mellonbread reviews Starwater Strains

I wrapped the Starwater Strains collection a month or two back. I didn't believe the cover art was real until I actually had the book in my hands. I love Endangered Species but the best stories are squirreled away at the end and there are a lot of duds to wade through. Wolfe At The Door has some bangers, but also several stories I only enjoyed reading in conversation with his other work (and some juvenalia that's only worth reading out of historical interest). I think Strains strikes the right balance of rich-but-approachable. Like in At The Door the stronger entries are strategically placed to prop up the weaker ones so there's never a losing streak, and the longer entries are bookended by shorter ones so the reader never leaves exhausted.

As usual, I'll skip the summaries and go straight to my thoughts.

Mythic Bastionland Myth: The Flying Swords

 

The faithful five

The flying swords

High-hearted, fierce-fighting wind-warriors

The closer they get to the sun

The further they have to fall

mellonbread reviews The Wolfe at the Door

Gene Wolfe's posthumous collection The Wolfe at the Door collects a bunch of Old Man Wolfe's short stories that were never included in previous collections, or in collections nobody read and are long out of print. I'd read one of them before and the rest were all new to me. 

Gene Wolfe has a handful of dedicated scholars who have produced a body of secondary works attempting to solve  the puzzles and mysteries he litters his books with. As much as I deride these talking heads for dressing up their confabulations as authoritative interpretations, they've undeniably put in a lot of work to help people understand what the hell is happening in the stories. Due to being uncollected and unpopular, the stories in Wolfe at the Door do not have a large body of critical work yet. You're on your own and it's up to you to figure out what's going on - or decide there isn't a mystery at all and you should just enjoy the ride.

I'm going to go story-by-story and pick out my favorites. This review will not make sense unless you've read the collection.

Review: Book of Fuligin

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.

Esoteric Enterprises - Coal City Maps

“You looked fearful of it, and tried… as it appeared to me — to keep your face from it when you carried it.” He threw back the cover as he spoke. The first page, thus revealed, was written in red in a character I did not know.

“This is a warning to the seekers of the path,” he said. “Shall I read it to you?”

I blurted, “It seemed to me that I saw a dead man in the leather, and that he was myself.”

He closed the cover again and ran his hand over it. “These pavonine dyeings are but the work of craftsmen long gone — the lines and swirls beneath them, only the scars of the suffering animals’ backs, the marks of ticks and whips. But if you are fearful, you need not go.”

“Open it,” I said. “Show me the map.”

“There is no map. This is the thing itself,” he said, and with that he threw back the cover and the first page as well.

-The Autarch Appian to Severian the Cruel