by Gene Wolfe
From the top of the ramp he looked back and saw them go, their glasses crashing to the flagstoned paths and brick paved patios, their cigarettes dropping like poisoned fireflies.
“I loved you,” the girl said. “Or at least I liked you. You’ll be gone in a moment and I can’t even ask you to kiss me, because I’m going to be sick.”
“We’re still here,” John Edward told her, “both of us.” And she was gone.
He walked down the ramp and into his apartment, stamping out every cigarette he saw. Sunshine was making hard shadows on the walls, and the airship vanished like mist. “Mr. Richbastard,” he said to himself. “I wonder how much all those tulpas cost me.”
The garden vanished, and the walls of the apartment rushed in, growing dirty as they came. He sat up. His head was splitting, and he thought that he was going to be sick to his stomach. The book was still propped open on his dresser where he had left it. His eyes were too gummy to read the print, but he remembered it: “Repeat, ‘I am the sound of an owl’s wings, the heartbeat of a banyan tree.’” He closed the book, and noticed that the hair on the back of his hand was gray; tried to remember how old he really was, then made himself stop.
In the next apartment the washing machine said: “Sun-where, sun-where, sun-where,” then “sunspots destroy tulpas,” as it switched to Rinse.
“By the Lord Harry,” John Edward said, “in a day or so—when I’m feeling better—I’m going to do that again.” Then he vanished. I was tired of him, anyhow. (I’m getting tired of all of you.)
II.
THE CASTLE OF THE OTTER
A BOOK ABOUT THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN
This book is dedicated to Charles N. Brown and the staff of Locus. And to Borry Molesberg, with respect and affection.
“You know the place where the old fort used to be, in bygone days before they built the bridge?”
“I know it well,” said the Mole. “But why should Otter choose to watch there?”
—KENNETH GRAHAME, The Wind in the Willows
The Feast of Saint Catherine
When a writer has the gall to do an entire book, even a very small one, about the writing of a previous book, it’s more or less customary for him to announce that he’s acting in response to innumerable and insistent demands. Unfortunately, I’m not. Mark J. McGarry asked me how I came to write The Book of the New Sun, and my answer, “Helioscope,” is the next piece in this collection. Bob Garcia asked a similar question, but I never got around to writing the article he wanted. I can’t recall anyone else who showed much interest.
Why do it, then? Out of a sort of blind optimism. Every writer worth his two-cents-a-word hopes, in some little corner of his mind at least, that somewhere out there, there are a few people who will do more than read his book, pitch it away, and reach for the next one—people who will read and reread, study the cover, perhaps, in search of some clue, shelve the book and later take it out again, just to hold. There was a time when I could put the palm of my hand flat on the front of a tattered paperback called The Dying Earth and feel the magic seeping through the cardboard: Turjan of Miir, Liane the Wayfarer, T’sais, Chun the Unavoidable. Nobody I knew had so much as heard of that book, but I knew it was the finest book in the world.
In the first volume of The Book of the New Sun, the old librarian, Master Ultan, says, “Such a child eventually discovers, on some low but obscure shelf, The Book of Gold. You have never seen this book, and you will never see it, being past the age at which it is met.”
“It must be very beautiful,” says Severian.
“It is indeed. Unless my memory betrays me, the cover is of black buckram, considerably faded at the spine. Several of the signatures are coming out, and certain of the plates have been taken. But it is a remarkably lovely book. I wish that I might find it again …”
And in the fourth volume, Severian muses, “Perhaps I have contrived for someone The Book of Gold.”
In all modesty, I think we have, Severian and I. Perhaps not for any great number of persons, but for a few. Even authors get a certain amount of fan mail; and not all the writers of those letters are angry with me, though some are. A few days ago, a boy of about 15 (Why shouldn’t he get his name in a book? His name is Raymond Vigil) asked me if he could buy a copy of the second volume, The Claw of the Conciliator. When I told him it was almost thirteen dollars, his face fell. He didn’t have that much. But he said, “The way you ended that last one …” Of course, authors have to take care of Number One, just like everybody else; so I didn’t give him a copy. I lent him a copy. I am pleased to say that he has not yet returned it. (Then too, when I did a gig recently at the Chicago Public Library, a very good-looking young woman—if I knew her name, it would be here too—came up with a copy of Claw to be signed, and said, “Will there only be four in the series?”)
So you see.
And the next best thing to The Book of Gold is a book about The Book of Gold. If The Book of the New Sun is The Book of Gold for you, then that is what you are holding in your hands, a book about it. It will concern itself with the writing of The Book of the New Sun, and the world of that book, and what has happened now that the book is written, just as if those were serious matters. And if The Book of the New Sun is The Book of Gold for just one reader, why they are.
This essay is called “The Feast of Saint Catherine” because I began it with the excellent idea of beginning at the beginning, and that was the way I began The Book of the New Sun—“The Feast of Saint Catherine” was to have been its title. But even before beginning at the beginning, it’s wise sometimes to stop and have a look around. So let me describe things as they stand right now, at the moment I am writing these lines. Then you’ll understand my viewpoint as you read the rest of this book.
The first two volumes, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, have been bought and published—Shadow in both hard and soft cover, Claw in hardcover only. The third volume, The Sword of the Lictor, has been bought too, but not published; I have been told that hardcover publication is planned for January 1982. The fourth volume, The Citadel of the Autarch, is still in manuscript—I’m a little better than half through the fifth revision.
In a later essay, I plan to cover all this material in more detail. (Some of you might like to know just who bought those books and told me about the publishing schedule.) But this seems a good place and indeed a necessary place in which to deal with one other point concerning the writing. It has frequently been reported that I finished all four volumes before submitting the first to a publisher. In fact, I’ve been warmly applauded in print for having done so. Unfortunately, it’s not strictly true. What I actually did was to wait until I had all four in second draft before doing the final drafts of the first and submitting it. I did not do that for reasons of admirable idealism; I did it because I wanted to be able to adjust the plot of the first volume in order to make the last end as I thought it should. When the first volume sold I began the third draft of the second.
And now we are come, by a path admittedly convoluted, to the Feast of Saint Catherine.
If you have read Shadow, you know that Saint Catherine is the patroness of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, who use the slightly eccentric spelling Katharine and call her Holy rather than Saint. (While I’m on the subject of these names and titles, perhaps I should point out that the Seekers are informally called the guild of torturers—not, please, the Guild of Torturers, since that is not their real name.) Holy and saint have the same radical meaning, of course: sacred. Katharine is merely the Germanic spelling of Catherine, a name originally Greek.
Saint Catherine, more precisely Saint Catherine of Alexandria, was probably an actual person. If so, she was born about 1600 years ago and lived in Egypt, then a part of the Roman Empire. She is reputed to have come from an aristocratic family, which seems likely since she is said to have bested fifty philosophers at her trial—she must have been a brilliant woman who had received a first-rate classical e
ducation. (In that period, though we refer to it as classical, education did not consist of the study of dead languages, but of rhetoric, which we call public speaking, philosophy, and what we would call engineering. It was intended to fit the student for a career in public life. The Roman State endured in various forms for about 2200 years.)
She was also a protester. She protested Maxentius’s treatment of Christians, and was sentenced to die (we would say be put to sleep) on a spiked wheel. It broke—mechanical failures of the means of execution are astoundingly common—and she was decapitated instead. Legend has it that the wheel not only broke, but broke out in roses; the firework called a catherine wheel commemorates their blazing reds, yellows, and whites. Like Joan of Arc and Thomas More, Catherine is reported to have forgiven her executioner.
The legends surrounding Catherine’s death supplied the raw material for Chapter XI of Shadow. But wait, as Dr. Talos would say, there’s more. As I indicated a page or so back, “The Feast of Saint Catherine” was to have been the title of what became The Book of the New Sun. If the story had followed the original plot, it would have gone something like this:
Severian, an apprentice torturer, meets a lovely prisoner, Thecla, and falls in love with her. He becomes a journeyman (on the feast of Saint Catherine, of course) but continues their relationship. Eventually, she pleads with him for the means of suicide, and he leaves a knife in her cell. When he sees blood seeping from under her cell door, he confesses what he has done.
Eventually (note the lacuna) he becomes a master of the guild. Everything is secure. The guild has been forced to forgive him, and he has almost forgiven himself. Then he receives a letter from Thecla. The suicide was a trick, permitting her to be freed unobtrusively. Soon she will be exonerated and restored to her former position in society. She says that she still loves him, though it may be that she only feels guilty about using him as she did. She invites him to join her.
What is he to do?
As an honest man and a patriot—and he is both—he should denounce the whole affair; but if he does so, he will be disgraced again, the guild will be disgraced, and Thecla will almost certainly die. If he does as she asks, he will be reunited with her; but he will be a pariah (he is now powerful and respected within his own little sphere), and he may well make her a pariah too, in which case she will probably come to hate him. If he simply burns her letter and ignores her, she will only come to hate him much sooner, and she will be in a position to exert great political influence, and to blackmail the other masters of the guild as well. (Needless to say, I had a solution—but I will leave it as an exercise for the reader.)
That was to be the story, and as the early chapters of Shadow will show, I began to write it. I intended it as a novella of about 40,000 words, and hoped to sell it to Damon Knight’s now defunct and always sadly underrated original anthology series, Orbit. Soon, however, I found that my plot presented serious difficulties. How was Severian to be punished by the guild for his breach of faith? How was he to become a Master? How could the discovery that Thecla was still alive be saved from crashing anticlimax?
Worst of all, I came to feel that I was throwing away a fictional world that deserved much more extended treatment. I decided to expand my story into a novel. It seemed like a daring decision at the time, but once it was made, I pretty easily came up with answers to my three questions. Severian would be exiled, which would permit me to show something of the world outside the Citadel. In his wanderings, he would gain power that would permit him to force the guild to accept him again and make him a Master. It would develop that Thecla was in fact dead—the letter was a ruse perpetrated by someone else. Great. Everything looked rosy. I could write my book.
When ideas, characters, and so forth will not come, or are not good enough when they do, the writer has a problem. But when they’re too good and too numerous, he has another. I finished my book and discovered that Severian was hardly started. Instead of winding up my plot, I had begun half a dozen others. Severian was not more surprised by the sudden appearance of Dorcas than I was. Roses have a way of cropping up in my stories whether I plant them there or not, and from the earliest chapters they sprouted from the creviced walls of Nessus.
“All Pergamum is covered with rose bushes; even its ruins have perished.”
It would be necessary to work out the symbolism, end the mysteries. But all that required still more space.
Very well, I’d write a trilogy.
I did, finishing (the first draft) with a sigh of exhaustion that shook my soul. There remained one small problem. I had, as is customary, divided my trilogy into three books. And the third was nearly as long as the first two combined.
Although I hadn’t shown anyone my work, my agent, Virginia Kidd, was aware of it. She, in turn, had made David Hartwell aware of it. I now asked her to ask him what he thought of a trilogy with a very long third volume.
She softened it, but I suspect his reply was unprintable. (I know, you think nothing’s unprintable now. Try telling your editor that your next must be in purple.)
Unwilling to cut tens of thousands of words from an existing manuscript, and unsure of my ability to do it without wrecking the story, I suggested dividing that last, fat volume and producing a tetralogy instead of the commonplace trilogy.
Quick as a wink, the answer flashed back from New York. (Answers that flash from New York take about four weeks; I’d hate to tell you how long it takes the dawdlers.) Fine.
I split the fat volume with a mighty blow and discovered I now had two slender—indeed, too slender—volumes instead.
Things could have been worse, however. As luck would have it, there had been a pretty good episode in the middle of the old, fat volume; it became the climax of the third volume. There were unresolved points that I now had room to work out, and when I had worked them through, the third and fourth books were almost exactly as long as the first and second.
Some wise man once said that if the Golden Gate Bridge grew, and painted itself, and produced little culverts, we would have to consider it alive. Much earlier in this inexcusably discursive introduction, I speculated that at least for someone I might have written The Book of Gold. Now I would like to suggest that perhaps The Book of Gold wrote itself. No doubt The Book of Gold always does. The Book of the New Sun has now even had a child, midwifed by Mark Ziesing. The kind of people who call themselves realists because they are besotted with one particular unreality will deny that a book can live. But then living books have never been for them. Perhaps we lean too much on parallels with biology. Perhaps the true test of the life of books is their denial by such people. Maxentius denied Catherine of Alexandria, and by so doing brought into existence something else.
Helioscope
(REPRINTED FROM EMPIRE)
With admirable concision, you ask, “What caused you to write The Book of the New Sun, and how were you able to do it?”
Obviously, those are two questions sharing a single mark; and obviously too, both can be answered on a number of different levels. I might, for example, answer, “Free will. And I own a typewriter.” But I think your readers might be impatient with both those replies.
I’ve written repeatedly—several times, I suspect, in Empire—that even a very short story normally requires more than a single idea; and that anything longer (say, over 25,000 words) is almost certain to fail unless it stands upon at least two impulses, or inspirations, or whatever you want to call them. I keep repeating this because I think it is true and important. So what I’m going to do here is list all the initial impulses I still recall more than five years after starting work.
To begin, I had the urge to do something big. For years before I began reading sf as you and I understand that term (with The Pocket Book of Science Fiction), I had been following Flash Gordon’s adventures on the immense planet Mongo; and as a result I was often irritated (as I still am) when I discovered a writer assuming a single, simple, uniform culture covering an entire world. Except for
instances in which livable area is small—essentially, one island—and those in which there is a very limited population possessing a high technology, I find this both incredible and boring (a poor but only too possible combination). I wanted to show an entire society: one I could attempt to make plausibly complex.
Second, I wanted to show a young man approaching war. As a college dropout, I had been drafted for the Korean War. I very vividly recalled the slow progression from civilian life, when my parents and I assumed I would not be drafted at all, to the moment when I heard the big guns in the distance. When I read The Red Badge of Courage, I found a story of a similar type (basic training to battle in that case) and I wanted to try one myself with an sf setting. These two impulses were not only not contradictory, but were actually reinforcing; I could show my protagonist slowly drawn into battle as though into a vortex, and passing through his society on the way.
Along about this time, I attended a convention panel on costume. (As I recall, I only went because I had been talking to Bob Tucker, who was the guest of honor at whatever convention it was. Bob felt obliged to go for some reason, and asked me to go with him.) The only panelists I can remember by name were Carol Resnick and Sandra Miesel. As I sat there being instructed in how to win a masquerade, something I was not at all eager to do, I began to sulk over the fact that none of my characters—as far as I was aware, at least—had ever been assumed by a masquer. That, of course, suggested thinking up characters who would lend themselves well to the game—characters who would wear simple, dramatic clothes. One of these was a torturer: black trousers, black boots, bare chest, black mask.
This dark figure, the personification of pain and death, clearly carries a great deal of emotional impact; but it is not always easy to see what such an impact is. At that time, I had not yet read The Magus, so the thought cannot have come from there, though it is to be found there; but from whatever source, I was conscious of the horror not only of being tortured or executed, but of being forced to be a torturer or executioner. It is a staple of Ag-school agnosticism to say that the existence of pain “disproves” or at least argues against the existence of God. For some time, it has seemed to me that it would be even easier to maintain the position that pain proves or tends to prove God’s reality.