LEXICON URTHUS - MICHAEL ANDRE-DRIUSSI

Gene Wolfe really has me out here reading dictionaries back to front. I’m one step short of learning Orcish or Klingon. But despite that chilling realization I don’t think I’ll dip back into the Wolfe-well for a minute. There’s 3 more in the Solar Cycle left for me and I’ll probably try to get them before the end of the year but, right now, a break is in order. Obviously, I loved this thing. I got it to clear up some questions I had about the timeline and whatnot but the words he picks out and defines from Wolfe’s insane vocabulary were so good I was running to write shit down left and right then decided to just read the whole thing over 2 days. I came back with a list of dozens, including “echopraxia” “algedonic” “xanthic” “phrontistery” and “thaumaturge” to name just a few. Entities/motifs like “Jahi” “Amphisbaena” or “Oizys” have also sent me down a few really cool rabbit-holes. Not to sound like too much of a lazy millennial but how the fuck did Wolfe find these words and how did Andre-Druissi follow up so thoroughly without the internet? How the fuck does he know so much about ice-age animals and the Seven Olympian Spirits, to name just two disparate he hopscotches around? A truly mind-boggling achievement; well done, boys. There’s nice longer sections on the history of Urth or the connections to things like the Tarot or Kabbalah that were all quite interesting and could/should/might already be long articles or dissertations. And this is only the 5 (he gets into the does-Urth-count? thing and wisely includes it) New Sun books, less than half of the Solar Cycle total. Will some brave hero update this to include the other books, or expand this one? As deep as Andre-Druissi goes there’s still a bunch of words and ideas left out. I suppose things like reddit now exist to collect the works of obsessives and a sci-fantasy story, especially one as abyss-deep as Urth, is very, very fertile soil for exhaustive research I hope I live long enough for more book-quality scholarship (I love a good reddit rant/deep twitter thread too, I promise) on Wolfe. He should at least be in the position of a LeGuin or PKD in terms of genre authors taken seriously by the serious, and be the topic of a comparable amount of paid-professional scholarship. Get on this academia. I’ll end this by trying to show how smart I am by mildly disagreeing with Andre-Driussi on something. There’s a section of the book where we learn about a historical figure (though in “our” future) named Kim Lee Soong who’s presented as an “early” space-traveler. Anyway, A-D suggests that this name is Chinese, based on a similarity to “Soong Meiling” who was Chiang Kai-shek’s wife. I don’t think this checks out, due largely to the fact that Japanese, Korean, Chinese and other East Asian cultures typically present their names with the family name (what we’d call the “last” name) first. So “Kim Lee Soong” has “Kim” as the last name. Google doesn’t think Soong is a common Korean name, though “Song” and “Seong” both are. Plus, the name “Kim” means “gold” in Korean, which has a solar theme that fits in thematically. Plus, I like the idea of Korean space travel. The efficiency of the K-Pop operations I’m familiar with seem to suggest that they could manage interstellar exploration. But this is all a silly nit-pick. A-D wrote an amazing guide to those books and just a cool collection of obscure words. 1000 Chiliads