feeling myself becoming a citadel of the autarch hater in real time as i am brought face to face with gene wolfe’s bad communism metaphor.
like i can’t say i’m on board with all the catholicism either but at least that’s written in an interesting and thoughtful way.
spoilers below the read more
to actually expand on this, i think having the ascians (yes really) exist as a blank space on the map was vastly more compelling than what their deal turned out to be. particularly after three books of characters questioning the nature of the war in the north; is the fighting that serious? are the ascians serving the powers under the sea? is there even a war in the north?
answering those questions, i think, weakens the narrative as a whole. or at least answering those questions in such a deeply boring manner. ‘oh it turns out that the ascians represent the Existential Threat of Communism’, in the most eye rolling Cold War era way possible.
i think i’m stuck on this so much because it really feels like the first failure of imagination on the part of Wolfe, the first time where Severian crested the hill and i went ‘oh, i was picturing something so much cooler’. the book of the new sun is many things; one of which is certainly flawed in ways borne of Gene Wolfe’s personal bullshit. but this is the first time it’s been trite.
the upshot is that it’s confirmed me in my decision to skip Urth of the New Sun, my understanding being that it’s a whole book of Gene ruining stuff like this.