Last night, Gene Wolfe passed away. He was, in my mind, one of the greatest (if not the greatest) sci-fantasy writers of all time. To describe what Wolfe did as worldbuilding or story-telling is not really accurate, because neither word fully captures the breadth of what he created.
The Book of the New Sun is my favorite work of his, although it's all genius. Noisms suggests that the Soldier series may be more accessible, and that's true. BotNS is the type of book you read a dozen times and still have to work to understand; a key element of Wolfe's work is the unreliable narrator. Sometimes, the author/narrator is mistaken. Sometimes, he forgets or misremembers. And sometimes, he lies outright. And it is never clear, especially to the inattentive reader, which is which. Wolfe's books are not to be read as much as they are to be conquered.
Not hours after Wolfe's death, a devastating fire swept through the Cathedral of Notre Dame, a landmark of Christendom for nearly a millennium. This is probably the Pareto optimum tragedy: almost no lives were lost that I saw (one firefighter was severely injured), but this is a cultural loss of almost unimaginable scale.
It is also a learning point for any worldbuilder. Building and places are more than the stone and wood and glass that comprise their physical structure. They become loci for the identity of those who inhabit them. The identity lives on, but the loss of the structure is the loss of something real and metaphysical from that identity. People create place, and the interplay of person and place creates something that cannot be replicated, like a seasoned cast iron pan. Notre Dame was/is a collecting point for the shared experience of millions of people, pushing ever on into the future and spilling over into the next generation of sharers in that experience.
These events signal a genuine end of an era. One era lasted 93 years, the other 856. The world will be different forever.
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