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For all those who are saying now "Who's Gene Wolfe??" I strongly, strongly, urge you to read his tetralogy "The Book of The New Sun," it's one of the finest sci-fi/fantasy series I've ever read and I have a pretty damn critical taste when it comes to literature. (not trying to sound snobby by the way, I just don't praise books like these lightly or without good reason)
So I love Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion, Martian Chronicles (and other Ray Bradbury books), Ursula K Le Guin(Earthsea), Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle, Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse Five etc), Dune, Game of Thrones series, Neuromancer, Asimov (basically everything but especially Foundation series), Terry Pratchett, and so on...
And I consider Gene Wolfe's work to be on a par with all of the above, and I would say he takes sci-fi to another realm. The Book of The New Sun is the first sci-fi series I read where I thought, "this is literature," as in, comparable with books by Dostoyevsky and Hemingway, and I don't believe this is hyperbole, it's just that good.
The other amazing thing about The Book of The New Sun is that each time you read it you realize you missed about 100 things in the previous read-throughs, there is so much "hidden" in plain sight and the subsequent read-throughs are like reading a completely different book.
So just read it please.
Edited to include Le Guin as another example of "genre fiction" as literature.
I would concur with this. Wolfe and Le Guin, to me, both write sci-fi/fantasy as literature while also closely using themes that most would consider "genre fiction".
That makes sense. I didn't like Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, or Wolfe.
I do not think your taste is critical if you enjoy Game of Thrones prose. Gene Wolfe's is far above. GoT is average fantasy prose and nowhere near literary fiction quality.
I read just the first book in the "Book of the New Sun" and found it quite boring.
And my books are quite similar to yours with few exceptions:
- Martian Chronicles - interesting concept but eventually it goes into some ecological + anarchist sci-fi which I'm not a fun of
- Earthsea - good, but it is mostly for teens, young adults (I read it as a teen and loved it, reread it years later and it was so so)
- Dune - the whole series, each book is unique in its own way
- Kurt Vonnegut - never read anything by that author
- Hemingway - I read just The Old Man and the Sea (or actually was forced in school to read it) - and this was a short novel about basically nothing, boring as it can be
And books I really liked that are not on your list:
- Cixin Liu - Three Body Problem and the rest in the series - I loved it, never read anything like it
- Anything by Naomi Novik (so just two books right now)
- Vernon - A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep
- N.K. Jemis - Stone Sky and the other two in the series
- Ann Leckie - Ancillary Justice (but only this, the other book was worse)
- (Almost) Anything by Philip K. Dick
That's from my recent reads (so few last years).
The final book even concludes with the narrator/protagonist suggesting the reader re-read the books to grasp their true meaning. IMO, two reads minimum are necessary.
Haven't read Gene Wolfe (yet), but I can strongly recommend 'Hyperion Cantos' by Dan Simmons.
I enjoyed Book of the New Sun but I’d say it’s quite a bit darker than most of the rest of the books you’ve named. Torture is a very central theme.
Thanks for the recommendation. The foundation trilogy stands among the best for me but if you say Wolfe isnt beneath Asimov, that is high praise.
I also found the book of the new sun dull. I don't agree it's a good book at all.
Hyperion written in 1989 is a much better book and arguably more sophisticated. But hey it's just an opinion.
I've heard Gene wolf is a good writer but after trying the book of the new sun I'm not tempted further. It probably comes down to personal taste.
I have only one upvote to give ...
A few years ago I had the privilege of seeing Gene Wolfe speak, in a modest-size room at DragonCon.
He said that as part of his Pringles work he and a lab partner were doing some kind of experimentation that involved a lot of steam and humidity. I forget why. Their lab was a fairly small temporary enclosure, in the middle of a big space. Gene dealt with the vapor by wearing a lab coat. His partner, muscular and six feet seven inches tall, just wore shorts.
The company liked to take tour groups through the area. One day, Gene opened the door and a tour group stopped and stared. He realized how they looked: him in a white lab coat, an apparently-naked giant behind him, steam clouds billowing out. So he said "Not now Igor, there are people here," and closed the door.
Gene Wolfe is one of my favourite authors, and his works more than most reward careful (re-)readings. To that end, I can highly recommend Alzabo Soup [1], a podcast delving into first Book of the New Sun (and currently Book of the Long Sun) in very deep detail (it took them a couple of years, with weekly 2 hour episodes to make it through BoNW). I reread along with the podcasts, and it was well worth it.
The podcast and the YouTube videos on Wolfe really make me rue Google's modern algorithm that obscures 1990s and early-millennium content. Pretty much all the mysteries of the BotNS were elucidated on the Gene Wolfe mailing list (which was archived) and a handful of fan websites. It would be much more efficient use of a reader's time to go through these instead of podcasts or videos, which aren't information-dense media and are duplicating effort and yet falling short of earlier commentaries.
Thank you for this. I've recently been enjoying the Kingslingers podcast (in-depth read-through of Stephen King's Dark Tower series), and have been actively looking for other read-along analyses of good books. At least for Kingslingers, it has significantly increased my enjoyment of the series.
Alzabo Soup is great, as is the urth.net mailing list someone else mentioned.
https://ultan.org.uk/ is another fantastic resource for Wolfe fans.
I have read every single thing Wolfe wrote (even the limited-edition chapbooks), and I feel I should warn potential readers: he only had about a decade-long run as a writer of high art in the 1970s. I strongly recommend the early Wolfe, but the later Wolfe is a lesser author.
In that decade, Wolfe produced three large works (The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace and The Book of the New Sun) and a number of short stories where the prose was incredibly rich and beautiful, fully the equal of Proust or Nabokov. His reputation should rest on these.
But from the early 1980s, his prose became drab, lackluster. He still could impress readers with his plots that invariably featured unreliable narrators and ellipsis, but even this was gradually taken to the point of absurdity. By the turn of the millennium, he felt like a one-trick pony. His editors at Tor apparently accepted every manuscript he submitted, but the late flood of weak novels IMHO diluted his stature.
The thing that changed for Gene was that he no longer had a day job. When he was working, he'd get up at 5 am to writer for two hours before leaving for work. The whole of the Book of the New Sun was written that way. Which meant there was a certain commercial pressure to sell books, and I think his consistency flagged. I worked at Tor in the mid-to-late 1990s. I don't think that Hartwell just accepted anything he sent, the process was a little more complicated than that, because David knew what he was working on. Gene had a tendency to resist editing; once he was done with a thing it was done.
I think he had some good books in that period, but there wasn't going to be another Peace or Fifth Head of Cerebus.
I read in some interview with him or some piece about him that one of people’s biggest criticisms of New Sun was the elaborate prose. So he consciously chose to write more simply after that.
In my own view, Long Sun is as good as New Sun: I don’t think the simpler prose detracts from it, it fits the tale and Silk’s personality (to say more threatens spoilers). We see a huge yet mostly stable set of characters evolve throughout the tale. Compare with New Sun which is mostly just Severian wandering around, having adventures and occasional encounters with characters from earlier. They are very different stories. After reading both series many times, Long Sun grew to be my favorite. This could change again.
I agree that Fifth Head is fantastic, but when I tried to reread Peace I couldn’t get through it (it was apparently his own favorite). And I agree with your assessment of his post-2000 novels. I did enjoy The Sorcerer’s House and The Land Across, but neither is calling out to be read again, and their details are vague in my mind.
I deeply love the characters Wolfe has given us. The moral systems by which his characters conduct themselves have been a scaffold for my own when my parents fell short. It's writing that exceeds itself past the only sensual, becoming symbolic glories to remember continually as I live. I can't praise him enough. It's so odd to have as a tension an author of fiction staining me on one half and the Buddha's early teachings on the other. It's a tension I treasure.
I have one criticism of him and it's a strong one -- I hate it because it has locked out just about every woman I've introduced to his corpus: his treatment of women. So very many of them: Chenille, the fire nymphs, just about every one Severian sleeps with save for dear Thecla, Chenille-as-Scylla, the prostitutes of Fifth Head, Jahi, Jolenta, Hyacinth, Jesus there must be a legion more I can't recall just now... So many of them are vampish, buxom women who are either put on a pedestal or written to be beauteous victims. That's not to say strong women don't exist in his books: there are a few but it's by and large the men who are written as whole people. One woman runs around for a few hundred pages stark naked with a flimsy premise as to why.
If readers can repeatedly forgive him for these excesses, his writing can transform the way you see the world and the purpose of living in it. A small excerpt: "We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges."
I've read lots of SciFi over the years, some of it challenging. I can read hard books.
Back in the 80's I started seeing so many raves for TBotNS that I went out and bought them all at once.
About 80 pages into the first one, I was turned off, bored really. They sat on my shelf for a decade at least, before I just gave them away.
My question is this: how long did it take you to "get into" this series. Should I have plowed on further? Or tried a restart? (I read the first 100 pages of Dune about 3 times before it clicked, and I loved it all after that)
Or is it a taste/style thing, and if someone doesn't like it within 80 pages, they're not likely to enjoy the rest?
It's hard to avoid getting repeated recommendations to read Gene Wolfe if you hang out with the more old-fashioned fans of science fiction. One year I read both the New Sun novels and a "best of" collection of several dozen of Wolfe's short stories.
Wolfe had a long career and a big reputation, and he certainly was distinctive among his peers. But I found that many of his stories lean heavily into two tricks. They are occasionally effective, but encountering them in story after story in rapid succession wore me out.
The first is opening a scene with a "hook" sentence. "I was standing in line to buy a newspaper -- of course, this was before I divorced my own mother." If you've read the well-known "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," you know exactly what I mean. It can be an effective trick, but Wolfe's career is basically an exploration of how far it can take you by itself.
The second is nenuphars. It's a technique for alienation that Wolfe uses with gusto. I happened to know the trivial fact that a nenuphar is a kind of water lily, but Wolfe relies on the reader not knowing what the word means to produce the effect of alienation. So sometimes a word like "nenuphar" will be a term for a unique concept within the world of the story, and other times it will just mean "water lily, but, like alien water lily, you know?" Do not call a rabbit a smeerp.[1]
Wolfe was, of course, a Catholic and admired the writing of religious moralists like Chesterton. One short story that, to me, illustrates a lot of what Wolfe as a writer is all about is titled "The Detective of Dreams." Allow me to summarize it for you.
A wealthy client begs an old detective to stop a man from ruining his dreams. The client dreams of arriving at a vast, illustrious palace, but soon upon entering, he meets the thief, who puts an abrupt end to the pleasant vision. One by one, several more wealthy clients approach the detective, asking him to apprehend the thief. The detective goes about town in a vain attempt to find out the thief's identity. Tired, he takes a seat on a bench near a church. His weary gaze rests on a robed figure in the beautiful stained glass window. He has found the man who troubles the sleep of the wicked.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmee...
The Book of the New Sun is amazing simply for the language. I actually thought he was simply making up words until I got out a dictionary and discovered that his vocabulary simply far surpassed mine, and mine isn't terrible.
Shadow of the Torturer is one of my all time favorite books. I confess I was less impressed with the rest of the Book of the New Sun as the world seemed to constrict as it went on, rather than expand. In spite of that, I think they're all worth reading.
I love Wolfe. Which book to read first depends on your attitude towards the fantasy genre. If you're skeptical of it, I would recommend starting with the compact sci-fi short story trilogy of "Fifth Head of Cerberus" rather than the magnum opus of "The Book of the New Sun".
If Cerberus works for you, there is a ton more to chew in New Sun, and you should absolutely read it whether or not you like more mainstream fantasy works.
And if you like New Sun but haven't read Jack Vance's original take on a similar world, "Dying Earth", it's absolutely worth it. Nowhere near as deep as Wolfe, but way more funny — a truly unique voice from the golden era of sci-fi.
My favorite Wolfe, after all these years, is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_of_the_Mist - a Roman (pre-Republic, 5th C BC) soldier wandering around classical Greece, suffering daily amnesia, against which he writes notes. Also, he gets to see and interact with deities.
A novella with a pretty hard punch was Seven American Nights.
That was a good article, Wolfe has been my favorite author for years, so it was interesting to read a little about his life.
Book of the New Sun is obviously his top work, but he had some other stuff that as really damn good such as his two books series "The Knight"/"The Wizard"
Given the popularity of scifi/fantasy TV shows lately would be interesting to see someone attempt to adapt BoTN, but maybe that would be just too difficult..
I read his "On Blue's Waters", without having read anything else of his before. A lot of the references in the book were completely mysterious to me (but would not have been had I read Book of the New Sun and Book of the Long Sun.
But I loved it.
And I didn't mind that the references were mysterious to me. It added to the feeling of the book, actually, which is very melancholic, and sort of follows the Odysseus template.
Couldn't recommend the book more.
I have read and still read a lot of science fiction, literature (both ancient and modern).
I have tried to read Gene Wolfe several times. I must confess that all I obtained from his works was a sense of profound ennui.
I am prepared to admit that the fault is likely to be entirely mine, considering how many people admire Mr Wolfe's writing.
The Solar Cycle is great, but even fewer people have read Peace. I think is a genuine mid-century American literary masterpiece that should be discussed (favorably) alongside with Cheever, Updike, Sherwood Anderson, and Don Delillo. It's his ultimate puzzle box of a book, but incredibly rewarding.
For people that enjoy the intersection of hard science fiction and elaborate prose, I think it may be hard to best Greg Bear's City at the End of Time.
I read it while on holiday and listening to particularly appropriate music, which may have enhanced the experience and influenced my positive opinion. I admit that it's tough going in parts and there are a lot of obscure references, but the imagery is unparalleled.
I recommend Howl by Subheim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB49oSvLkqs
There are plenty of other earlier SF authors that fit the bill , Swift and CS Lewis for example.
And there are plenty of New Wave authors that also fit into this Ballard and SRD (Chip Delany) especially
One of my all time favorite authors in literature. The secret to enjoying Gene Wolfe is being ok with fuzziness - he’s notorious for using unreliable narrators. And don’t try too hard to figure it all out at first, just keep going. Eventually the most mysterious, awe inducing visions will enter your mind and often they’ll occur a day or two after you even read it. It’s like your mind needs a bit extra time to compile the sublime code he’s given you. He’s a straight up magician.
Nice to see something about Gene Wolfe here. I'm a big fan. I just finished re-reading The 5th Head of Cerberus and have been eyeing The Book of the New Sun series on my shelf. Probably time for a re-read of that soon.
If I may put on my pedantic hat for a second: the article writes of the world of the New Sun tetrology: "The sun is so old that it is dying." I thought it was pretty well establish that the sun was dying of unnatural causes--possibly an artificially created black hole.
I think there are many definitions of High Art here. This Is How You Lose The Time War is something I'd recommend also, to compare and contrast what is considered emotionally vivid, beautiful prose, and challenging literature in science fiction now compared to Gene Wolfe. It's super fascinating to see how some things have changed in its definition of the pinnacle of the art and how others have stayed the same.
My email address for many years has been autarch@urth.org. So that will tell many people just how much I love Gene Wolfe's work.
I wouldn't really class Wolfe's books as SF or fantasy, but more as extended puzzles. Particularly in the case of the "New Sun" books, but also with the "Long Sun" ones, you spend a lot of time trying to work out what the heck is going on - and most times failing. But they are definitely well worth reading.
I'm very fond of Gene Wolfe, but for people who want an intro to his oeuvre I would strongly recommend "There Are Doors" over Book of the New Sun. Not because I dislike BotNS, but it's a real door-stopper slab of a tetralogy (a pentalogy if you count "Urth").
To me There Are Doors really punches way above its weight.
Gene Wolfe's short-form stories are magnificent, and in some cases exceed his long-form novels/novellas.
There are numerous collections available, some focus on horror, others literary sf, and others just an all-around mix. I can't recommend them enough.
Often they include background regarding what he wrote, or why, or who he wrote it for, where it was first published, and what not.
For novels that don't get as much acclaim as the BotNS, or FHoC, I highly recommend the Soldier series. More wonderful mystery hidden in plain sight.
Not related and slightly off topic, but here's a recent reddit thread, from a subreddit called ShittyGeneWolfe. Worth reading for the giggles.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ShittyGeneWolfe/comments/k58ar4/lis...
Also recommend The Book of the Long Sun and its sequel, set loosely in the same universe as Book of the New Sun.
He was an industrial engineer by training, and was a senior editor on the staff of the journal Plant Engineering. This always tickles me given how that has to be the absolute nether pole of his own writing.
Gene Wolfe’s work is great, and I feel he is appreciated by many HNers. But one author I think is too seldom mentioned and read is Ballard. His take on science fiction is very interesting, often working on a more psychological level.
No mention of his amazing Soldier in the Mist series.
Wolfe is great, some of his works are the best of the genre, but elevating sci-fi to high art was Lem's project not his.
Also I must add that the assertion in itself is plainly wrong. Look at "Gene Wolfe" entries in the New York Review of Books and you will find none. Gene Wolfe might be considered as "High Art" by his fans, but that only means they don't read the New York Review of Books - and don't know much about literature for most of them.
Have to recommend 'World at War' series by Harry Turtledove. It's like watching paint dry, it repeats itself, somehow, but, what's better in a HODL, don't actively trade -environment? I love it. Enjoy the kukuriknich and all the other skits dudes. Harry for life. Guns of the South is pretty good too! I'll try this gene wolf bs, it seems great.
Well that's certainly dismissive for all the other authors who wrote science fiction before him. It's also cultish, and probably wrong given that I find his books sluggish and boring, with the psychological acumen of an american high school teenager.
I find it hard to appreciate art that revels in torture, graphic violence and emotional abuse as an end unto itself.
If you want an example of science fiction as high art, personally I would suggest Vernor Vinge (specifically A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky) and Ursula Le Guin.