bryce0lynch

I've been working my way through the Nebula & Hugo award winning novels.

I just hit 'The Claw of the Conciliator' and I have to ask ... WTF?

Can someone explain the Why of this novel? I get the dying earth, and I'm a lifelong reader of real SciFi, so I generally get allegory, satire, and all the rest that comes with SciFi ... but I can't get what's going on in this novel. I understand what happens, but not the why.

Can someone explain?

Drop

Something that will turn many people off of The Book of the New Sun is that you won't fully understand it unless you read it twice.

It's also important to understand Severian is not reliable, in spite of his bragging about his memory he often appears to forget things, knowingly lie, or brush over big details.

There are lots of weird things going on in the book, and as much as it doesn't seem that way, everything in the book is relevant. It's a book to rack your brain over. You can read it and understand the plot, but without discovering the connections, often rereading passages and analyzing the action, it's going to feel like a lot of hype for nothing.

Having a dictionary handy as well as a large knowledge of classic literature will bring about a hell of lot more understanding. If at anytime you don't understand a term or reference, look it up. It could clear up so much confusion.

Dr. Mantle

The Claw of the Conciliator is the second volume of the Book of the New Sun. You need to start with The Shadow of the Torturer.

Drop

I didn't even see that. If he didn't read Torturer then he's has even more reason to be incredibly lost. I hope he did, though.

bryce0lynch

Nope, I had not. I was just reading the award winners. I got a lot of the background & backstory, I think.

The entire witch part at the end. The play ... so much of the story seems random & unconnected with the rest. Are you saying that reading the first volume would help explain the end, or the play?

benedict

It has been a while since I re-read the series so I'm just posting what I found in a few searches.

Cut and pasted from an online review, the following might be of interest: "Dr. Talos' play, described in the chapter entitled Eschatology and Genesis, contains much food for thought. It deals with the destruction of an old, exhausted world, and the creation of a new one, under a New Sun. Or is it instead about the redemption of both? Miracles, oblique and hidden in the first volume, become more noticeable now, though no less mysterious. Wolfe's Catholic vision of suffering and mercy, of sign and sacrament, gradually emerges from this remarkable story."

This suggests a need for reading Book One.

For the above reason I can't say for certain but maybe the witches bit at the end of Book Two will be elucidated in Book Three. Or Four. Or Five! Apparently, The Urth of The New Sun is said to shed more light on the earlier four books.

Josh-da-man

About five or six years ago I picked up all of the Book of the New Sun, Urth of the New Sun, Book of the Long Sun, and Book of the Short Sun titles, and they're still sitting on my bookshelf unread.

I'm a bit intimidated by them...

benedict

I found the Short Sun books to be the most complicated but so far have read the set but once.

Over the years I've read New Sun two or three times and Long Sun at least twice.

These days re-reading anything is a bit of a luxury but maybe I need to read the whole three series again!