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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
LOTR makes LOTR look basic!
so what you’re saying is... potshots are free for all?
as for that book i think if he loved it as much as he said he would have continued
one time i skipped an organic chemistry exam because i was way too deep into a cortázar book (hopscotch). i fucking lied to the teacher, claimed i was sick.
i can’t read cortázar these days anymore but when i got the bug i got the bug and i got it bad.
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im gonna go look at the first pages of this book you say and see if it’s true. but if LOTR is your benchmark... i don’t know.
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LOTR is not my benchmark, I just think it’s probably the most famous series in the history of sci-fi or fantasy. Fair? It’s also a damn good boom (“Fellowship...” was always my favorite, and I got a huge kick out of “Silmarillion,” which is much closer to BOTNS than the actual LOTR series. I was just trying to come up with an example of a SF/Fantasy book that’s universally renowned and a veritable literary classic.
Gene Wolfe’s world-building puts Tolkien’s to shame. And it’s not just this one book... Book of the New Sun begat Book of the Long Sun — another four-volume masterpiece that takes place in the same “universe” but is not a sequel — the book that NPR called the #1 science-fiction/Fantasy book of all time (BOTNS was #3, even though it’s objectively better). And Book of the Long Sun begat Book of the Short Sun, a direct sequel to Long Sun which gets hella weird, even for this author, and acts as both a sequel and a prequel to BOTNS.
But yes, in terms of actual complexity and originality, BOTNS is definitely more like Ulysses than it is like LOTR, which might as well be the Princess Bride for how it measures up to this behemoth.
These books, by Gene Wolf, are equal parts Dickens, James Joyce and ... honestly, I can’t think of anything else that fits. Lovecraft maybe?
Ľ Dickens, Ľ Joyce, Ľ Lovecraft, Ľ the fucking Bible.
I just want someone to talk to about it.
ETA: Rob did love the first novella volume of BOTNS. He has a review of it on his site. It’s called “Shadow of the Torturer.” Problem is, he has no clue what the book is about yet.