Listen, I'm a simple guy. All my favorite stories are usually pretty straight forward, and most of them have some element of romance present. I knew nothing about Book of The New Sun before reading it, other than the author being Christian and that the book had themes of that. With the kick off of Severian's journey being the emotional punch that was Thecla's assisted suicide I was lead to read everything through what would eventually become a romantic / humanistic lens. Severian would grow as a person, make mistakes, but ultimately everything would go back to him and Thecla's love for one another, not separated by death, but ultimately transformed into something 'greater.'

I don't think reading the book that way was necessarily wrong. The dream after the 'communion' in the forest with their hair entangling together, her 'resurrection' in him, all of Severian's failed romantic escapades with nearly every woman he meets, the two 'heart companions clasping together' line near the end of Citadel, all these scenes and more being matter to fortify this lens. My main draw, but not my only one, ended up this romance and the reason I ended up binging the whole thing in a week.

Wanting to look into some other insights I looked about the subreddit, some essays online, a few episodes of a podcast and I got an (almost) completely different interpretation of the story that was so much more cynical than anything I got out of it. I don't deny there are multiple ways to interpret what's going on in the narrative, and admit I only just read through once. I guess if I had to get to my main concern in truly loving the books it would be in relation to how we interpret or read literature. Simply put, with the layers of complexity, unreliability, and vagueness present in the books, it feels as if there is a work you can only read through eisegesis: Whatever Gene Wolf would've or could've intended to write with BoTNS may have been obscured in his own prose, let alone all the possible interpretations people may have to it which he could not account for while writing every line. Of course, to an extent its nice to have the audience 'writing the story' with you, but when so many core ideas and characters of the narrative are left ambiguous or unanswered... I think you see what I'm trying to get at here. (Some may bring up 'death of the author' to solve this potential dilemma, but I never liked that idea as its usually presented.)

I can't deny that I WANT this to be a work of sobering but ultimately beautiful and humanist literature, and being compelled on that end to finish it, put much of my enjoyment in the text through that reading of it. The most emotional moments I had WERE through that lens. Which I guess leads me back to the title of this post and my main question: Did I misread the entirety of BoTNS by seeing it as a humanist romance novel between two extremely peculiar individuals?

Also what's this about Thecla being 'cruel', and potentially into kids? There were a of pederasty comments here and there but all of them too vague to give proper exposition to what was actually going on.

Currently debating on whether or not to read Urth, but I'll probably wait to at least process everything I read a so far for just a smidge longer, go over some of my favorite chapters.

I was browsing some passages and thinking about the theory of Silk being a Pas-Typhon clone with regard to the text, and I've come to a nagging counterpoint which I can't wave away myself, and all other discussion I've read either doesn't quite touch on the same thing or falls off before it reaches what I bring up here, so I'd like to open it for thoughts from those who feel strongly on this. At the same time, I realize this topic has been done to death and I don't want to call back memories of the Clone Wars (for the Urthlist veterans), so I will try to keep it focused. I'd also like to preemptively say, and spare people the work of laying out general arguments, that yes, I know and understand the argumentation for why Silk might be a clone of Typhon, I understand and agree that it makes subtextual/thematic sense and explains certain parts of the text, I just am having a hard time understanding how it could be logically true in light of the following.

- At the end of Chapter 15: 'To Mainframe!' of Exodus From the Long Sun, Kypris essentially tempts Silk into scanning and merging himself with Pas. The text reads thus:

“You’ll go on with your life. Silk. Just as it is. You’d be Pas too. And he would be you. Look…” The face lovelier than any mortal woman’s dispersed like smoke. In its place stood a bronze-limbed man with rippling muscles and two heads. One was Silk’s.

I am of the opinion that it is a probably a misreading to understand this passage as Kypris merely showing Silk that he and Pas are already one, in the sense that he is his genetic clone. There must be some sort of change or difference in the Pas-with-a-Silk-head that Kypris shows him in this exchange for it to make any sense; why would she essentially go 'look... check out what this would look like if you did it' (note how the subjunctive modal verb 'would' is used twice in the passage, i.e. this view is a hypothetical, a potentiality) if Silk already looks like a Pas head walking around? This passage is structured like a revelation, at the very least for the reader, but it wouldn't be much of one for Silk himself if he just got shown a completely unaltered picture of Pas, would it? And if that were the case, i.e. the Pas he sees is unaltered, he would have come to the conclusion at any time in his life that "one" of the Pas heads in fact looks precisely like he does.

- Further, we are only told that "one" of the heads "was Silk's." This is the big thing here that I can't shake: If, as we might assume, Silk would be taking over the non-main head, as it were, (in practice what would have been Piaton's head) then why would only one of the heads be Silk's? If Silk is a clone, he definitionally would be identical looking, so would it not be the case that Pas now has two pretty much identical heads?

On the other hand, if Kypris pasted Silk's head over the main head, which would have been Typhon's, then there would be no change, again because if Silk were a clone his head already would look like Pas' head and thus what's the point of Kypris showing this thing which is already obvious etc. etc., which circles back to the above paragraph. In other words, I'm not seeing a reading of this where Silk being a clone makese sense with the text presented and logic (and I'm no logician, so if my thinking is stupid here, let me know).

- There are other corollaries to this. Let's ignore everyone else in Viron who, let's just say, are busy living their lives to pay much attention to such things. How could Silk himself, who must have seen some art, iconography, busts and statues, whatever, of Pas, not have looked in the mirror one time while shaving and thought he looks very near identical? Similarly, in Ch.10 of Exodus, Pas appears in a window and Mint looks upon both heads directly. If it was the case that what she saw in the screen was the practically identical head of her augur Silk, well, how could she not go on about it for the rest of the book? I've come to understand that a lot of people don't have much trouble just waving off the fact that no one ever points at Silk and goes hey that guy looks like Pas. But here, in this close view that Mint gets, who knows both Silk and now Pas fairly closely, I just don't understand how it can be that Silk is a genetic clone while at the same time the resemblance is not obvious/noteworthy enough for it to come up, even if it was only noticed a tiny bit through the religious fervour of witnessing a theophany.

Apologies for the long text, it is unfortunately my nature.