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And I've never been part of a problem that I did not ignore or start
Having watched the first-season finale and just about half of the second season of Torchwood (2006–11), I have put the series on hold until I can track down the rest of the first season, because while I am truly spoiler-indifferent and really enjoying the show, I have realized I don't want to replicate my experience of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun (1993–96), where I short-circuited at least one major character's arc by reading the second half first.
There are four volumes of The Book of the Long Sun: Nightside the Long Sun (1993), Lake of the Long Sun (1994), Caldé of the Long Sun (1994), and Exodus from the Long Sun (1996). The plot concerns a revolution on a generation starship whose gods are literally ghosts in the machine, except perhaps for the minor god whose revelation to a young augur in the first novel kicks off a quest that starts like the Blues Brothers and ends like Les Mis; unlike Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980–83) with its experimental play of memory and time, The Book of the Long Sun is notable for its dead-ahead structure which does not even incorporate flashbacks, although occasionally its characters dream. In other words, all information not encountered in order in the text must be explicitly filled in or deduced in hindsight, and Wolfe uses this technique to keep the reader reevaluating interactions and motivations in light of later events. It was therefore utterly disastrous for me to read the last two volumes first, which of course I had no way of knowing one late autumn night in my junior year of college when the second-half omnibus was lying around a friend's dorm room and I wanted something to read while five people I liked very much were carrying on a conversation that bored me completely.
The Book of the Long Sun is one of the narratives where I have a favorite character; his name is Patera Remora and he is the coadjutor of the city-state of Viron, which in the classically inflected religion of the Whorl means more or less what it does in the Catholic or the Anglican Church, only with a lot more haruspicy. When encountered for the first time in Caldé of the Long Sun and even more so in Exodus from the Long Sun, he is an excruciatingly sympathetic character. In the midst of spies and factions, barricades and negotiations and casualties on all sides, Remora is a paper-pusher out of his depth and he knows it. Sometimes it makes him funny, but he's frightened all the time. A fence-sitter by nature and an establishment figure by profession, now that he's thrown in with Patera Silk and the revolutionaries against the Ayuntamiento of Viron and even a schism of his own Chapter, he's trying desperately to do the right thing and mostly floundering toward it, but to say that he's not graceful about the process is several orders of understatement. Conversationally, he's one of those formal, diffident people who are always correcting themselves like an unsolicited apparatus criticus; physically, he's the kind of tall and thin that looks like a deck chair folding up when he takes a seat and he can be trusted to trip over his own feet at moments of action almost as reliably as over his own tongue at moments of truth. One of his characteristic gestures is nervously pushing his hair out of his eyes, another worrying his religion's equivalent of a rosary. Emotionally, he's a mess. Undergoing a classic katabasis in the tunnels beneath Viron with the sibyl-turned-revolutionary-general Maytera Mint and an agent of the Ayuntamiento, Remora is scalding in his self-honesty and oblivious when it comes to reading the room—he has a knack for choosing exactly the wrong moment to unburden his conscience, share his feelings, or suggest a stratagem for which there is invariably a simpler solution. And yet he does come out of it stronger, with a truer sense of himself and what matters to him than when he started, even if you could still give yourself an ulcer waiting for him to finish a complete sentence; it's not silly at all that by the end of the series he's become one of the central figures of the exodus to the planet the ship-born characters call the Short Sun Whorl, eventually the Prolocutor of the Vironese Faith on Blue. He'll do it well now—he wouldn't have before. And the ghost of his mother in Mainframe is proud of him.
When encountered for the first time in Lake of the Long Sun, Remora is not sympathetic at all. He is an ecclesiastical snot. For all his easy invocation of the gods, he's far more office politician than priest, as polished as he is insincere, more concerned with keeping a lid on an inconvenient theophany than with actually helping the manteion on Sun Street out of its financial difficulties as Silk has been appealing for weeks, even though leaving the younger augur to his own devices just accelerates the combination of divine and secular intrigues that drives the unraveling of the Whorl; he's a second-order antagonist but a tellingly blinkered one, so enamored of his own delicacy in disposing of a sensitive affair that it doesn't occur to him to investigate further, except where he imagines that he already knows what he'll find. He intercepts letters, he offers bribes. He may not be as destructive, but he's as good a representative as any councillor of the Ayuntamiento of the structures of power and complacency that Silk will end up shaking to their roots. Of course his fastidious self-assurance will crack to pieces the minute the world begins to shift its shape, his petty ambitions and illusions rendered profoundly and embarrassingly irrelevant by the events spiraling around the man he once blessed and brushed off in the same patronizing farewell. Serves him right, the would-be Richelieu. He was always behind the eight-ball of this game and it wasn't even billiards in the first place.
Coming in at the point where this character started to break down into sympathy, I missed all of that. I missed that he had ever been so supercilious and comfortable instead of shocky and gauche, that he had casually talked down to and ordered around characters before whom he would be shown as indecisive and incompetent when faced with soldiers and spy-catchers instead of circular letters and cups of beef tea; I missed that he had ever thought he was on top of this situation and not just scrambling to survive it. I missed that he had done harm. I missed how much he grows as a person. There's no reason to expect from Remora's introduction that the glossily dismissive emissary from the Prolocutor's Palace would ever put himself in danger for the sake of a truce or offer himself for torture in a comrade's place or get himself demoted to regular augur and nonetheless walk around beaming at everyone because he finally lived up to his mother's dreams for him. Seriously, it's a good arc, all the more so because it belongs to a person who never stops looking or sounding like an emotionally disorganized deck chair that teethed on a thesaurus, and it's not like I can't still appreciate it for the id-blast that it is. But I got it back to front and while that is sort of apropos for the character, I really suspect it would have been even more effective in the right order.
Anyway, since I have seen character development already in the seven episodes of Torchwood I've watched so far, I figure I should go back for all of it from the start, even knowing that the writing of the first season has some hiccups, to say the least. I hope Gene Wolfe of blessed memory appreciates that I have taken the lesson. Not everyone can make me care, even slightly, about linear narrative.
There are four volumes of The Book of the Long Sun: Nightside the Long Sun (1993), Lake of the Long Sun (1994), Caldé of the Long Sun (1994), and Exodus from the Long Sun (1996). The plot concerns a revolution on a generation starship whose gods are literally ghosts in the machine, except perhaps for the minor god whose revelation to a young augur in the first novel kicks off a quest that starts like the Blues Brothers and ends like Les Mis; unlike Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980–83) with its experimental play of memory and time, The Book of the Long Sun is notable for its dead-ahead structure which does not even incorporate flashbacks, although occasionally its characters dream. In other words, all information not encountered in order in the text must be explicitly filled in or deduced in hindsight, and Wolfe uses this technique to keep the reader reevaluating interactions and motivations in light of later events. It was therefore utterly disastrous for me to read the last two volumes first, which of course I had no way of knowing one late autumn night in my junior year of college when the second-half omnibus was lying around a friend's dorm room and I wanted something to read while five people I liked very much were carrying on a conversation that bored me completely.
The Book of the Long Sun is one of the narratives where I have a favorite character; his name is Patera Remora and he is the coadjutor of the city-state of Viron, which in the classically inflected religion of the Whorl means more or less what it does in the Catholic or the Anglican Church, only with a lot more haruspicy. When encountered for the first time in Caldé of the Long Sun and even more so in Exodus from the Long Sun, he is an excruciatingly sympathetic character. In the midst of spies and factions, barricades and negotiations and casualties on all sides, Remora is a paper-pusher out of his depth and he knows it. Sometimes it makes him funny, but he's frightened all the time. A fence-sitter by nature and an establishment figure by profession, now that he's thrown in with Patera Silk and the revolutionaries against the Ayuntamiento of Viron and even a schism of his own Chapter, he's trying desperately to do the right thing and mostly floundering toward it, but to say that he's not graceful about the process is several orders of understatement. Conversationally, he's one of those formal, diffident people who are always correcting themselves like an unsolicited apparatus criticus; physically, he's the kind of tall and thin that looks like a deck chair folding up when he takes a seat and he can be trusted to trip over his own feet at moments of action almost as reliably as over his own tongue at moments of truth. One of his characteristic gestures is nervously pushing his hair out of his eyes, another worrying his religion's equivalent of a rosary. Emotionally, he's a mess. Undergoing a classic katabasis in the tunnels beneath Viron with the sibyl-turned-revolutionary-general Maytera Mint and an agent of the Ayuntamiento, Remora is scalding in his self-honesty and oblivious when it comes to reading the room—he has a knack for choosing exactly the wrong moment to unburden his conscience, share his feelings, or suggest a stratagem for which there is invariably a simpler solution. And yet he does come out of it stronger, with a truer sense of himself and what matters to him than when he started, even if you could still give yourself an ulcer waiting for him to finish a complete sentence; it's not silly at all that by the end of the series he's become one of the central figures of the exodus to the planet the ship-born characters call the Short Sun Whorl, eventually the Prolocutor of the Vironese Faith on Blue. He'll do it well now—he wouldn't have before. And the ghost of his mother in Mainframe is proud of him.
When encountered for the first time in Lake of the Long Sun, Remora is not sympathetic at all. He is an ecclesiastical snot. For all his easy invocation of the gods, he's far more office politician than priest, as polished as he is insincere, more concerned with keeping a lid on an inconvenient theophany than with actually helping the manteion on Sun Street out of its financial difficulties as Silk has been appealing for weeks, even though leaving the younger augur to his own devices just accelerates the combination of divine and secular intrigues that drives the unraveling of the Whorl; he's a second-order antagonist but a tellingly blinkered one, so enamored of his own delicacy in disposing of a sensitive affair that it doesn't occur to him to investigate further, except where he imagines that he already knows what he'll find. He intercepts letters, he offers bribes. He may not be as destructive, but he's as good a representative as any councillor of the Ayuntamiento of the structures of power and complacency that Silk will end up shaking to their roots. Of course his fastidious self-assurance will crack to pieces the minute the world begins to shift its shape, his petty ambitions and illusions rendered profoundly and embarrassingly irrelevant by the events spiraling around the man he once blessed and brushed off in the same patronizing farewell. Serves him right, the would-be Richelieu. He was always behind the eight-ball of this game and it wasn't even billiards in the first place.
Coming in at the point where this character started to break down into sympathy, I missed all of that. I missed that he had ever been so supercilious and comfortable instead of shocky and gauche, that he had casually talked down to and ordered around characters before whom he would be shown as indecisive and incompetent when faced with soldiers and spy-catchers instead of circular letters and cups of beef tea; I missed that he had ever thought he was on top of this situation and not just scrambling to survive it. I missed that he had done harm. I missed how much he grows as a person. There's no reason to expect from Remora's introduction that the glossily dismissive emissary from the Prolocutor's Palace would ever put himself in danger for the sake of a truce or offer himself for torture in a comrade's place or get himself demoted to regular augur and nonetheless walk around beaming at everyone because he finally lived up to his mother's dreams for him. Seriously, it's a good arc, all the more so because it belongs to a person who never stops looking or sounding like an emotionally disorganized deck chair that teethed on a thesaurus, and it's not like I can't still appreciate it for the id-blast that it is. But I got it back to front and while that is sort of apropos for the character, I really suspect it would have been even more effective in the right order.
Anyway, since I have seen character development already in the seven episodes of Torchwood I've watched so far, I figure I should go back for all of it from the start, even knowing that the writing of the first season has some hiccups, to say the least. I hope Gene Wolfe of blessed memory appreciates that I have taken the lesson. Not everyone can make me care, even slightly, about linear narrative.
Re: Audiodrama recommendations
No, understood: I am the same way about small presses and self-publishing. Library wouldn't even be an option for me if the CDs were in our local system, since our local system is closed for COVID-19 and I have no idea when they will reopen.
Anyway though, these are my favorites of the ones I've listened to so far;
Thank you! All of these sound interesting to me, although I am less likely to head straight for the depresso endings right off the bat. Is there a particular reason that you're not sure about recommending The Hope to me or just the serial killer/prison plot, in which case I will point out that film noir is also comfort viewing for me. (Either way, you should write fic for it.)
there are quite a few I don't have yet.
Good Lord, this looks like crackfic. I understand that would not prevent it from going incredibly dark, but still. I am delighted to see a couple with Murray Melvin. I am very fond of him.
Re: Audiodrama recommendations
No, it's basically just that, and you're right, you're about the least likely person to bounce off it because of that. Unlike the general trajectory of some of the others, this one started out dark and ended up less so.
Good Lord, this looks like crackfic.
If you think that looks like crackfic, check out this one.
Re: Audiodrama recommendations
And he said in the first episode that he was never doing that again!