Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I The Trackless Meadows of Old Time
- II The Wild Joy of Strumming
- 15 Books in The Book of the New Sun
- 16 Wolfe's Rules: What You Must Do to Be a Writer
- 17 Balding, Avuncular Gene's Quick and Dirty Guide to Creating Memorable Characters
- 18 Wolfe's Irreproducible Truths About Novels
- 19 Nor the Summers as Golden: Writing Multivolume Works
- 20 What Do They Mean, SF?
- 21 The Special Problems of Science Fiction
- 22 How to Be a Writer's Family
- 23 Libraries on the Superhighway – Rest Stop or Roadkill?
- 24 The Handbook of Permissive English
- 25 More Than Half of You Can't Read This
- 26 Wolfe's Inalienable* Truths About Reviewing
- 27 A Fantasist Reads the Bible and Its Critics
- Index
15 - Books in The Book of the New Sun
from II - The Wild Joy of Strumming
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I The Trackless Meadows of Old Time
- II The Wild Joy of Strumming
- 15 Books in The Book of the New Sun
- 16 Wolfe's Rules: What You Must Do to Be a Writer
- 17 Balding, Avuncular Gene's Quick and Dirty Guide to Creating Memorable Characters
- 18 Wolfe's Irreproducible Truths About Novels
- 19 Nor the Summers as Golden: Writing Multivolume Works
- 20 What Do They Mean, SF?
- 21 The Special Problems of Science Fiction
- 22 How to Be a Writer's Family
- 23 Libraries on the Superhighway – Rest Stop or Roadkill?
- 24 The Handbook of Permissive English
- 25 More Than Half of You Can't Read This
- 26 Wolfe's Inalienable* Truths About Reviewing
- 27 A Fantasist Reads the Bible and Its Critics
- Index
Summary
We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilised. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with thickset gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulfs between creations – books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.
We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of thin jade, ivory, and shell; books to whose leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here – though I can no longer tell you where – no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does.
Which is a paradox, to be sure, since Master Ultan's library contains the crystal and is itself the Library, or perhaps the Bibliotheque, of All Books. What does it mean?
Primarily, it seems to me, that the library is folded in upon itself like a Klein bottle, though in a more profound sense. This folding in of the library, this sense that the library is larger than the world that contains it, is modern as far as I know. And yet there is some flavour of the ancient about it, of books that have not been read since before they were written, of the worm and the dust. Jorge Luis Borges's ‘The Library of Babel’ has rightly been called Kafkan in its sense of enormity and oppression: ’In the entrance way hangs a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. People are in the habit of inferring from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it really were, why this illusory duplication?);…
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- Shadows of the New SunWolfe on Writing/Writers on Wolfe, pp. 193 - 202Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007