Running Iron Podcast Eleven: Stories that Shaped Us

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1. Matthew says

   November 23, 2019 at 3:40 pm

   This was a good podcast to here after a hard day at work.

   Like “Oil Can” the Lord of the Rings when I was young and that left an impression on me. However, one of the books that really made an impression on me language-wise was Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. Actually, it’s four books in a series but one story. Set in the far future it involves the wandering and adventures of Severian a professional torturer who was exiled from his order for showing mercy to a prisoner. Language-wise what’s unique is that uses a lot of rare, archaic, and foreign words to describe concepts about this far future world. While most sci-fi writers use neologisms, Wolfe chose to only use real words that were close to the concepts he wanted to write about. This basically allows multiple interpretations of what’s going on. There is also a scene in the last book, Citadel of the Autarch, (yes, that’s a real word) where there’s a story telling contest between a group of soldiers including an enemy captive. The captive comes from a culture where their speech is all quotations from the books that lay out the principles of their tyrannical government. (Think a culture where they could only quote Das Capital or Mein Kampf.) Wolfe then shows that even using only quotes from the book that one could tell a story highly critical of said government. 

   Though I was always more of Dostoevsky guy, I’ve read fair bit of Tolstoy including War and Peace. I was disappointed to realize after finishing it that I read an abridge version. It was still very long (and worth reading.)

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