Controversial opinion but Obama didn’t fucking read Three Body Problem, and even if he did I would imagine his takeaway would just be something like “it’s a metaphor for how China is bad”
EDIT: this is a perspective you could glean from the dust cover!
This strategy is part of the reason these books are successful imo, because the abortive and conventionally unsatisfying narrative strands are important in making the reader disoriented and have to “work”, but not in the way of the genre’s typical ask (which is, usually, drink down a bunch of scif fi words/concepts/rules and then follow a narrative formed around this junk), and also helps make the unreliable narrator aspect at least in my imo less arch than it often can be, since the unreliable narrator is also kind of disinterested and withholding instead of acting as a more active authorial game.
So, overall, you get something like the sensation of reading forensically like you would Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example (BotNS isn’t that good of course just trying to make a point) where you know it’s not going to make “sense” bc it’s somewhat alien text that’s been part of a time/place/mind that we don’t quite have access to. And the books have a light touch in this too, which is key. The effective, but not quite convincing or all that serious authorial note from Wolfe about it being translated from a future language that doesnt exist yet has the right kind of levity. At least for me, personally, BotNS manages to elicit the best outcome of this strategy without stumbling into the kinds of things that always bum me out (being ostentatiously “clever”, doing a lot of rules I have to care about, etc).
I would love an example of this because I want to see if I agree or in fact I actually love ostentatious cleverness
no, not going to enable that sort of thing
Awwww come on buddy, it’s just little old me, you’re not enabling me to do anything too dastardly
Homeboy is talking about how the course of his life was predetermined because his mom asked his dad a dumb question, which cursed him, as a tiny little man, while he was still inside the sperm cell. This book rules already
I’m so happy you’re reading this. It’s the perfect fit.
I think it’s possible Obama didn’t read the book. I also think it’s possible he did and is just bad at talking about fiction.
I see a connection to the people take comments from Digital Foundry videos to form their own opinions comments. It takes practice to talk about fiction in a way that isn’t basic recap, hyping up, or cliche, even if someone has read and loved something. I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama had read the book, reached the “I’m going to talk about this book I read” part of the conversation, and defaulted to adjectives: imaginative, interesting, sweeping, immense scope.[1] The dude says he reads to escape; so he might well have read the book and still defaulted to the blurb or review he read that got him into the book in the first place.
As for Tristram Shandy, I’d describe him as ostentatiously clever, but it works because it’s the narrator’s persona, the approach pokes fun at that, and such a thing was not at the time overdone (it had, if I’m not mistaken, barely been done).
The Laurence Sterne book I want to return to is A Sentimental Journey. It’s a good follow-up to Tristram Shandy, as it’s doing a lot of the same things with narrator/author perspective and funny interactions within a more coherent plot: it’s a travel narrative.
[1] I used to do interview coaching for pre-med students. One kind of question we’d prep is the “Tell me about a book you read” question. There were miles of difference between the students who hadn’t read a book outside of class since high school and the students who were regular readers, but even the regular readers needed some prompting to elaborate on why they liked the book or what was interesting about it.
me
I think people are habituated to talk about things as from a like an economic perspective, when it would just be simpler and more productive for people just to describe what the experience of reading/watching/listening. Video games used to be the primary offender in making its audience mangle subjective aesthetic experiences into a consumer reports format, but I think it’s gotten more common in other media: I come across movie and tv reviews that talk about things like who had a “character arc” or what a particular work means in the context of a brand or genre, like people are grading these things like theyre homework assignments. It’s really strange. Probably some un-learning of this would be beneficial imo
This sounds great! @radicaledward has been putting his thoughts down, chapter by chapter seminar style, over on his substack, which has also piqued my interest.
I relate to your frustration with the genre trappings. I find I’m sometimes down for the ride, but increasingly I get bored with the conventional narrative strategies when the genre, or even the form/medium, has so much potential.
Right now I’m finishing up N.K. Jemison’s Broken Earth trilogy. I’ve found myself thinking I know what’s going to happen in the narrative, and then proven wrong. I think the author is more interested in her characters and themes she’s pulling from their life stories than she is about narrative fidelity or convention. I’ll have more thoughts once I finish the series.
@RubySunrise do you have the link to edward’s substack? it looks like they haven’t updated their profile to include it since the site move over.
i remember once reading a line that said “people often know more about the things they like than why they like them.” i used to think that line was pretty profound, but as i’ve gotten older i’m cooler toward that thought. i don’t know if it’s because i’m more lazy or just more stupid, but i find it harder to articulate the reason i like certain books. in fact, the more i like something, the more inclined i’m to just say “yeah that was really good.” of course, there are many posts i’ve made in this very thread that contradict that statement lol.
when i was in grad school, i published a few book reviews because i thought that was a good stepping stone into publishing fiction (results still to be determined). writing them was the most i ever needed to think about a book, especially because i wanted to appear intelligent and thoughtful in the reviews. i’m looking at some of them now, and despite being pretty exhaustive in length, i don’t remember a single thing about the books. they’re also kinda full of shit.
glad to see they’re still alive and kickin
This doesn’t quite work so far since in my view the close first-person voice too strongly invites personal involvement in what’s going on. I guess to your point that does allow a continued sense of disorientation as I am asked over and over to latch onto narrative devices (characters, locations) only to soon lose them, but I guess it’s making me feel like Wolfe is Lucy with a football—I can’t dispassionately regard the football and my missing the football as the point or any kind of aesthetic experience because I’m not some third person observer, I’m Charlie Brown. Despite what I said earlier, I enjoy when Severian/Wolfe hold the reader at arm’s length, my frustration (perhaps too strong a word) comes from how the form otherwise hews too closely to fantasy/sci-fi convention, e.g. Severian is too emotionally attached to the immediate action and characters in a given scene like a normal SFF protagonist.[1] I’m getting whiplash from jumping between these narrative modes, and I guess I would like it to commit more to one or the other. The first-person perspective in for example Moby-Dick is better at maintaining a sense of the impersonal (and is thereby more successful as a book) as Ishmael doesn’t go on at extreme length about junk that doesn’t matter like:
Not the right time to read Claw chapter 23, “Jolenta”!
Jolenta, I think, rebelled physically and psychically against any kind of work, and certainly against this. Those long legs, so slender below the knees, so rounded to bursting above them, were inadequate to bear much weight beyond that of her own body; her jutting breasts were in constant danger of having their nipples crushed between lumber or smeared with paint.
I … lifted her into the boat, putting my arm about a waist quite as slender as Dorcas’s.
…the uplifted petals gave her perfect complexion shade. It made me think of Agia…
Agia had no feature that was not inferior to Jolenta’s; she had been hardly taller than Dorcas, with hips over-wide and breasts that would have seemed meager beside Jolenta’s overflowing plenitude…
Jolenta’s desire was no more than the desire to be desired, so that I wished, not to comfort her loneliness as I had wished too comfort Valeria’s, nor to find expression for an aching love like the love I had felt for Thecla, nor to protect her as I wished to protect Dorcas; but to shame and punish her, to destroy her self-possession, to fill her eyes with tears and tear her hair as one burns the hair of corpses to torment the ghosts that have fled them.
I don’t object to Severian having these thoughts/being a horndog, but indulgent passages like this are too frequent, too long, and to my taste boring; they communicate little except that Severian is hot for the ladies, when there is so much other interesting stuff we could be exploring instead. I’ll keep reading and hopefully develop a more sophisticated perspective on this.
Stray observation: Severian/Wolfe bring up things and people from forty chapters ago as though I should have any memory of them (interesting, challenging), yet reminds us of the color of Severian’s cloak (and of what the name of the color means) at every opportunity (unsure why).
The first .epub I found of Shadow & Claw often referred to Dr. Talos as Dr. Tabs.
I forgot about this! Gonna go check it out
MoH does this mean you have not read the one and only Ursula K. Le Guin?
I can only hope this doesn’t sound like my trying to contort the book into a prefab genre box; strongly agree with the above about the language of economics infecting media criticism like a virus ↩︎
i’ve read leguin (left hand of darkness, the dispossessed, and a few short stories – honestly have loved everything i’ve read, not sure why i haven’t read more), pkd (the classics), some kim stanley robinson, and a lot of sf adjacent stuff (early kobo abe novels, those russian brothers).
fantasy has even less experience.
the reason why i said i’m scared of it is because it’s such a wide world and i’m afraid of the trial and error process i’d need in order to meet my particular taste (not necessarily saying it’s good taste) would be a long one with many false starts. always open to recs :)
I’m in a similar position as you I think, but even less experienced. I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by the intensely commercial/bad SFF and have only in the past few years begun investigating the “real stuff.” I have written down several titles and authors in reading this thread during the past couple years—it’s why I’m reading Book of the New Sun, which was first mentioned here in like 2021…
yeah, it’s hard because i have a distaste towards genre moonlighters, like the literary types who want to go slumming to “show them how it’s done” because i think most of that stuff is pretty bad. at the same time, i’m scared to go whole hog on the hard stuff because my taste has been pretty cultivated toward the “literary” for better or worse. leguin was great because the two books i read had everything i was looking for and more. pkd is just a freak and i will always read the freaks. there are likely others like samuel delaney who would also check my boxes, i just haven’t read them yet.
fantasy is even worse because from the small sampling i’ve done, the quality of writing on average is worse than sci-fi. i suppose i’m referring to more modern fantasy here, like game of thrones and such, but there is just a cadence, humor, and gravitas to the writing that’s too freakin epic for me. you find the same in bad crime writing. that’s why i’m hoping book of the new sun is a hit with me.
idk, I think this difference of opinion is one of the hazards of writing an opaque and intentionally misleading novel, and it’s hard to go into my reasoning for landing on a different opinion without detailing events in that last two novels. But some stuff happens that complicates what you’re perfectly reasonably taking from the narrative. One problem with the Moby-Dick comparison is that it’s not about Ishmael, whereas BotNS is about Severian, which is why he and his sometimes dumb personality are present in the narrative.
good joke lol
you’re probably to struggle with BotNS then. I mean I hate that stuff too, and those books were pushing it tbh. That’s primary reason I advised skipping Urth. But if you want to get the best Wolfe vibes without stumbling into that particular kind of overdoing it, then you might go with The Fifth Head Of Cerberus instead.
take a look at the “Instrumentality Of Mankind” stories by Cordwainer Smith. Now there’s a dude with a trueanon episode with his name on it
hey @radicaledward any experience with the Long Sun books?
