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Comment by laurex | Hacker News Reader

The Book of the New Sun is amazing simply for the language. I actually thought he was simply making up words until I got out a dictionary and discovered that his vocabulary simply far surpassed mine, and mine isn't terrible.

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If you haven't seen it, there's a great companion book "Lexicon Urthus" [1] that provides a definition for all of the unusual English words used, as well as character references and in-book lore. I re-read BOTNS with the Lexicon, and really expanded my appreciation of the use of language in the books.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Lexicon-Urthus-Dictionary-Urth-Cycle/...

That is the thing that has always stuck out to me. The books are a master class on language. And, interestingly, the intricate language added a certain texture to the story that I haven't often encountered elsewhere. It made the story almost... slippery? As though I could see the shape and outline of the story, but the real specifics were left for my mind to fill in.

A bit hard to explain, but not something I've experienced to the same degree outside of Wolfe.

He has always been incredibly clever in his use of language. The names of people in BotNS had me checking in a dictionary of saints (and books on mythological monsters for the non people) to try and gleam more meaning from them, and I remember a moment of wonder when I realised the aliens’ speech was weird because they always have an even number of syllables in each sentence.

His books are incredible and really pay off careful rereading.

Gene Wolfe explained in a commentary to his series that the aliens (called hierodules) are speaking in blank verse.

To help your vocabulary, the word you're looking for is "glean" [0]

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/glean

I'm not a native English speaker so I find this extremely interesting. I usually read in English so I often notice how much vocabulary certain writer uses. Most of them use the same vocabulary I am familiar with and I read the whole book without looking up a word, but there are some writers where I get a new word every few pages and it is not a word that was forced in there. It made sense to use it.

I never read Gene Wolfe after I started reading in English, I've read him in my native language. I'll need to bump him up in my reading list to see how it reads in English.

Same for me, I read it in my native language and find it hard to find his prose top quality and I found his story a mediocre quality (and for me story is the La raison d'être of a book).

I love the atmosphere and the originality, but you shouldn't go into the cycle expecting action - it's like expecting action from Blade Runner. The first book takes 100 or 200 pages to describe the events of a single day. Some character introductions are breathtaking though, I was particularly impressed by the hothouse. Some episodes and creatures are amazingly creepy.

The vocabulary was the most mind blowing feature of the book for me.

He is talking about people and creatures and things that are far removed from our everyday experience in one direction (the remote future), and he is doing so through archaic words that are just as far removed in the opposite direction (the remote past).

Same happens with Cervantes. A funny thing is that the more languages I learn, the more vocabulary I recognize in a given language. In most cases obscure words from one language are pretty common in another.

Fuligin was the word that stuck with me.

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