One of my absolute favorites and I’m hoping folks want to talk about it.
Hands down my most reread book. Me, an atheist, never imagined a twisty/puzzly novel about the life and times of future space jesus would speak to me so deeply.
The prose is multidimensional and layered with meanings that only come into focus once you know where it’s going.
Some of my favorite examples:
- The title of chapter 1
- Severian first finding his dog.
- Thecla’s story of a fortune teller predicting she would sit on a throne.
- The ending of book 1
- The ending of book 2
Any other trek fans delighted by Group of Seventeen in book four, realizing it was 10 years ahead of the TNG episode “Darmok”?
Yeah, I don’t want to cast aspersions too much. I could see what Gene’s getting at, and it is absolutely literary in a way that not enough sci-fi is, but the mix didn’t work for me, and I just didn’t want to spend time with that crew or see where Severian was going to end up. Or rather, given the narrative’s structure, how he was going to end up where he ends up.
This was part of what detracted from my enjoyment of the first five books; I just didn’t like a single character. So that, combined with the Herculean effort required to try to understand basically anything that was happening makes me feel like Im doing work when I read them. Im still going to read them again, though.