Starting the Book of the Long Sun

[avram]

bigscary has had me meaning to go back and reread all of Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos books. Last time I read the early ones was when I did a full reread as preparation for Phoenix, which was published in 1990. But reading A Case of Conscience (which struck me as annoyingly arbitrary) has me wanting to reread the Long Sun books. Here we go again:


theodidact: student of God

manteion: Greek, “place of divination”

palaestra: a place for training athletes in ancient Greece or Rome

minuend, subtrahend: terms in arithmetic — the subtrahend is the number subtracted from the minuend, leaving the difference

Villus: a minute hairlike projection on mucous membrane

The first clues that the setting is a spinning generation ship come on the first two pages: “cities low in the night sky”; “not yet quite prone on the crumbling shiprock blocks, though shiprock was supposed to last until the end of the whorl.”

During his enlightenment by the Outsider, Silk hears “paired voices (though there were more, he felt sure, if only he had ears for them”. Severian and Thecla, and the autarchs?

Having just reread Urth of the New Sun, I’ve got a better idea of what Typhon was like than I did when I read Long Sun the first time. Pas is Typhon, that much is obvious. But I’m wondering (not for any particular reason) whether the Whorl was launched before or after Severian’s arrival in Typhon’s era as the Concilliator. If before, it can’t be too long before. Typhon already had two heads when Severian arrived, though he was concealing that information even from his own guards (and presumably from everyone but his doctors and the other head). Was there any contact between Mainframe and the outside world while the Whorl was being built or launched? If so, what did people think of two-headed Pas? Perhaps the secret got out, and contributed to the end of Typhon’s reign and the rise of Ymar’s autarchy?

Page 12 (Litany of the Long Sun): “Silk nodded again, gravely reflecting that Horn was already a grown man in every way that mattered, and a man far better educated than most.” Having finished the series before, I know that Horn’s the one writing this, and therefore tooting his own horn.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Actually, The Book of Silk (the in-the-narrative title of the book) was written by Horn *and Nettle*. So it's probably Nettle's little love-note to Horn.