Avram's journal

I started An Evil Guest, Gene Wolfe’s latest, on the way to Games Club yesterday. (Oh, lost a lot of games of Race for the Galaxy and Dominion.) Here are things I’m noticing as I go; page references are from the first Tor hardcover:

( Here's your spoiler-cover )

I finished up Return to the Whorl on Thursday, completing the last of Gene Wolfe’s Sun books.

( Final opinions and specualtions; spoilers, of course )

I was considering starting up Wolfe’s latest book, The Knight, but ladymondegreen starting talking about staging an intervention. I started Eleanor Arnason’s Ring of Swords on the way to work Friday morning. This is a copy borrowed from drcpunk; we both copy-edited a really great review of it that should be running in The New York Review of Science Fiction soon. It was one of those great reviews that really sells the book. The author considered the book from three angles: as an SF Jane Austin book, as a parallel to Macbeth, and as Heinlein slash fiction. How could I pass that up?

But I’ll be holding that for commutes. Now I’m catching up on my comics reading. I picked up a pair of Paul Grist collections that came out on Wednesday: Kane: Greetings from New Eden (a contemporary cop story) and Jack Staff: Everything Used to be Black and White (a British superhero comic). These are great. Grist is one of those comics artist who approaches things from a graphic-design perspective, with lots of blocks of solid black or white, and lots of attention to panel and page composition. (Though see page 19 of the Kane book for examples of a nose-shading technique that keeps not working even though he keeps trying it.) His stories tend to bounce around a bit with lots of flashbacks; I was a bit confused by some of the transitions early in Kane, but the ironic juxtapositions of comments and events made it worth my while. I’m only a third of the way through the Jack Staff book, but I’m enjoying it even more. Grist manages to combine bouncy superhero fun with X-Files mystery and an old noirish plot twist and make it all work in true postmodern genre-sampling style.

I really need to start catching up on some of the comics collections I’ve had sitting around. There’s volume 2 of FLCL which I picked up last week, and Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde which I got when it first came out in paperback and still haven’t gotten around to reading. I think I’m still a few volumes behind in Ranma 1/2 too.

Just finished On Blue’s Waters, the first book of the Book of the Short Sun.

( Spoilers for all of the Sun books )

I realized the other day: Patera Silk is a Mary Sue!

( SPOILERS for The Book of the LONG Sun )

Finished The Book of the Long Sun last night, started On Blue’s Waters (first part of The Book of the Short Sun) today.

( Wondering about technology in Long Sun )

( Update: The word “azoth” )

Six pages into the new sketchbook and I’ve done nothing I feel like scanning and posting. Not the sketchbook’s fault; the Strathmore paper is giving me the excellent performance I expect from Strathmore. (Consider this a recommendation.)

I spent the day at Ground, mostly reading Exodus from the Long Sun, occasionally sketching, but not really getting into the groove. I need a cheap source of Art Nouveau inspirational reference material; Google image search isn’t quite doing it for me. (Hm, this page of doors would be pretty good if the images were larger.)

It’s odd; I came back from Arisia all revved for doing some art, and now I just can’t seem to get into that head-space.

I was thinking about terms for the undead, and considering the D&D monster, the wight. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but whoever named this creature (probably Gygax, his linguistic reach has always exceeded his grasp) should have done a little research. Wight is a Middle English word meaning person, or possibly creature. The undead creature that Tom Bombadil saves the hobbits from he calls “barrow wights”, which simply means grave men. Gygax (or whoever) clearly seized upon the unfamiliar word wight as a term for an undead creature, and assumed that barrow was just a way of saying what kind of wight it was, like there are hill giants and storm giants. It’s as if you wrote a story about some zombies haunting a tomb, and called them “tomb folk”, and someone unfamiliar with the word folk decided it meant zombie.

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:

( Observations on the first few pages of The Book of the Long Sun (with spoilers for that series and New Sun) )

The Book of the New Sun is the classic Gene Wolfe book. It was originally a four book series (well, originally three, but the last one got too big). But, well, wait, let me tell you another story so I can tell you this one:

Within the story of the Book of the New Sun, our viewpoint protagonist, Severian, carries around a book called Wonders of Urth and Sky, a collection of old stories. (Very old stories — New Sun takes place some large but unspecified number of millennia in our future.) Every so often he’ll sit down and read a story. One such is “The Story of the Student and His Son”. The names of the hero and monster in this story are both puns, but the names are not given in the story. There’s enough information for you to figure out who they are, and to figure out what the puns are, and that’s good enough for Wolfe.

( For those who haven’t figured it out... )

New Sun is built around a climax, but the climax never appears in the four-book series. Instead, there’s enough information for you to figure out most of what happens, and that’s good enough for Wolfe. Not good enough for his editor, who made him write a fifth book, Urth of the New Sun, which I’m halfway through, and I’ve finally come to agree with the folks who say it’s not as good as the other four. I think now that the best way to read the series is to read all five, and then go back and reread the first four.

( SPOILERish speculation, that didn’t pan out, about Urth and the Long and Short Sun books )