Gene Wolfe

by Michael Andre-Driussi

  Moonlit waves closed about me, and I saw the Citadel below me. Fish as large as ships swam between the towers.... this drowned Citadel vanished like the dream it was, and I found that I was swimming through the gap in the curtain wall and into the real Citadel itself. The tops of its towers thrust above the waves; and Juturna [the undine] sat among them, submerged to the neck, eating fish. (V, chap 48, 341)

  With the mysteries laid bare, it becomes apparent that enough clues were provided for such major mysteries to be solved in the original tetralogy. That Severian would travel through time to become both the Conciliator and Apu Punchau, rather than being a reincarnation, avatar, or descendant. And that the world would drown with the coming of the New Sun.

  Minor Mysteries

  Urth gives answers to minor mysteries of TBOTNS, as well. For example, the memory-free nature of Meschia and Meschiane in Talos’ play Eschatology and Genesis seems like a playful riff on a collision between the first day in the Garden of Eden and everyday reality.

  Meschia: (Examining NOD.) Why, it’s only a statue. No wonder he wasn’t afraid of it.

  Meschiane: It might come to life. I heard something once about raising sons from stones.

  Meschia: Once! Why you were only born just now. Yesterday, I think.

  Meschiane: Yesterday! I don’t remember it ... I’m such a child, Meschia. I don’t remember anything until I walked out into the light and saw you talking to a sunbeam. (II, chap. 24, 213)

  The play opens with this comical approach to the end of the world meeting the beginning of the world, where a new Adam and Eve are walking and talking yet are very fuzzy about memories. It isn’t until the end of Urth that Severian discovers that memory-wiped colonists in fact colonized Ushas:

  I recalled what the young officer had reported [as the Deluge reached the House Absolute]: that Hierodules had landed a man and a woman on the grounds ... Remembering that, it was simple enough to guess who my priest’s forebears had been — the sailors routed by my memories had paid for their defeat with their pasts. (V, chap. 51, 369)

  The sailors who had run away from fighting against him at the trial in Yesod are referenced in two brief passages about thirty chapters earlier:

  It seemed that I had no sooner joined the battle than it was over. A few sailors fled from the Chamber; twenty or thirty bodies lay upon the floor or over the benches. (V, chap. 21, 155)

  As to their fate, Gunnie asks, “Where are my shipmates? The ones who ran and saved their lives?” and Apheta answers, “They will be returned to the ship” (V, chap. 22, 161).

  In this convoluted manner, what seemed a simple joke about Adam and Eve in the play turns out to be entirely true and real.

  Then there is the mystery of Hethor’s pets. The notule, a monster that is like a dark scrap of flying paper, is small and could easily be carried in a pocket. But the blob-like slug and the man-sized salamander are so big that Severian muses upon a cargo vehicle being necessary:

  But what of [the slug,] the creature we had seen in the hall of testing? ... A large cart, surely, would have been required to transport and conceal it. Had Hethor driven such a cart through these mountains? I could not believe it. (III, chap. 22, 180)

  Later, Severian learns from Agia that the monsters come from magic mirrors (IV, chap. 30, 240). Magic mirrors, in turn, are introduced to the reader in previous volumes.

  First Severian retells a story Thecla told him about Domnina’s visit to Father Inire’s Presence Chamber, where a Fish was forming at the intersection of eight magic mirrors. The girl asks him if this is how the offworlders come to Urth, i.e., by teleportation.

  “Has your mother ever taken you riding in her flier?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you have seen the toy fliers older children make on the pleasance at night, with paper hulls and parchment lanterns. What you see here is to the means used to travel between suns as those toy fliers are to real ones. Yet we can call up the Fish with these, and perhaps other things too.” (I, chap. 20, 184-85)

  Inire’s veiled point is that mirrors are used as propulsive sails, not as a teleportation system between different stars. But one volume later, Jonas uses the mirrors in the Presence Chamber to teleport himself away in the style implied by Domnina’s question, albeit to another universe rather than another star system (II, chap. 18, 167-68).

  Magic mirrors are also related, in a somewhat different way, to The Book of Mirrors, which seems to be a teleportation system from planet Urth to the space near Tzadkiel’s starship (II, chap. 21, 186).

  As for the mirrors used on a starship, we have Hethor’s line about “demon-haunted” sails:

  Sometimes driven aground by the photon storms, by the swirling of the galaxies, clockwise and counterclockwise, ticking with light down the dark sea-corridors lined with our silver sails, our demon-haunted mirror sails. (IV, chap. 4, 35)

  The implausible cart for Hethor’s pets; the Fish in the Presence Chamber; that the sails of the starship are mirrors; that the starship sails are haunted by demons; that Hethor is a former sailor; that the pets have sorcerous names like “salamander” and “peryton”; etc. From these scattered points in TBOTNS, the reader was supposed to have figured out that the old sailor Hethor summons his pets with a scrap of starship sail cloth, a mirror vastly more powerful than the “toy” in Father Inire’s Presence Chamber. In Urth, Severian travels on the starship and sees firsthand the magic of the sails in drawing apports into being. Furthermore, in the fierce fighting on the ship the sails themselves are damaged, so that Severian is momentarily frightened of silver scraps flying around, because they remind him of Hethor’s pet notules (V, chap. 15, 106). So we are given evidence of mirror scraps.

  (But is it really the case that Hethor uses a bit of sailcloth to summon his pets? Robert Borski strongly believes a completely different theory, arguing in chapter seven of Solar Labyrinth [2004] that Hethor is a shape shifter who enlists the aid of a few other shape shifters. So Wolfe’s mysteries are still open to further analysis and interpretation — just because I declare a mystery resolved in a certain way doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still have some life to it within the larger critical community. Far from it! We’re all one big, happy family — which is to say, our numbers aren’t very big, we aren’t particularly happy, and we’re not at all related.)

  In this manner, Urth answers many mysteries established by TBOTNS. Some of the mysteries are “known mysteries” (for example, the mysterious connection between Severian, Apu Punchau, and the mausoleum builder), while others are “unknown mysteries” (as in the case of the memory-wiped colonists of Ushas). The exposure of the unknown mysteries in Urth causes the text of TBOTNS to open up into unexpected dimensions, rather like a solid cube that suddenly expands into a hyper dimensional tesseract.

  •

  I close this inquiry with a special note of thanks to David Hartwell, “first reader” of TBOTNS and thus the unelected advocate of all Wolfe readers. Hartwell is a very intelligent man, with a Ph.D. in Comparative Medieval Literature and a taste for difficult texts. He is thus highly qualified, so if he doesn’t get it, how could we? He served us all very well by arguing with Wolfe about the ending of TBOTNS and then buying its coda, Urth. We owe him our sincere gratitude.

  Thank you, David Hartwell!

  Review of Nightside the Long Sun

  Here it is, the first book of the new Starcrossers Landfall series by Gene Wolfe: a fast-paced adventure on a generational starship known by its inhabitants as the ‘whorl’; a mystery that starts off with a god-sent vision and ends with an exorcism blending science and religion; and a suspense novel that takes a priest trying to save his gymnasium/church into the underworld of crime.

  The hero is a man named Silk, a simple priest who has suddenly been contacted by a god while playing a game that looks to be a cross between basketball and the Aztec ball court game. In a frozen moment Patera Silk receives a vast amount of information from the Outsider, paramount of which is that he h
imself is the answer to his predecessor’s prayers, and that his mission is to save his manteion (‘house of prophesy’). Silk goes to the animal market in search of a sacrifice appropriate for this portentous moment, and meets a canny seller who suggests a child is the best sacrifice of all. The grisly specter of human sacrifice serves as an introduction to the lesser but still horrific notion of sacrificing animals that can talk, and Silk eventually purchases such a creature.

  Unfortunately, it quickly becomes apparent that the Ayuntamiento (Spanish for ‘body of magistrates’ or ‘municipal government’) has just sold Silk’s financially strapped manteion to Blood, an underworld figure who deals in an addictive drug called rust. In addition, the sacrifice goes badly, seemingly an ill omen. Desperate, Silk decides to break into Blood’s mansion and win back the manteion by reason or force. First he has to find the place, and as the sleeve of night brings darkness to his city of Viron, light to the skylands above, he sets out on his quest.

  Nightside introduces a rich new mythology, exotic yet slightly familiar. Mainframe, the realm of the nine gods and fortunate souls, is as visible to the inhabitants of the whorl as Mount Olympus was to the ancient Greeks, and most of the Nine bear a certain resemblance to figures in Greek myth: Pas, sky god with lightning bolts and father of seven gods, seems like Zeus; Echidna, grain goddess and wife of Pas, was a Greek sea monster; Scylla, their eldest child and patroness of Viron, was another sea monster; Tartaros, god of thieves, was a pre-Olympian god who gave his name to the darkest region of Hades; Thelxiepeia the enchanting was one of the Sirens; Phaea the ever feasting, where ‘Phaea’ (shining one) was a title of Demeter as white sow; Marvelous Molpe seems a female form of ‘Molpus’ or melody; Hierax the mute might be a masculine form of ‘heira,’ or priestess; and Sphigx, who is associated with deserts, has a name close to sphinx.

  The scenario of the Nine inside the whorl while the long forgotten Outsider breaks through from the void of space seems like a Gnostic response to the cyberpunk cult of the god machine, as well as harkening to Plato’s analogy of the cave, where people mistake shadow for substance until one man sees the source of light and the true nature of reality. Probing these gods as false idols, personalities of Urth mortals impressed into the computer when the whorl was created unknown chiliads before, produces some interesting speculation: the Scylla of Mainframe might be the same as the Scylla mentioned in chapter four of The Claw of the Conciliator as an enemy of the New Sun; and as the Greek Echidna is married to Typhon, so might two-headed Pas turn out to be the virtual-reality version of the despotic Monarch Typhon who tempted Severian in The Sword of the Lictor and imprisoned the Conciliator in The Urth of the New Sun.

  But this is all background as Silk enlists the help of Auk, a local burglar, and forms a partnership of priest and criminal akin to Chesterton’s Father Brown and Flambeau. Auk tries to talk Silk out of his quest, telling him that Blood’s mansion is too tough a target even for a professional thief, let alone a complete novice. Silk is adamant, however, and takes to the break-in with all the skill and energy he can muster.

  Wolfe is renowned for his use of words weird and wonderful, and Nightside is no exception. Although the culture is derived from South America, sprinkled with terms like ‘jefe’ (boss), ‘Juzgado’ (court of justice), and ‘Alambrera’ (wire screen or fire grate), the criminal subculture is patterned on that of Dickens’s London, giving the street language of the whorl a heavy dose of thieves’ cant. (Among the truly obscure words in Nightside is ‘azoth,’ an alchemical term for mercury, which was also applied to the principle of the immaterial.) With third-person narration, the action is immediate, the outcome is uncertain, and Nightside the Long Sun begins with a bang what promises to be a great new series of four books.

  Review of In Green’s Jungles

  It is my great pleasure to herald the arrival of a new masterpiece from Gene Wolfe: In Green’s Jungles, the second volume of The Book of the Short Sun trilogy. This represents a new level: It may be the best thing he has ever written.

  When we last saw Horn, the hero/narrator of On Blue’s Waters, he had left the city of Gaon under cover of darkness and was making his way northwest toward his home city of New Viron. As Green begins we find him in a new town where he quickly receives a new name, “Incanto,” and becomes deeply involved in local conflicts, all resulting in something like a Spaghetti Western told by Scheherazade.

  The town’s name is Blanko. It is one of four colonies (Blanko, Soldo, Olmo, Novella Citta) in close proximity to each other on Blue, all founded by settlers from the same city (Grandecitta on the Whorl). Blanko’s trouble is Duko Rigoglio, leader of Soldo and the man who would be king of the four colonies.

  Horn is invited to dine at the farmhouse of Inclito, the de facto leader of Blanko. On the way there, Inclito tells Horn that he fears there is a spy within his household and asks him to discover who it is. (Could it be the cook, the maid, the scullery maid, the coachman, either of the two hired farm hands, the daughter, the daughter’s friend, or the grandmother?) So against a backdrop of looming warfare we enter a country estate mystery ... and at the dinner table we have a story-telling contest among the diners.

  Horn began The Book of the Short Sun intending to tell the story of his failed quest to find the hero Silk, protagonist of The Book of the Long Sun, and bring him back to the planet Blue. In Blue we learn he had set out from Blue, was sidetracked into a trip to Green (the inhumi planet), somehow went from Green to the Whorl (the orbiting generation starship where Silk was last seen). On the Whorl he met with failure of some sort, then was forced to leave in a lander that took him to Blue, compelled by the same people who then installed him as their leader in Gaon. This quest from Blue to Green to Whorl and back to Blue seems to have taken about a year; the writing of Blue took about a year.

  Blue followed this plan and reads like a version of The Odyssey where Odysseus begins telling his own story not as a stranger in the court of King Alcinous, but as a newly installed Rajan of Gaon. The report of his earlier seaborne adventure is the main narrative thrust, while the incidental journal notes of his situation while writing the report show him administering his new kingdom. This narrative device is somewhat similar to that used by Wolfe in The Soldier of the Mist: part narrative, part journal, all begun in medias res and told in “real time.” But where Latro’s memory problems make the Soldier books a choppy and challenging text, the narrative flow of The Book of the Short Sun is as smooth, as smooth as ... dare I say it? ... Silk.

  People in the narrative present keep mistaking Horn for Silk, even when they only know of Silk from reading The Book of the Long Sun, which was written by Horn. As a grown man, Horn had been given the quixotic task of making manifest a hero from a book written from a boy’s viewpoint. It is hard to be a hero; in Horn’s case it is perhaps even harder to find a hero; but here the biographer has somehow become so similar to his subject that people meeting him see the hero and not the author.

  In Green’s Jungles is very much about stories and storytellers. The story Horn is trying to tell shifts on him with Green: the focus moves away from his past failures on Green and into new challenges on Blue. The story is changing on Horn in the present, in part because what he thought of as a completed action was in reality only the middle of one. The old story continues in diminished form, with herculean labors and nightmarish visions “in Green’s jungles.” The story is changing Horn himself; Horn is changing the story. Many riddles from Blue are resolved, such as why Horn looks so much like Silk, how Horn traveled from Green to the Whorl, and exactly how close Blue and Green are during conjunction.

  The new story is about fathers and daughters, in the same way that Blue was about fathers and sons. This is very new for Horn, because he has raised three sons, but no daughters. He learns through interactions between Inclito and his daughter Mora; through his own interactions with Mora and her girlfriend Fava; and then there is Jahlee, an inhuma vampire who grows nearly as close to Horn as the inhumu K
rait, who calls himself Horn’s son, did in Blue.

  The world of Blue is a mess. The crops are failing, wars of conquest are breaking out, slavery has emerged (the new details on how slavery came to Blue provide a powerful and complex situation). Conjunction with Green means that a fresh wave of inhumi have arrived to prey upon the colonists; Horn’s relations with the vampires becomes ever more complex (he made deals with a few in order to win the war for Gaon in Blue, but by the end of that book they were stalking him).

  But there are strange signs that give hope. Horn’s education by the enigmatic Vanished Ones, the centaur like creatures who previously inhabited Blue, continues and he gains new powers. And his dealings with inhumi are awakening in him an unpredictable magic. Things are building toward a spectacular climax, and I look forward to the next volume.

  Review of Strange Travelers

  Here is a brand new collection of fifteen stories. Originally published in magazines, theme anthologies, and a program guide, they offer a wide variety of styles and modes for your reading and re-reading pleasures. Since this is a review, I’m going to fly through the list of stories so you can see what is there, learn what you remember, and wonder at what you are missing.

  “Bluesberry Jam” (1996) is set in a permanent traffic jam, where a talented young street musician wanders away from the family car, in search of love and music. (Reminds me of Delany, especially the young musician heroes of The Einstein Intersection and Nova.) What begins as a straight “Orpheus” quest becomes caught up in the nature of two different types of musician: the self-taught, intuitive kind, who make up new songs in and of the present; and the highly polished “schooled” type, who perform the old hits from distant times and lands, with no personal input beyond the performance. And then it becomes something else again.