‘“I have heard those who dig for their livelihood say there is no land anywhere in which they can trench without turning up the shards of the past,” says Severian. No matter where the spade turns the soil, it uncovers broken pavements and corroding metal; and scholars write that the kind of sand that artists call polychrome (because flecks of every colour are mixed with its whiteness) is actually not sand at all, but the glass of the past, now pounded to powder by aeons of tumbling in the clamorous sea.’

In “The Book of the New Sun” by Gene Wolfe



Welcome aboard. You are journeying upon one of the most dizzying, dazzling and deceiving ships you have ever ventured on. Welcome to Urth. In many ways, you will never leave…

TBotNS is one novel in five volumes, just like “The Lord of the Rings”. It's not an unending series of the Wheel of Time sort. You really MUST pay attention to what Wolfe “doesn't” say. In fact I'm sure I missed a lot when I read it years ago...that’s why it's been always on my "re-read" list for ages. That said, I can certainly see why some don't like it and why it hasn't gained wider popularity. It is a very unconventional narrative and actually quite hard work requiring the reader participate, making deductions and intuitive leaps to fill in the intentional gaps left by the author.

On the question of genre -- Science Fiction versus Fantasy -- I would argue that “The Book of the New Sun” (TBotNS) is fantasy of the best kind. It's mythopoeia of the same type as, and on a similar scale to, Tolkien's. The fact that the towers are also rockets, the monsters are aliens, the gods are Cthuhlu-esque, the magic is science, etc., doesn't change the fact that Wolfe is dealing with the myths, themes, and archetypes that trace their heritage back to classical and primitive mythologies. The most concise illustration of this point is the painting the curator Rudesind is cleaning when Severian encounters him on his errand to Ultan's library (p. 36 of the omnibus edition). The astronaut on the desolate moon (that in Severian's time has become a terraformed paradise) is a armored knight errant in the Waste Land. There is so much in that image; contemplating such gems is one of the great joys of reading this novel.

Having said, AGAIN, is this science fiction or fantasy? For starters, I can understand some people being potentially put off by the Torturer in the title and the leather-clad bloke on the cover...it probably would have put me off if I'd been browsing in a bookshop. I adored the bit where the painting is being cleaned. I hadn't read the back of my edition when I started, so I hadn't initially realised it was set on this world in the future, so when I realised he was cleaning a picture of a man on the moon was when I realised it was on Earth/Urth. Contardicting msyelf, I could still argue that it's SF though, SF very cleverly dressed as fantasy - it all sort of has its roots in reality rather than magic/myth etc. But I am quite swayed by your argument.

Nevertheless, this is a fantastic series that improves enormously on re-reading. Give it a year or two to settle, though. Like I said, just read all of Wolfe, it will repay you forever.

As for Vance again, he's a fantastic stylist and does a great line in melancholy sarcasm, but he's not a deep moral thinker in the same way as Wolfe. I love Vance for cruel and angry chuckles, but he doesn't tickle at profundity. Vance has a black humour that is wonderfully funny and horribly cruel at the same time. He doesn't I agree aim at profundity, but he is a fantastic stylist and I think him at the very least Wolfe's equal (not that comparing them makes much sense in the end, and both are marvellous). Frankly, profundity isn't the only test of literature, precision and tone matter too, and Vance at his best is hard to equal on the light accuracy of his prose.

Well, if you can deliver great prose AND be profound, I consider that a plus. Vance tends to lay things out in rather obvious fantasy metaphor, but there's more mystery and ambiguity in Wolfe. I've re-read some Vance books many times, and enjoy them a great deal, but they don't haunt me in the way Wolfe does.

I think Wolfe obviously enjoys his SF/Fantasy elements too much to appeal to someone who doesn't enjoy them. But I don't think most fantasy prepares you for the kind of things that Wolfe has to offer - he too often frustrates those kinds of interest. Although Wolfe admires Tolkien, I don' t think Tolkien is a deep influence. (He doesn't have anything of Tolkien's romantic melancholy.)

It's too simple to see Vance as frivolous and Wolfe as profound. Vance for example has a deep-seated suspicion of moralism and hypocrisy. I think the appearance of profundity in Wolfe is that Vance's psychology is rather more straightforward: characters in Vance generally know what they want. Wolfe's characters generally aren't fully aware of what they want any more than they're fully aware of anything else. One reason why none of them are capable of telling a story straight.

I think Vance is best in his fantasy really. SF requires some kind of genuflection in the direction of plausibility that dampens Vance's imagination too much.

I think that TBotNS has flaws that severely damage its appeal to non-sf readers: the writing isn't conventionally "beautiful," and the book doesn't yield satisfaction without really picking at the details and figuring out what 's going on. To non-SF readers, I think it's offputting without seeming "important" or "literary."

Even still, I thought the result was ultimately a disappointment, but still impressive. But definitely nothing on the order of Ulysses. If SF has anything on the order of Ulysses (in terms of temperament, conceit, structure, self-awareness, theme), it would probably be Samuel Delany's Dhalgren. Though Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker is pretty incredible as well.

I also love that quotation about the sands being glass. These little pleasures keep coming as the series progresses. There's another offhand remark about a time when all the mountains were not carved into the likeness of various tyrants. And what about the alien beings that travel backwards in time? My favourite bit is still to come, where Severian fights an alzabo, the creature from which they make the cannibal-ritual serum, speaking in the voice of a child it's eaten. Somehow the successive books just continue to deepen the mysteries.

I wonder if the dodgy accents were part of a Clever Strategy. The character narrating the book's not sure who he is any more, and we are slowly figuring out why as we read. Wolfe seems to be attempting to write in the persona of a not-very-good writer, a high-risk plan even by his standards. The hint we got from the end of the Long Sun books and the start of the Short Sun is that Nettle was responsible for Horn's writing-style being readable. Nine times out of ten when Wolfe does something like this it's to hide a vital piece of information in plain sight. I worry, after a third reading, that this was the tenth time.

Book Review Gene Wolfe Jack Vance SF = Speculative Fiction Tolkien Vance ( )