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kateofmind's review against another edition
3.0
Know what? I don't buy the sister stuff at all right now. But I still enjoy this book.
ederwin's review
2.0
I picked this up because while I enjoyed Book of the New Sun, the further I got into it, the less I understood it. What I was hoping for was a book that could explain what the heck was happening in New Sun. That isn't what this is. (Nor does it claim to be, so I simply had the wrong expectations.) There is lots of information in here which helps to decipher New Sun, but it seems to be intended for someone who already has a pretty good understanding of the book and wants to dive deeper into some more speculative theories. This, ultimately, is just not for me.
will_sargent's review
4.0
You have to love that this book exists. At the same time, this book is full of The Wildest Of Wild Ass Guessing, to the point where it becomes clear that the writer is seeing connections using his own constructed name classification scheme.
The really strange thing is that while this book goes into huge efforts to figure out who characters really are, it tries very hard to collapse characters into each other. Paeon, for example -- this is a bit character mentioned by the last Autarch in passing. There's no great reason he has to be Father Inire in disguise, when he could just be, well, Father Inire.
Worth reading as an exercise, but if anything I'd say this book has taught me the limits of reading Wolfe -- it's simply to ambiguous to tell what happens after a certain point, and what Wolfe tells us is that memory is fallible, we are easy confused, our narrators could be lying to us, and it's all just a story anyway.
The really strange thing is that while this book goes into huge efforts to figure out who characters really are, it tries very hard to collapse characters into each other. Paeon, for example -- this is a bit character mentioned by the last Autarch in passing. There's no great reason he has to be Father Inire in disguise, when he could just be, well, Father Inire.
Worth reading as an exercise, but if anything I'd say this book has taught me the limits of reading Wolfe -- it's simply to ambiguous to tell what happens after a certain point, and what Wolfe tells us is that memory is fallible, we are easy confused, our narrators could be lying to us, and it's all just a story anyway.
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