Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun (1980–83)

Abstract

Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which is made up of four works — The Shadow of the Torturer (1980), The Claw of the Conciliator (1981), The Sword of the Lictor (1982) and The Citadel of the Autarch (1983)¹ — has been hailed by numbers of science fiction writers and critics as being the event of the 1980s for the genre. Certainly it is a highly-wrought, intelligent, perceptive work, full of amazing bursts of imaginative creation. It is reminiscent of Peake and Borges in its richness of creation, its inwardness, and its questioning of reality. Its hero Severian the torturer, with his coolness of intellect, recalls Peake’s much more evil Steerpike, or Borges’s narrators with their methodical rationality. Whether the tetralogy is strictly science fiction or fantasy is long in doubt,² apart from the fact that it deals with our Earth a long way into the future when, as in Aldiss’s Hothouse, the sun is dying, though here by its growing colder and feebler; the society described is largely of an antique or medieval character, with rituals, guilds, myths and religions, and few machines. Reference is made occasionally to a previous, aeons-past technological age of interplanetary travel, but that is all.