Out of kindness I refrain from quoting some of his claims about the nature of sex in his hypothetical “Heaven.”

I will not say anything about the relation between mind and world that goes beyond the absolute minimum.

I like being drunk, know why? ‘Cause it’s like licking metal, and that’s a radical feel.

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Was Tolkien a cuck when he warned, in one of the greatest literary works of the blood-soaked 20th century, that seizing the Ring to defeat evil was going to corrupt?

Okay, new (?) Legion theory: the show has been narrated, a la Doc Scratch, by the Shadow King ever since the moment he got his body back.

This explains not only the way SK suddenly becomes a benign side character whose immense powers and psychopathy don’t really worry anyone, but also how the strange rhetoric about “insanity” very recently espoused in an obviously suspect manner by SK-in-Melanie’s-body starts suddenly being adopted by the show itself (as I boggled at here, right after finishing S2)

I’m most of the way through the Book of the New Sun series (about halfway through the last book, The Citadel of the Autarch), and all in all I’m kind of confused and disappointed by the latter two books relative to the first two.

There used to be a lot more going on and more of a sense of direction – a decent-sized cast, continual foreshadowing of big things supposedly in the narrator’s future, and a sense that a fairly alien world and culture were being gradually revealed in hints and glimpses.  But for a long time there have been no persistent supporting characters, no persistent threads linking the individual episodes (whatever happened to the whole Vodalus thing anyway??), and it’s just felt like watching someone go on sidequests to level up their Barbarian character in a computer RPG.  For like 400 pages.

Maybe this will change real quick right at the end, or maybe it won’t, either of which would be structurally strange and neither of which would be satisfying, I imagine.  I know he wrote a fifth volume a number of years later – should I be thinking of my position in the series relative to the end of volume five rather than four?  Or should I be thinking about how Severian’s descent into lone, aimless vagabondry itself means … something … in contrast with the earlier stuff?

Verbal brain noise: “you know frogs?  little bastards”