufu” is Gene Wolfe.
I opened the book at random. (I should mention that Japanese books are “reverse” to Western standards — their front cover is where our back cover is. In addition to this, the text runs vertically, from top to bottom, from right to left.) So anyway, I opened the book and my eye alighted upon bits of phonetic writing contained within parenthesis — in other words, a parenthetical note on the text. I believe it was a gloss on “amschaspand.” (You were guessing it would be “graven.” That would have been neat, but no.) I flipped through the book and saw a few others, probably “Nilammon” among them.
“Ah-ha,” I thought to myself. “How clever! They have taken notes from Wolfe’s article ‘Words Weird and Wonderful’ in The Castle of the Otter and incorporated them as footnotes. I’ll bet they don’t have any such notes in later volumes.”
I bought the book (for 250 yen, about $2 then and now) but didn’t search out the others during my two years living there. I brought the book back with me to the States and it remained a curio as I embarked on writing my Lexicon.
Nineteen years later I returned to Japan for a summer job, and it seemed like an opportunity to fill out my set of the Japanese edition, so I did. Contrary to my earlier theory, the other volumes did in fact have word glosses. This meant that it wasn’t the easy thing I had thought it was, and that the Japanese translators had, in effect, worked up their own lexicon!
This long-winded and self-aggrandizing introduction is just a prelude to the real thing, the wordlist of the Japanese lexicon for The Book of the New Sun. One strategy would be to spread the WWW glosses out among all four volumes, but that does not seem to be the case here — it looks like the translator did most of the work himself, only asking Wolfe directly about two chapters in the fourth volume.
In annotating the words, I trace some to the words defined in the appendix to volume II (marked *), many to “Words Weird and Wonderful” (marked †), and a few to words defined in other articles in Castle of the Otter (marked ‡)
Volume I (68 notes)
1. League (measurement) *
2. Exultant †
3. Amschaspand †
4. Arctother †
5. Erebus ‡
6. Matachin tower †
7. Cubit (measurement) *
8. Saros (“period of 6,600 days,” i.e., the modern sense of the word. Here the translator made an error, since I believe the ancient sense of the word is required at this spot.)
9. Urth †
10. Cacogen †
11. Chain (measurement) *
12. Minim (measurement) †
13. Half-boot (torture)
14. Ophicleide †
15. Diatryma †
16. Thylacodon †
17. Triskele †
18. Glyptodon †
19. Smilodon †
20. Nilammon
21. Megatherians
22. Graven
23. Drachma
24. Ell (measurement) †
25. Saffron
26. Pantocrator †
27. Hypostases †
28. Quadrille (card game)
29. Urticate †
30. Salpinx †
31. Bordereau †
32. Cabochon emerald †
33. Omophagist †
34. Span (measurement) *
35. Moira †
36
. Stride (measurement) *
37. Externs †
38. Ophicleide †
39. Ascians †
40. Baldy
41. Paduasoy †
42. Balmacaan †
43. Surtouts †
44. Dolman †
45. Jerkin †
46. Jelab †
47. Capote †
48. Smock
49. Cymar †
50. Onager †
51. Dulcimer †
52. Lamia †
53. Hesperorn †
54. Oreodont †
55. Cloisonné
56. Fearnought
57. Simar †
58. Succubus †
59. Abacination †
60. Defenestration †
61. Estrapade †
62. Burginot †
63. Verthandi †
64. Coal Sack Nebula
65. Alzabo †
66. Merychip †
67. Teratornis †
68. Pandour †
The article “Words Weird and Wonderful” has around 230 entries for unusual words found in The Shadow of the Torturer. The Japanese edition of The Shadow of the Torturer gives around 68 glosses. So there are less than a third of those given in “Words Weird and Wonderful.”
Volume II (23 notes)
1. Scylla
2. Demiurge
3. Baluchither
4. Kestrel
5. Phorusrhacos
6. Tribade
7. Hierodule
8. Notule
9. Jennet
10. (A note to explain that the White Knight bit mentioned by Jonas in the antechamber is a quote from Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass.)
11. Faille (fabric)
12. Naviscaput
13. The three fates
14. Khaibit †
15. Megatherian
16. Capote †
17. Ushas
18. Petasos
19. Tyrian purple
20. Water moccasin (snake)
21. Eclectics (people who fold other cultures into their own — “this refers to Americans”!)
22. Glamour
23. Spelaeae
Volume III (25 notes)
1. Rosolio (wine)
2. Coronas lucis
3. Remontado
4. Sangria (wine)
5. Sanbenito
6. Sikinnis
7. Cuvee (wine)
8. Saros (“18 years,” which is about equal to the previous definition of 6,600 days.)
9. Barghest
10. Caloyer
11. (Re: old man in Casdoe’s cabin, Palaemon wears glasses.)
12. Notule (“message from Notus, God of South Winds”!)
13. Galleass
14. Gegenschein
15. Squanto
16. Verthandi
17. Amschaspand
18. Xebec
19. (Complication over English word “toadstool,” to explain the poisonous, loathsome aspect of something that looks like a yummy shitake mushroom.)
20. Pele tower
21. Hellebore
22. Skuld
23. Catamite
24. Logos
25. Estoc
Volume IV (31 notes)
1. Caitanya
2. Bowspirit
3. Narthex
4. Arsinoither
5. Apeiron
6. Schiavoni
7. Bushmaster (snake)
8. Anpiel
9. Merychip
10. Cherkaji
11. Coryphaeus
12. Cuir boli
13. Onager †
14. Phenocod
15. Ophicleide †
16. Ziggurat
17. Calotte (cap)
18. Ransieur
19. Uintathier
20. Platybelodon
21. Acarya (science)
22. Samru (King of Birds)
23. Jupe (female clothing)
24. Aquastor
25. Mandragora
26. Piquenaires
27. Pilani
28. Capote (cape, hood) †
29. Chechia
30. Lugsails
31. Pandour †
A summary of the numbers is in order, which calls for a table. The first column shows the total number of notes per volume, while the second column gives the number of those notes that appear to be from original research rather than being simply copied from The Castle of the Otter.
Total: Original
70: 13
23: 21
25: 24
31: 27
Volume I has the lion’s share of notes, nearly half of the 149 that is the total, and it also has the lowest percentage of original notes (18%). But in subsequent volumes the percentage of original notes is quite high, so that in the end there are 85 original notes, which amounts to 57% of the 149 total.
In fact I have no certain knowledge that the translator used The Castle of the Otter at all, it is just my long-held hunch. He might very well have done all the research on his own.
At the end of Volume IV, the Japanese translator gives three endnotes about a single sentence in chapter 38, specifically about the mysterious séance at the stone town. I’ll give the English sentence he is footnoting:
“I know now the identity of the man called Head of Day [1], and why Hildegrin, who was too near, perished when we met [2], and why the witches fled [3].”
Here are his endnotes:
1) “Head of Day” is one of Severian’s future shapes.
2) Hildegrin’s disappearance was caused by the energy released at the union of old and new Severians.
3) The witch was a member of the temple slaves, and realizing that she had interfered with a very important matter, she withdrew.
In addition, the translator writes that he got help from Gene Wolfe on chapters 37 and 38, and thanks him for that.
•
What is the moral of this story? “Every curio you collect has a deeper meaning that will come to you in the fullness of time”? Maybe.
It is funny, nearly haunting, that I thought the annotations to the Japanese edition of Volume I were a simple work of cribbing notes from “Words Weird and Wonderful,” when in fact it is not. I have no doubt that its presence in my collection, or my awareness of its existence, was another obscure milestone on my path to creating a Lexicon. Which is to say, years before Lexicon Urthus was even a twinkle in my eye, months before I had even laid eyes upon The Urth of the New Sun, my investigative gaze fell upon a narrow spine whose alien, angular letters proclaimed Jiin Urufu, so that I caught my breath, smiled, and said, “What have we here?”
What Gene Wolfe Expects of his Readers: The Urth of the New Sun as an Answer to Mysteries in The Book of the New Sun
The Urth of the New Sun (1987) offers the unique opportunity of showing exactly what we are up against in reading (or deciphering) a Gene Wolfe text. This coda to The Book of the New Sun (1980-83) answers many mysteries of the original tetralogy, but readers should bear in mind that it was not part of the original plan. In a 1990 essay beguilingly titled “Secrets of the Greeks,” Wolfe explains the origins of the fifth book:
I had an argument with David Hartwell over this last bit [the ending of The Citadel of the Autarch]. David felt that I should add one more paragraph saying, Okay, Severian went to the universe next door and borrowed the white hole and fixed the sun and everybody lived happily ever after. I, on the other hand ... felt that a paragraph wasn’t going to be enough. David and I yelled at each other for a while, but eventually came to an agreement. David would publish The Citadel of the Autarch exactly as I had written it, provided that I would write another book in which Severian recounted his trip to the universe next door [i.e., The Urth of the New Sun]. (Castle of Days, 416-17)
This paper seeks to outline the establishment of four mysteries (two major ones and two minor ones) in TBOTNS and their subsequent solution in Urth. I do not claim th
ese are the only mysteries solved, but I believe they provide different models for study.
Major Mysteries
Urth gives clear solutions to a number of major mysteries, including the link between Severian and two other men of widely separated posthistorical periods: the mausoleum builder from the Age of the Autarch (whose funereal bronze looks like Severian) and Apu Punchau from the Age of Myth (who looks like the funereal bronze of the mausoleum builder). In the course of TBOTNS it initially seems that Severian might be the third reincarnation of a man who had started as Apu Punchau and then reincarnated as the mausoleum builder — the cultural belief in reincarnation is established early in the text, when Master Gurloes says, “Doubtless I had acquired merit in a previous life, as I hope I have in this one” (I, chap. 7, 76). By the end of TBOTNS, however, Severian has a new theory of a “First Severian,” the original version of himself born in his time, a man who went to Yesod and returned as a time traveler, first building the mausoleum in the Age of the Autarch as a message to his younger self (our narrator Severian), then traveling back to the dawn time to become Apu Punchau, ultimately dying in the time-fight against Hildegrin (II, chap. 31).
In Urth both theories are combined and refined, despite the seeming paradoxes. It is plain that Severian will become not only Apu Punchau and the mausoleum builder, but also the Conciliator himself, as well as the New Sun, and even the Sleeper of Ushas. At the same time, Severian is shedding versions of himself, such that he is not, nor will he ever become, the same Apu Punchau who rises from the dead, fights against Hildegrin, and implodes in TBOTNS. This Apu Punchau has a separate life, a different adventure. (Between his rising from the dead and his final implosion, we know of this separate Apu’s career as a vivimancer in the stone town, which apparently leads to an encounter with the pelerines at some point, witnessed by his having one of their capes — an artifact he leaves with Severian just before imploding.) So rather than being reincarnations that imply spiritual continuity across linear birth-death cycles, the iterations of Severian are exposed as being time-traveling slivers of himself. Thus Severian becomes like the First Severian in taking actions that affect his younger self, but he remains forever unlike the First Severian in that the First Severian is still shaping him.
Urth also delivers an unambiguous answer to a major mystery that was probably not even recognized as a mystery by most readers — the relation of New Sun and the deluge. In at least seven points in TBOTNS, Severian has intimations of deluge, the most emblematic case being voiced on the ride in a howdah through a stately forest, on the way to meet Vodalus: “I feel now that I’m traveling through the Citadel in a flood, solemnly rowed” (II, chap. 9, 76). Urth shows that the arrival of the white fountain in Urth’s solar system causes gravity waves to trigger a literal deluge. At the end of his guilt-wracked survey of the destruction, Severian enters the water and re-enacts the vision quoted above: