Much appreciated wrap-up

Thanks, Brandon.

Stephen! It's good to see you back on the boards. I can't wait to dig into your Fifth Head comments. I'm sure I was thinking of George Saunders as one of the other writers. Other potential candidates for the second are probably Dan Simmons, John Crowley, and I'm sure more will come to me throughout the day. I can be certain I was thinking of George Saunders though.

Hey Brandon! I just realized you never answered my question about this episode: you mentioned Wolfe as one of the three writers you give to people who have doubts that they either have time to read, or doubts about the worthiness of, genre literature. I'm really curious who the other two are!

Another great episode - and I owe you guys thanks for all the kind words. Luckily this kind of stuff can't possibly make my head any bigger, but I do appreciate your effort and the chance to be involved with such a wonderful and well-executed project. One thing that I think might easily be explored involves a comment Brandon made involving the humanity of flesh creatures subject to manipulation - I do think that one of the things Wolfe does is give many of his characters the ability to engage in persuasive casuistry - when you get to later works I might chime in on the forums here about that theme again.

Also ... when I wrote on Peace (which I am not truly happy with, though, ironically, I have gotten far more positive feedback on it than on some of my other work that I am VERY happy with - looking at you, Short Sun and Home Fires), I read the book five times in a row from start to finish to make sure I was picking up on the patterns, though there are plenty of quality resources available to consult on Peace. I strongly recommend that Brandon read it at least twice in rapid succession - it's just that type of book. Keep up the awesome work!

It's going to be even harder to pick favorites from this next phase, I think, and it will be a lot of fun when we're all done to put together a desert-island bookshelf.

I'll confess that I had this notion of modeled intelligence wrapped up in the umbrella category of robots. It shouldn't be -- or rather, modeled intelligence should be the umbrella category under which robots exists with computers and uploaded consciousnesses, etc. We'll probably steal this term from you!

Since we recorded this episode, I've gone on to read another volume of Chesterton's work in the Ignatius Press series. While he's quite eloquent in his criticisms of everyone else on the planet, it strikes me that he is something of a clever nay-sayer. He complains and bemoans, but doesn't offer solutions, at least not in what I've read so far. In short, his anti-modernism is precisely that type of aesthetic nostalgia without a real political philosophy. There's a real yearning for the high Middle Ages that he has invented from reading romance and hagiography and not reading charters and law codes.

We've got our eye on the violence now that we are going to be getting much more of it. There's a surprising amount of it in "A Story," by John V. Marsch (which we're wrapping up this week) and it's going to give us a chance to talk about Wolfe's whip theology that you pointed out to us.

As always, thanks for your great comments!

I, too, loved the wrap-up episode.

Let's see. My five favorites from this period... Well, of course "The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories". Also: "How the Whip Came Back", "The Toy Theater", "Alien Stones", "Paul's Treehouse" (partly because of the fun in listening & discussing it here). Also: "The Changeling", "The Blue Mouse", "The HORARS of War", "Eyebem" and "The Recording". Those are the five stories I am putting in my top 10, which I can do because I have a space expander like in "Slaves of Silver", which I also really liked, although not quite as much as you two. And oh hell, I left out "Trip, Trap", which was great. — What can I say? The man is too good.

I would like to flag a theme as either a subset of the robot theme or (I would argue) a related but not identical theme: that is, the question of a model of a person's intelligence (modeled in a computer, or in another's brain). Wolfe asks all the same questions about these as about robots — are they human? Are they souls? — as well as questions like, "Are they the original person"? We'll see this theme in Fifth Head, of course, and prominently in The Book of the New Sun (people in Severian's head, alzabo, to say nothing of multiple Severians, etc), as well as The Book of the Long Sun. But I wanted to note that we've already seen it a number of times: it's in "The Changeling", in "House of Ancestors", in "Alien Stones". A variation on it is the crippled or imperfect copy; we see those in "The Packerhaus Method" and "The Toy Theater" (probably). I think it's worth flagging. It's a different aspect of Wolfe's exploration of consciousness that goes along with his robots.

Another central consciousness related theme we see a lot in later Wolfe that has already arisen multiple times is memory. This is true in all the stories which are told as memories by a narrator (e.g. "The Recording"), but its flaws and uses are particularly prominent in "The Changeling" and a number of others I am forgetting. This, too, will get a workout in future books.

Finally — related to politics — I think we should keep an eye out for themes about the justifications for violence. This is central to New Sun, of course. But it's been a big theme in multiple stories.

A few other responses to the episode:

— I liked your discussion of "Paul's Treehouse", and will accept gratefully your compliment on my discussion of it (assuming that you were referring to mine — I thought so...)

— Like Brandon, I am a big fan of Borgesian — or, I would say, Menardian — backwards reading. But I would suggest that, unlike what Brandon says (that it's a good place to start), that perhaps it's a good place to end: after one has carefully read a work in historical context, to help understand the story as it was meant when written, and then see what it can mean in other, later contexts. — Or, as a compromise, a good middle place: start with the free-associative out of context readings, nail down some historical grounding, and then return to anachronistic readings with firmer footing.

— Brandon: You said Wolfe is one of the three writers you give to people who have doubts that they either have time to read or doubts about the worthiness of genre literature. So: who are the other two??

— You all made a much better case for "family values" than its proponents have made for at least a generation. I would suggest avoiding the phrase; what family values means now is basically hatred of gays and lesbians, and similar things. If you want to complain that the term has been hijacked, well, it happens.

— It was interesting that Chesterton was talking about the destruction of the family in the 1920s and 1930s — long before the golden age fantasized by the actually-existing family values proponents of the 1950s. It's not entirely a surprise — there'd been a huge effect from the 20s, from modernism, from rise in divorce (there's a terrific short history book on the rise in divorce between 1880 - 1920 in the U.S. called Great Expectations) — but he put it more strongly than I'd have guessed.

— Interesting you say that Bertrand Russell was sounding themes similar to Chesterton and the search for a third way; Russell was, of course, a socialist. He was an anti-Bolshevik socialist — which is to say, an anti-communist socialist. But a socialist still.

— Oh and, by the way, anti-communist, democratic socialism is the third way. Just sayin'.

— You cited the longing for a third way and anti-modernism as synonyms, but I think there's an important difference: the third way is a third way to live in a world whose shaping by modernism is taken as irreversible; anti-modernism — which tends to be more an aesthetic and a source of incoherent political gestures than a well-thought out political position — is, well, against modernism, and tends to include a lot of fierce, impotent nostalgia.

As for what I am looking forward to: Fifth Head, and Peace, which (like Brandon) I have never read and which I feel is a huge hole in my reading as a Wolfe fan. (I'm tempted to try and read it twice: once before the podcast, in a gulp, and then again, with y'all. We'll see if it happens.) And also "Forlesen" (I'm interested if Brandon changes his views — I, like Wolfe himself & most fans, think it's one of Wolfe's very best stories), "Seven American Nights" (also), and "The Death of Dr. Island". And a bunch of others. Many of Wolfe's best short stories are in this period; getting rid of half of them will lead some gaping wounds in the project. I get the necessity; but I am not looking forward to those!

In the meantime: Fifth Head ho!

I can't wait to have you reading along with Fifth Head. I think it benefits greatly from group reading and close reading. I remember reading it a few years ago and not being "wowed" by it and forgot so much of it that I was astonished when we read it again with fresh eyes.

Glen has a collection of Chesterton editorials and essays, kind of a greatest hits. It included a work called "Heretics". The Man Who was Thursday was also a favorite work of Chesterton's by Wolfe.

Wolfe has really emerged, in my mind, as a champion of a third way, much the way Glenn describes Chesterton as being. To me, this type of voice is essential in the kind of discursive climate we live in today. I'm so glad you're listening and reading along!