The Book Of The New Sun

 "The Greatest SF Novel of the last century." - Neal Gaiman
















  The Book of the New Sun is Gene Wolfe's masterpiece series, and taken as a whole it is easily the greatest novel I've ever read.

 This is the story of Severian, member of the guild of torturers who wanders the lands of Urth.
Yes a torturer.  When in need of money he can use his well honed skills for such as acts as public beheading, and dismemberment.  To clarify, it is never so gruesome that anyone would be put off, and their is no SM or anything like that.

 The language and prose of this novel are of the absolute highest quality, containing a lyrical beauty rarely found in even the most famous of works.

   Now, Wolfe assumes the reader is highly intelligent and knowledgeable.  He assumes your vocabulary is quite large, and even if it is, you will almost certainly have to look up some words(or just infer from the context).

   The novel is told in first person, with Severian claiming he has a perfect memory, but a careful study will show that he does at times contradict himself demonstrating that he is an unreliable narrator.  The observant reader will find many clues are embedded in the text that tell far more of Severian and his world than just his words.


 Now this IS a SF novel, not a fantasy piece.  Severian may see magic, but the reader should know better.  Severian lives in a dying world, an Earth so long gone that technology is magic and the sun is begins to burn the world.

 It was originally released as four novels, "The Shadow of the Torturer", "The Claw of the Conciliator", "The Sword of the Lictor", and "The Citidel of the Autarch".  In recent times the series has been republished in a far more respectable looking edition, comprised of the two novels shown above(each contains two of the original novels).

 This is a definitive work of the 20th century, however unknown it may be to the mainstream, and should not be missed.

10/10

The Wizard Knight

Gene Wolfe's two part series, begging with "The Knight" and ending with "The Wizard" is brilliant, this is Wolfe at his best as in "The Book of the New Sun".

 Like most Wolfe novels it is told from the first person perspective, with an unreliable narrator who calls himself Sir Able of the High Heart.

 We know that Able is originally from our world, but as a young boy he wanders in the woods and somehow finds himself in another world.  This is a pretty generic starting point, and when I first read it I was afraid Wolfe might have cast his lot in with all the generic fantasy writers of the world.  Thankfully this is not the case.

 Able is writing the story as a letter to his brother Ben, who lives in our world, and whom he has not seen since he left it.

 Able has the body of a man, for he was aged by an aelf named Disire, but he is in many ways still a child, and his recollection of events as he writes are often warped by this.

 Wolfe crafts an amazing world based on Norse mythology, a world with multiple levels, where each levels inhabitants serve as the Gods of the level bellow.

 Wolfe also creates some terrific characters aside from Able, a talking cat named Mani, and a magical dog named Gylf that can transform into a terrifying beast, Gylf can speak but rarely choses to do so.

At first glance, with very simple sounding titles, this may appear to be a children's book.  It is not, Wolfe is a very deep writer, he writes without holding back or coddling the reader.  Still this is one of Wolfe's more accessible works, so it may be a better starting point than "The Book of the New Sun".

10/10