My copy of Book of Fuligin came today. This is a Book of the New Sun fancomic that was crowdfunded a couple years ago. Various artists and writers contributed short comics or illustrations set in the world of the Solar Cycle - the posthistoric dying Urth created by Gene Wolfe. Submitters were prohibited from using characters from books for original stories, though some of the submissions depict the canonical events of the novels. I've had the PDF version sitting in my Gmail for months but I forgot I even backed this project until I got the email asking me to update my shipping info. I'm very glad I did.
The book is a hardcover with good cloth binding. The cover is a minimalist illustration of Severian and a tangle of thorns on a black field. There's a embossed Terminus Est with a single blood drop on the spine, which looks great. There's an illustration of Old Man Wolfe on the interior covers (front and rear) that makes him look like Doctor Robotnik. The matte black they chose for the cover and pages accumulates fingerpints like nobody's business and looks gray in good light. I wouldn't nitpick this except that the cover claims the book is "written and drawn in the darkest of inks" and I just discovered through miniature painting that you need a gloss to make black actually look black.
The package came with a loose page that had a cool drawing of Severian.
Enough about the physical product. Let's dive into the stories. This review assumes you've read the New Sun books and won't make sense if you don't. It will contain spoilers for plot details from the novels and will give away some setting or thematic elements of the stories in Book of Fuligin. If you got a copy from the Kickstarter I suggest reading it before you read this. As of this posting the publisher says there are a handful of spares they might sell after they make sure the backers are taken care of. You may yet get a chance to grab one if you haven't already.
Goran Gligovic
It wouldn't be a Wolfe pastiche without a cheeky frame narrative. This introduction and the conceit of the Sequentialists reminds me of the Pastwatch institute and Emma Grosvenor (nee Lockhart) from Carla Speed McNeil's superb Finder series. Certain people have the ability to psychically recall information from the distant past, songs and movies and books and historical events popping into their heads at random. Emma experiences this as a fugue state, and when the institute discovers this they pay her an obscene sum of money to be wired into a neural interface that siphons every scrap of data out of her perpetually dreaming mind forever.
The character introduced in The Sequentialists is presumably the one who writes the short introductions we get for each thematically separated section of Book of Fuligin. I found these segments to be a little overwritten, but a good emsee knows sometimes you have to lay it on thick.
Garresh
LOOSE LIPS
Garresh
Loose Lips is visually superb, with an incredibly strong design for the POV character. I'm going to admit that the plot may have gone over my head - if there's something happening beyond the guy delivering the commission just in time for the ship to land, I missed it. In my opinion this is the real mystery of Gene Wolfe. Is there a puzzle here to be solved, or did he just do it because he thought it was cool?
Edit: Just occurred to me that the enormous hull of the ship descending at the end is supposed to look like a pen descending onto a page. Favorite.
BIRD SONG SUNG
Claire Connelly
The visual of the radar dish strongly evokes a Sam Weber illustration from the folio edition of New Sun. The language the narrator uses turned me off at first, but the more I thought about it the more appropriate for the setting it seemed. Wolfe litters his "translations" with archaisms and we know from the story of the Monitor and Merrimack in the Book of Urth and Sky that the wars of the real world have become archaisms in the posthistoric Urth. Plus, not everyone in Urth is as articulate as Severian. For a character to say that "a war blitzkrieg into existence" is not any different from a torturer jabbering about peltasts and erentarii and baluchithers.
Penman
M D Penman
No dialogue and some excellent art. One of the pleasures of fanart and fanfiction is how you can communicate reams of information to an audience familiar with the original work using only a few details. The lobotomy scar on the hunter's prey instantly communicates zoanthropy, and from there the rest of the story falls into place well before the final page. It's obvious to anyone paying attention but we feel clever for figuring it out. Favorite.
VITUMANCER
A Gadskova
Evocative of the original Nausicaa manga in both visuals and theme, with a little Roadside Picnic thrown in. I'm not complaining. Again I'm forced to use my brain. Did I miss something or is the ending ambiguous? I understand what happened in a literal sense and how it thematically parallels the introduction, but is there more?
Emmons
COMMUNION
Matt Emmons
A succinct Alzabo story with cool visuals. I wonder if it could have been even more minimalist, without any dialogue.
Jed Dougherty and Zach Chapman
A powerful Alzabo story with a cool old school comic book style. Mutants in jars at the Bear Tower, a reasonable backporting of the technology from the Whorl to the Commonwealth's canonical masters of animal handling. The second the protagonist interrupts the animal master explaining why Alzabos are dangerous you know how it's gotta end. Favorite.
THE KING, THE WITCH AND THE MIRROR
Luke Baker
Good visuals and a story that seems straightforward on the surface. The paneling on this one is really good.
Baker
SAINT MAG
Marta Castro, Maria Gil
A Roman martyr style hagiography set in the world of New Sun. The style and tone remind me a lot of Factoid Books' Big Book of Martyrs, probably because they're both black and white anthology comic series that draw heavily from the lore and mythology of Catholicism.
TO PIERCE A CITY'S HEART
Ramon Perales
Old Man Wolfe suggested in his commentary on Boy Who Hooked the Sun in Best of Gene Wolfe that you practice writing by taking a short story you like and rewriting it from memory in your own style. This is New Sun given that same treatment. A cool reinterpretation of the original novels, with a new masked
protagonist going through a war, meeting a seemingly normal dude from
the past, mages with mirrors that show prehistory and Ragnarok, a powerful techno-tyrant offering to make her master of all she surveys if she swears fealty... The whole journey through the tower feels very Hellboy and that's one of the highest compliments I can pay a comic. Favorite.
CYCLES OF MEMORY
Hannes Radke
A delightful riff on Wolfe's fascination with friendly robots built to suffer. Based on a throwaway line from Cyriaca's story in Sword of the Lictor about the machines giving everyone a guardian to watch over them. Cyriaca's story is my favorite thing in the Solar Cycle and this is my Favorite story in the entire Book of Fuligin.
NOVITIATE
Justin Morales
A perfect spin on the torturer-obsessed weirdos from Shadow, but tragic rather than comic. Whenever I write in someone else's setting this is the kind of thing I try to create. A disgusting little vignette with a stinger at the end. Favorite.
Berlin
A COLUMN OF ASHES
Mikael Lopez, Hello Berlin, M D Pennman
I liked this one, but I think the guy ending it with violence and a badass one liner was a little much after the superb PTSD sequences earlier. I loved the little quote about the Endocatopter.
A mirror which reflects what is immured. A column of ashes upheld by the wind
Closer makes clearer
I also love the implication in this and Cycles of Memory that the Guild is constantly kicking people out into the wilderness to cover up their own mistakes, which is supported by the original novels.
SOVEREIGNS
Amagoia Agirre, Will Aickman, Ramon Perales, Santino Arturo
A horror story that turns out okay in the end. Besides encoding information in tiny details, fanfiction of this type lets you play with audience expectations. When we first learn the masked man is a representative of the Monarch we worry that he's a procurer for the Monarch's grotesque sexual appetites. Then we worry that the child will be executed when her psychic powers don't measure up to the Monarch's expectations. Then we get a sigh of relief when we learn that these are not the servants of Typhon, but of the machines from Cyriaca's story, who keep art and learning and stories alive during the long twilight of Urth. The machines who taught humanity to love, and were shocked when humanity loved them back. Favorite.
AUTARCH
Andrey Garin
Simple and to the point, with no dialogue. I don't know how many events depicted here I'm supposed to recognize or decode.
The remaining stories are depictions of scenes from the novel, interspersed with individual pieces of fanart.
Son of Witz
AFFECTIONS OF THE EXECUTIONER; FOUR PLATES OF LOVES LOST
Mary Sanche
Four drawings of Severian with women. Thecla, Agia, Dorcas, then Juturna and Valeria. The choice of the last plate is interesting. Juturna was a honey trap, Valeria a marriage of convenience. Jolenta is the more logical pick to complete the tetrad. Not exactly romantic, considering by Severian's own admission he rapes her, but that makes the omission all the more glaring if we're trying to illustrate the moral journey of a man who inevitably contaminates every relationship with blood and torture. But that's easy for me to say, I'm not the one who has to draw it. As it stands the existing pages show us the dark side of the other relationships through the artist's mastery of facial expressions and posing. Obsession, violence, madness...
THE BOTANIC GARDENS
Z. Bill
A fun riff on the aforementioned "rewrite it from memory" idea.
THE DUEL
Nathan Anderson
A cool rendition of a scene from the novel. Love the use of white in a book full of heavy dark shading.
THE LIEGE OF LEAVES
Tom Mushroomancer
A cool rendition of a scene from the novel. Grimly comic like how I remember the original scene, with guys getting beheaded left and right.
THE CORRIDORS OF TIME
Finn Matthews
If you followed the development of Book of Fuligin or are just a New Sun fan in general there's a good chance you've already seen these. They kick ass but I think some of them suffer in this format. The two-page spread consigns poor Thecla not only to the revolutionary, but to be swallowed by the spine of the book. I still call this a Favorite.
After that we close out the book with concept art and a cool poem about the Alzabo. The Sequentialist closes the book out by saying he's running out of ink, like the last line in Melting (maybe my favorite ending of a short story and book of short stories ever).
WRAPUP
I think most "Wolfe scholarship" is really fanfiction. It starts with a
grain of fact and builds a plausible explanation of what's really
happening, then piles layer after layer of speculation on the initial
premise until it becomes its own story. I think this is fine as long as
you don't treat it as authoritative, since it's all based on
an unprovable initial conjecture. When it comes to examining the themes and setting of the original novels in a new light, Book of Fuligin can go toe-to-toe with the best of 'em.
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