6 ms·

Wolfe wrote some incredible masterpieces. The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, and some of his 1970s short stories deserve a place in 20th-century serious literat

Wolfe wrote some incredible masterpieces. The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, and some of his 1970s short stories deserve a place in 20th-century serious literature in general. The Book of the New Sun stunned me as a teenage reader, and I fondly reread the book every few years (that said, Severian’s habit of shagging everyone he meets doesn’t hold up well in this day and age, and I have seen female readers call The Book of the New Sun a risible male fantasy). However, there is no doubt that Wolfe’s powers declined over time, and homages to him inevitably focus on the works from decades ago. Besides their intricate plots, those early works had incredible prose, just as rich as Proust, Nabokov, or Faulkner. Once the 1980s came in, suddenly Wolfe’s prose became plainer, more workaday. Then, his novels increasingly started to milk the “unreliable narrator” gimmick but without much else to them. Furthermore, it is not even clear that readers are appropriately given all clues to figure out the real action and themes. I have spoken to multiple Wolfe superfans who worry that A Land Across, for example, ultimately turned out to be turgid and impenetrable, and that Wolfe’s publisher accepted it just on blind faith that readers got earlier Wolfe novels, so surely there was something to this one too. (I know the principle of de mortus nil nisi bonum and I don’t want to be too harsh about the man, but this is probably the only opportunity for a long time that the Hacker News community will get to discuss his work.)

Finnucane 8y ago
I recently reread Book of the New Sun for the first time in more than twenty years, and yeah, it makes a different impression at 54 than it did at 17, not least because it was familiar now and new then. The characters, especially Severian, quite often act in ways that are not admirable, and I can be pretty sure that Gene intended that we see some of the not admirable traits as actual flaws. He is not, for instance, suggesting that sleeping with your grandmother is a good idea. He wasn't going to make it that easy for us. But Peace and Fifth Head of Ceberus, and much of his short fiction remain classic.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  He is not, for instance, suggesting that sleeping with your grandmother is a good idea. Well, that is how Fry was able to save the universe from the Brain Spawn.
  - jefurii 8y ago
    Yep he did do the nasty in the past-y. Oh My.
username223 8y ago
I read some of The Book of the New Sun many years ago, and was mostly just disgusted by the story of an executioner becoming a tyrant. Is it worth taking another look?
- friedman23 8y ago
  If the premise is enough to ruin your enjoyment of the book then you shouldn't read it.
- SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
  I don't think that summary is accurate. The Book of the New Sun is deep, heady, high literature, not an indulgent fantasy adventure. It reads like a bit like a mythological holy book, authored by the supposed prophet - and you kind of have to read it like one, to get anything out of it - as if you're doing a deep textual exegesis. Its not A Game of Thrones. It was definitely an interesting story, though it could be a chore to get through at some points, and I'm still kind of trying to figure out if I actually like it or not, or how much I actually really understood. It definitely won't appeal to many or even most people, I'd say. Its a heavy, somber experience, very little humor. I will say, upon starting a re-read, it felt like nearly every word/sentence/paragraph in its initial chapters were impressively thick with double meanings, foreshadowings, and themes that only really become clear after finishing the story. PS - the audiobooks are really well done - the narrator is just perfect.
  - username223 8y ago
    That's fair. Like I said, it was a long time ago, and I didn't finish the series. I just remember it often being a chore to read, with a loathsome main character. Maybe it made a larger point that I missed at the time, but I was a kid reading David Eddings. PS - I'll check out the audiobooks. I hope they're as good as Rob Inglis' reading of The Lord of the Rings. It may not count as "deep, heady, high literature," but he does an incredible job.
    - svachalek 8y ago
muckrakerz 8y ago
This misses the character of Severian as others here note. A character need not be a paragon of modern virtue to be good in his setting.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  What bothers those female readers is not the behaviour of the morally flawed protagonist in itself. Rather, it is that the author seems oddly bent on making his protagonist use women for sex time after time, and that says something about the author. Furthermore, the work lacks a female voice that would serve as a corrective to Severian and put his actions in a clearer moral light. Now, one might disagree with all that criticism, and I remain a fan of the The Book of the New Sun myself. But one cannot deny that within 1970s and 1980s science fiction and fantasy, there is a huge difference between Wolfe and the feminist writers of those decades like Ursula K. LeGuin, Storm Constantine, and Samuel R. Delaney. In our modern age, when critics and ordinary readers have often come to expect the gender concerns introduced by those feminist authors, Wolfe's work can strike some readers as problematic.
  - muckrakerz 8y ago
    I've found that people that complain about this often gloss over the fact that Baldanders is stealing bodies and making grotesqueries of children that he rapes. Plenty of bad things happen in those books.
  - root_axis 8y ago
    > the author seems oddly bent on making his protagonist use women for sex time after time, and that says something about the author All writings say something about their author, so that statement doesn't tell us much. Just because an author writes a flawed character does not mean that they are endorsing the character's flawed traits. There is also narrative meaning behind Severian's sexual behavior. This reasoning is like suggesting that Vladimir Nabokov was a pedophile because he wrote Lolita. I will also point out (as noted in the article) that LeGuin has praised BOTNS as a masterpiece. > there is a huge difference between Wolfe and the feminist writers of those decades like Ursula K. LeGuin, Storm Constantine, and Samuel R. Delaney. Differences exist between authors, this is not a surprise and not undesirable. > the work lacks a female voice that would serve as a corrective to Severian and put his actions in a clearer moral light. This is intentional. One of the book's primary themes is the exploration of Severian's amoral and immoral behavior and the sterile and sophisticated justifications delivered as a 1st person narrative as a way to explain away his horrifying decisions to the reader; he is a rapist, torturer, and executioner that ascends to the highest levels of power while wrestling with the flaws that are revealed through his own masculinity. Severian's repeated sexual trysts culminate in his near castration as a direct rebuttal to his self-embodied caricature of masculinity and as a representation for all of humanity. A "corrective female voice" would bludgeon us with what we're supposed to extract through analysis of the story. A choice quote from the books: > Love is a long labor for torturers; and even if I were to dissolve the guild, Eata would become a torturer, as all men are, bound by the contempt for wealth without which a man is less than a man, inflicting pain by his nature, whether he willed it or not. It is a fictional autobiography of a bad man who is forced to come to terms with his own toxic masculinity in order to bring the new sun (or be castrated and relegated to the ash heap of history)
ArchBang 8y ago
I might doubt your doubt somewhat. As often with Gene Wolfe, it's not clear to me that it is his powers which have waned, or that it is my own folly in not rising to the challenge of the puzzle. There's so very often something lurking in the shadows after all, and (in my incomplete experience) his works always benefit from a re-read. For one more recent work with more workaday prose, The Sorcerer's House, it helps to follow a 'superfan' and consider it a rewriting of the lamia of Corinth. There certainly is so much more there than meets the eye; as dense as BoTNS. I find it more fruitful to take the ostensible lack of clues to figure out the 'real' deal as challenge for us (or the braver readers of the future) to rise up to. There's plenty good in late Wolfe, just deeper hidden, perhaps.

Finnucane 8y ago

I recently reread Book of the New Sun for the first time in more than twenty years, and yeah, it makes a different impression at 54 than it did at 17, not least because it was familiar now and new then. The characters, especially Severian, quite often act in ways that are not admirable, and I can be pretty sure that Gene intended that we see some of the not admirable traits as actual flaws. He is not, for instance, suggesting that sleeping with your grandmother is a good idea. He wasn't going to make it that easy for us. But Peace and Fifth Head of Ceberus, and much of his short fiction remain classic.

jessaustin 8y ago
He is not, for instance, suggesting that sleeping with your grandmother is a good idea. Well, that is how Fry was able to save the universe from the Brain Spawn.
- jefurii 8y ago
  Yep he did do the nasty in the past-y. Oh My.

username223 8y ago

I read some of The Book of the New Sun many years ago, and was mostly just disgusted by the story of an executioner becoming a tyrant. Is it worth taking another look?

friedman23 8y ago
If the premise is enough to ruin your enjoyment of the book then you shouldn't read it.
SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
I don't think that summary is accurate. The Book of the New Sun is deep, heady, high literature, not an indulgent fantasy adventure. It reads like a bit like a mythological holy book, authored by the supposed prophet - and you kind of have to read it like one, to get anything out of it - as if you're doing a deep textual exegesis. Its not A Game of Thrones. It was definitely an interesting story, though it could be a chore to get through at some points, and I'm still kind of trying to figure out if I actually like it or not, or how much I actually really understood. It definitely won't appeal to many or even most people, I'd say. Its a heavy, somber experience, very little humor. I will say, upon starting a re-read, it felt like nearly every word/sentence/paragraph in its initial chapters were impressively thick with double meanings, foreshadowings, and themes that only really become clear after finishing the story. PS - the audiobooks are really well done - the narrator is just perfect.
- username223 8y ago
  That's fair. Like I said, it was a long time ago, and I didn't finish the series. I just remember it often being a chore to read, with a loathsome main character. Maybe it made a larger point that I missed at the time, but I was a kid reading David Eddings. PS - I'll check out the audiobooks. I hope they're as good as Rob Inglis' reading of The Lord of the Rings. It may not count as "deep, heady, high literature," but he does an incredible job.
  - svachalek 8y ago

muckrakerz 8y ago

This misses the character of Severian as others here note. A character need not be a paragon of modern virtue to be good in his setting.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago
What bothers those female readers is not the behaviour of the morally flawed protagonist in itself. Rather, it is that the author seems oddly bent on making his protagonist use women for sex time after time, and that says something about the author. Furthermore, the work lacks a female voice that would serve as a corrective to Severian and put his actions in a clearer moral light. Now, one might disagree with all that criticism, and I remain a fan of the The Book of the New Sun myself. But one cannot deny that within 1970s and 1980s science fiction and fantasy, there is a huge difference between Wolfe and the feminist writers of those decades like Ursula K. LeGuin, Storm Constantine, and Samuel R. Delaney. In our modern age, when critics and ordinary readers have often come to expect the gender concerns introduced by those feminist authors, Wolfe's work can strike some readers as problematic.
- muckrakerz 8y ago
  I've found that people that complain about this often gloss over the fact that Baldanders is stealing bodies and making grotesqueries of children that he rapes. Plenty of bad things happen in those books.
- root_axis 8y ago
  > the author seems oddly bent on making his protagonist use women for sex time after time, and that says something about the author All writings say something about their author, so that statement doesn't tell us much. Just because an author writes a flawed character does not mean that they are endorsing the character's flawed traits. There is also narrative meaning behind Severian's sexual behavior. This reasoning is like suggesting that Vladimir Nabokov was a pedophile because he wrote Lolita. I will also point out (as noted in the article) that LeGuin has praised BOTNS as a masterpiece. > there is a huge difference between Wolfe and the feminist writers of those decades like Ursula K. LeGuin, Storm Constantine, and Samuel R. Delaney. Differences exist between authors, this is not a surprise and not undesirable. > the work lacks a female voice that would serve as a corrective to Severian and put his actions in a clearer moral light. This is intentional. One of the book's primary themes is the exploration of Severian's amoral and immoral behavior and the sterile and sophisticated justifications delivered as a 1st person narrative as a way to explain away his horrifying decisions to the reader; he is a rapist, torturer, and executioner that ascends to the highest levels of power while wrestling with the flaws that are revealed through his own masculinity. Severian's repeated sexual trysts culminate in his near castration as a direct rebuttal to his self-embodied caricature of masculinity and as a representation for all of humanity. A "corrective female voice" would bludgeon us with what we're supposed to extract through analysis of the story. A choice quote from the books: > Love is a long labor for torturers; and even if I were to dissolve the guild, Eata would become a torturer, as all men are, bound by the contempt for wealth without which a man is less than a man, inflicting pain by his nature, whether he willed it or not. It is a fictional autobiography of a bad man who is forced to come to terms with his own toxic masculinity in order to bring the new sun (or be castrated and relegated to the ash heap of history)

ArchBang 8y ago

I might doubt your doubt somewhat. As often with Gene Wolfe, it's not clear to me that it is his powers which have waned, or that it is my own folly in not rising to the challenge of the puzzle. There's so very often something lurking in the shadows after all, and (in my incomplete experience) his works always benefit from a re-read. For one more recent work with more workaday prose, The Sorcerer's House, it helps to follow a 'superfan' and consider it a rewriting of the lamia of Corinth. There certainly is so much more there than meets the eye; as dense as BoTNS. I find it more fruitful to take the ostensible lack of clues to figure out the 'real' deal as challenge for us (or the braver readers of the future) to rise up to. There's plenty good in late Wolfe, just deeper hidden, perhaps.