This was read a few years ago and I can only say that my notes at the time said this volume was " was progressively more and more surreal" so that I took a break before commencing on the author's Book of the Long Sun series. ( )

This is some strange stuff I didn't really understand - at the same time found it great reading - haha. ( )

pure unadulterated kino of the highest order. the crowning gem of the white race ( )

I enjoyed this book but not as much as it’s predecessor, The Book of the Nee Sun. I am not sure it would make sense or be a worthwhile reading experience without first reading BotNS. UoftNS answers explains (obliquely) some of the mysteries set in the BotNS. But Urth also leaves something for the reader to mull over and speculate on well after the book is done. As is typical, I think for a Gene Wolfe book. ( )

This book is perhaps best thought of as volume five of the four-volume Book of the New Sun. As the book opens, we find Severian, now Autarch of Urth for the past ten years, on board a mighty ship sailing the tides of space (and time) to the planet Yesod, where he will undergo trials to determine if he will finally be the one to bring the New Sun back to Urth and reinvigorate the planet. He has numerous transcendent encounters with himself and others and finally returns to Urth, again through time and space, bringing the White Fountain that will renew the Old Sun.

I first read this book not long after publication. It had been a couple of years since I'd finished the earlier four volumes of The Book of the New Sun, and so had forgotten many of the situations and incidental characters. This was a mistake. This book needs to be read as a pendant to the earlier novels, because it references many of the minor - and not so minor - characters of those books and their situations. This time around, I re-read it not long after a re-read of the earlier novels and the events made more sense.

But not much.

Severian's trials on Yesod grant him powers which he will use to turn back time on Urth. This means that the narrative is disjointed and things happen for apparently no good reason. By this time, we are well into the territory of "any sufficiently advanced science will look like magic"; indeed, so well into that territory that the science is pretty much dispensed with. We are left with the writing, which is deep, and baroque, and retains the voice, memories and experiences of Severian, as well as the personalities he has carried within himself since The Claw of the Conciliator.

Wolfe is taking no prisoners here. We became used to time elapsing between the different books in the New Sun cycle, so a ten year gap between Citadel and this book should come as no surprise. (And the intervening period is filled in with a flashback in due course.) But when we get to the last quarter of this book, narrative causality is discarded, and we enter a strange sort of Xeno's Paradox world where the more we read, the further away the ending of the book seems to get, until we suddenly get to it.

Is this book essential to understanding the rest of The Book of the New Sun? I doubt it. I'm about to tackle (for the first time) the following four novels in the Solar Cycle, The Book of the Long Sun . From what I've heard, I doubt this will have been useful for those books, either. But there is so much referencing back to the events of the earlier novels that there have to be insights here to be unearthed (or even unUrthed), if the reader can take the time to find them. Perhaps this was the whole point of the exercise, to provide the reader with a puzzle to solve. It may take me another re-read to get that, though.

Despite all that, I enjoyed this read up to the point where I hit the Xeno's Paradox section in the last 40 or so pages. I started reading science fiction because I found ways that the genre at its best would excite my imagination; understanding was sometimes secondary. And that was certainly the case here. But whatever you do, don't try to read this as a standalone novel! ( )