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I first read the first book in this series nearly 30 years ago. As someone who has an intuitive understanding of maths I was immediately hooked and could not stop until I had finished the Necroscope series and the Vampire Wars series. Even now, remembering the plot lines and how the entire series was interwoven makes me long for an adaptation for television. I don't think it would work as a film series simply because of the multiple story arcs that become more convoluted after the first book. Still...great review.

If you ever come across A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, please get it. I know you love Science Fantasy works and this is one of the best ever. Love your channel! Thanks for the great content.

Great discussion. It was linked to in the Gene Wolfe FaceBook group. I've subscribed. I read Lafferty before I read Wolfe. I bought and read every volume of the Ace Science Fiction Specials as they were published, making Past Master my 1st Lafferty, in 1968. Then I read Fourth Mansons when it came out, so 2 Lafferty novels before I got to his short stories, in the collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970). Many Lafferty fans tell people to start with his short stories, but I didn't do that and still became a rabid fan. I met him once at a WorldCon and had him sign a hardcover reissue of Past Master. He told me that I paid too much for it, but I politely disagreed. I started reading Wolfe with The Fifth Head of Cerberus in 1972, followed that with Peace & The Devil in a Forest before The Shadow of the Torturer came out. I loved Wolfe, and I loved Wolfe's prose, but I didn't connect it with Lafferty until this video. Thanks!

Lafferty's 'doggerel' verse is infamously hard to read!🤣🤣 When you said 'oh, this is a poem' the first time I burst out laughing. That was great. Can't believe you found Annals of Klepsis! That was for a long time my fave Lafferty novel. Others are vying with it these days, but it will always be way up there. It is indeed 'literary pulp', but a kind of literary that's almost opposite to the register of Wolfe. If you thought Past Master was a wild ride, buckle in! Reefs of Earth is another contender for all time fave. That's more personal for me than objective. The Pucas (*pook-uhs*, Irish Gaelic for goblins, but they're from the planet Puca in this novel) are some of Lafferty's best wild kids (and he has a lot of them). It's a great US midwestern/plains/southwest novel. A joyously grotesque Twain-meets-Bradbury-on-crack sort of yarn with surprisingly poignant undertones. Fourth Mansions is objectively the 'greatest' work among this set of novels. The prose style and layered depth of themes are up there with the Thomas Pynchons and the like. I actually didn't super connect with it the first time I read it. I really, really liked so much of the imagery etc. But bounced off it a little for some reason. (I'm the only Lafferty reader I've heard of doing that so far.) On subsequent reads it's become a favourite. Incredible novel. Space Chantey is basically Homer's odyssey in space! With bits of other mythologies, notably Norse in the second chapter. Also super fun and pulpy - a little more silly than most of Lafferty's other novels, but with real depth hiding in there. A breakneck blast. (Gaiman loves it.) Devil is Dead'll be there waitin for ya when you get to it, don't worry. :)

'He can talk so long with so little'🤣🤣 Thank you for the shout out and kind words. Your book haul looks as diverse as some of mine. Some similar interests for sure.

You nailed Scavengers Reign, that it's so much more than (planetary) survival horror. I was drawn in in a very similar way, just enjoying the beautifully strange atmosphere and then blown away by the unfolding story. Pretty much my favourite contemporary animation. I hadn't heard of Aldebaran. I've loved Moebius's artwork for some time and still haven't got round to collecting (and reading) the comics! Look forward to doing that when I can and will be keeping an eye out for Aldebaran as well. Thanks!

I'm keen to get hold of this now! I think you'd enjoy To Live by the Chinese author Yu Hua. The long story (though not an overly long novel) of an ordinary man and what he and his family suffer and how it develops his character. Beautiful and poignant.

Hi! Ooo Paradise Lost, The Histories, Proust! A great list you have.

Darmok and Jalad play Sudoku at Tanagra.

I've been binge watching book reviews (especially comic book reviews) for the last couple of days. It's a whole new genre of YT videos for me. And I can tell you: Your reviews are amazing, definitely among the best I encountered. Really pleasant to listen to and I'm here for more. P.S. I definitely want to read DEN now. The art seems really outstanding.

This was a great follow-up after I just finished the book, thank you for covering it! I'm glad you mentioned that not using the appendix is a perfectly valid way to approach it, because that's exactly what I did. I sort of ended up creating my own reality and definitions as I went along from what I could gather.

I believe this novel deserves more exposure, I certainly enjoyed it. I'm in my senior years now and a lifelong fan of sci-fi. I also love classic role-playing games so I've always wanted to run a campaign based on Gateway.

The real question is not if you "understand" this book, its if Gene Wolfe understands this book. I think Wolfe has gotten away with something unforgivable. I think he has inserted a "cuckoo" into sci-fi and fantasy literature. His books aren't sci-fi and fantasy. However many sci-fi and fantasy "allusions" has fooled many sf&f fans. This book has no sf&f tropes. It is as if you were reading a physics textbook and you found yourself trying to understand a particularly confusing paragraph. Only later to realize that the publisher of the textbook had made a mistake and inserted passages from an electrical engineering textbook into the section on the electromotive force. Same subject different discipline. I suspect many sf&f fans think that there's a really good sf&f story in Wolfe's cuckoo. Unfortunately their failure to find said sf&f story, and their hopeful references to things they think are "true", only feeds the malignant cuckoo in their nest. We should admire authors who demand we think. "Billy Budd" by Herman Melville does hold secrets that should be admired. Secrets about the difference between morality and legality. About the human condition. While i hear about references to Borges and Greek myth from readers of Wolfe, i dont hear references to conflicts between good and evil, conflicts between science and religion, between politics and the human condition. For "our Melville" as Le Guin asserts, i find very little discussion about how our vain obsessions destroy us; but i do find otherwise intelligent people obsessing about finding the most obscure reference, and acting as if it doesn't add to the obtuseness of understanding Wolfe's BotNS! The fact that certain passages are clarified in your mind, doesn't clarify the whole thing, does it? Much less clarify it in someone else's mind.

Cool finds!

Great video! Thanks for sharing all of these treasures with us!

Noises Off is a family favorite of ours! Jason has acted in a production of it!

I never find Lafferty in the wild, those are great finds!

Camus' "The Plague " is an awesome read!

What does your shirt say?

Stephen Crane is a great writer! He wrote one of my favorite poems, "In the Desert"

Volume 1 of Galactic Empires has quite a racy cover! That might be why you couldn't find it!

That anthology of Chinese literature is awesome!

Great western finds. Off to check out that video about reservations.

Nice voice. Subscribed!!

I agree about wanting to find genre fiction that's literary--good prose, complex characters, developed themes, etc! I would say Instance of the Fignerpost fits that bill when it comes to mystery! So excited for you to read it! ^^

It's a game

Lonesome Dove is an absolute masterpiece. So much better than all the rest. Stupendous.

This was a great video and got me to thinking about it so I made my own list. I already finished one…… fittingly it was The Death of Ivan Ilyich

call it serendipity, but i watched your video yesterday and at night i was reading borges when i came across this passage: "Bioy Casares came over for dinner tonight and we spent long hours discussing the execution of a first person novel in which the narrator would omit or alter the facts while contradicting himself at several points, all in such a way as to allow a few readers, very few readers, to discern some atrocious or banal truth."

Excellent review and discussion. As a writer of an unreliable and manipulated narrator, Severian was always my gold standard, even though I trusted him implicitly the first two times I read the books! Great insight into LOTR with the sense of the amount of work the writer put in to the book being both a driver for re-reading, and a reward for those re-reads, as they remain satisfying. I enjoyed your take on Shadow, and it made me want to read it again, it has been a long time for me, so I am excited to see how the book shifts according to my own changed perspective, how the symbols that meant one thing to me at 14, at 23, and at 30 now appear to me in my 50s.

I loved Titus Groan! Then I got sidetracked trying to find the [non-essential but good] novella "Boy in Darkness" that Peake wrote after Gormenghast. I was thinking that it took place between the first two books, but now I see that it takes place during Gormenghast. Anywho, I see my library has a copy of "Boy in Darkness and other Stories", so my search is at an end... I am part way through Swann's Way and definitely enjoying it, but I find I have to read it quite slowly or my brain stops absorbing the material even while I'm delighting in the writing. Greg from Another Bibliophile Reads is doing a Proust group read next year. Love those Landmark editions!

great vid, thanks

Food for thought. So many books and so little time! Happy reading.

The final line of the first chapter is him stating that he ascended to the throne. It isn't him literally stating he becomes the Autarch, but it implies that he becomes a king of some sort.

There are denudified Den stories, at least in their originally published form. Corben ran his own publishing house Fantagor Press during the 80s and 90s where he put out Richard Corben's Den. The series featured clothed or otherwise obscured bodies. Corben was a massive talent. He was an stunning illustrator, an assured visual story-teller... and a decent writer. I take Den for what it is and I think pulpy is a good description. I think Corben's self-written fantasy/sci-fi/horror has a lot in common with Wally Wood's self-written fantasy/sci-fi/horror. Their sense of comedy is similar as well, actually. Their stories are not as deep as they thought they were, but they are entertaining. It's a good point that Den does not always win fights. He's shown to be rather a dunderhead pretty often, too. Maybe Corben was keeping in mind that David Ellis Norman was in reality a young, inexperienced guy? With that in mind, though, it is a little weird that Corben described Den as the ultimate man. Apparently brains weren't too important to him.

I saw Heavy Metal in the theater at a midnight showing decades ago, and that's what turned me on to the magazine. Picking up a few issues and finding the continuing adventures of Den was fantastic. I suspect Corben's emphasis on independence is one of the reasons why the character isn't more mainstream. Producers/publishers want a slice and if he was reluctant to let go they might look for someone less protective--and savvy, honestly. That and, of course, the relentless nudity and sexual content which a lot of Western culture just can't abide without pearl clutching. But imagine the what if's. What if Arny had played Den instead of Conan? What if some enterprising adult film director had made a version a la some of the 70s or 80s X-rated films. What if the film adaptation had been entirely about Den rather than the rather weird Loknar shorts? Just ordered vols 1 & 2 to feel the nostalgia....

Interesting video! I feel like it would be fun to try to make a 'bucket list' of all the books you want to read before you die.

The King Yellow, fastry

Reading The Reivers and Light In August right now. Easily the richest, most multi-layered masterful of any of the books I ever read. The Sound and the Fury is one of those books you really have to give yourself up to.

You are saying Borges correctly, but his first name has a pronounced e at the end. pronounced like Whore-heh (sorry, but accurate) middle name is pronounced like Louise.

Why'd you use Simon's Quest in the thumbnail?

This series is the closest thing in book ficiton that has come close to the Fromsoftware storytelling. Mythological, paradoxical, uses Deep time to layer the world and its eras, complete in its incompleteness, you do not read this series, it reads you.

Did you read it in John Candy's voice?

Ooooh, this looks fun! Classic Heavy Metal!

Random thought: Have you noticed that "Death, Death has come" is the same line that Agia says at the Sanguinary Field? No idea what to make of the fact that Dr. Talos repeats it, but there you are.

The prose in Swann’s way was a big influence for book of the new sun, reads like Severian reminiscing about cakes and tea