Context The Citadel of the Autarch cover art ( Bruce Pennington) This story demonstrates the hope that control of thought by control of language is necessarily weak, because a new language can be constructed out of the old one to communicate forbidden thoughts. The prisoner is nevertheless able to flexibly order & reuse quotes to tell a story about the struggle of a good man oppressed by injust officials, criticizing the government and his society’s failure to uphold its ideals. The story is told by a prisoner of war from a totalitarian society based on Maoist China, which has gone past Orwell’s Newspeak to speak only in quotations from propaganda texts. “Loyal to the Group of Seventeen’s Story-The Just Man” is a philosophical short story told in Chapter 11 of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, volume 4, The Citadel of the Autarch, on the topic of the Ascian language & political control of language for brainwashing.
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