The Art of War examinations. During the Sengoku period (c. 1467–1568), the Japanese "daimyō" named Takeda Shingen (1521–1573) is said to have become almost invincible in all battles without relying on guns, because he studied "The Art of War". The book even gave him the inspiration for his famous battle standard "Fūrinkazan" (Wind, Forest, Fire and Mountain), meaning fast as the wind, silent as a forest, ferocious as fire and immovable as a mountain. The translator Samuel B. Griffith offers a chapter on "Sun Tzu and Mao Tse-Tung" where "The Art of War" is cited as influencing Mao's "On Guerrilla Warfare", "On the Protracted
The Book of the Long Sun brief suicidal crisis, and comes to final conclusions about the moral doubts that he possessed during the earlier parts of the series. When "The Book of the Long Sun" concludes, Patera Silk's fate is unknown. Silk is an allegorical character, as is typical for Wolfe's work. He is often associated with Moses. Maytera Marble is a chemical citizen of Viron, or a "chem." This means that she is a robot who possesses a self-aware, sentient mind. Maytera Marble was initially designed to be a maid, but as her life progressed she found a more religious calling and became one of