Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29111 in Books
• Published on: 1994-10-15
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Amazon.com
One of the most acclaimed "science fantasies" ever, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is a long, magical novel in four volumes. Shadow & Claw contains the first two: The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, which respectively won the World Fantasy and Nebula Awards.

This is the first-person narrative of Severian, a lowly apprentice torturer blessed and cursed with a photographic memory, whose travels lead him through the marvels of far-future Urth, and who--as revealed near the beginning--eventually becomes his land's sole ruler or Autarch. On the surface it's a colorful story with all the classic ingredients: growing up, adventure, sex, betrayal, murder, exile, battle, monsters, and mysteries to be solved. (Only well into book 2 do we realize what saved Severian's life in chapter 1.) For lovers of literary allusions, they are plenty here: a Dickensian cemetery scene, a torture-engine from Kafka, a wonderful library out of Borges, and familiar fables changed by eons of retelling. Wolfe evokes a chilly sense of time's vastness, with an age-old, much-restored painting of a golden-visored "knight," really an astronaut standing on the moon, and an ancient citadel of metal towers, actually grounded spacecraft. Even the sun is senile and dying, and so Urth needs a new sun.

The Book of the New Sun is almost heartbreakingly good, full of riches and subtleties that improve with each rereading. It is Gene Wolfe's masterpiece. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk

Review
"The Book of the New Sun establishes [Wolfe's] pre-eminence, pure and simple....The Book of the New Sun contains elements of Spenserian allegory, Swiftian satire, Dickensian social consciousness and Wagnerian mythology. Wolfe creates a truly alien social order that the reader comes to experience from within...once into it, there is no stopping." --The New York Times Book Review

"Magic stuff...a masterpiece...the best science fiction I've read in years!" --Ursula K. Le Guin

"Arguably the best piece of literature American science fiction has yet produced." --Chicago Sun-Times

Review
"The Book of the New Sun establishes [Wolfe's] pre-eminence, pure and simple....The Book of the New Sun contains elements of Spenserian allegory, Swiftian satire, Dickensian social consciousness and Wagnerian mythology. Wolfe creates a truly alien social order that the reader comes to experience from within...once into it, there is no stopping." --The New York Times Book Review

"Magic stuff...a masterpiece...the best science fiction I've read in years!" --Ursula K. Le Guin

"Arguably the best piece of literature American science fiction has yet produced." --Chicago Sun-Times

Customer Reviews

A Book of Gold
Someone once wrote of Ulysees that Joyce cannot be read only reread. I think the same is true of Gene Wolfe, and in particular the Book of the New Sun, which like Joyce's work is an intricate narrative labyrinth. Unlike Joyce, however, Wolfe, has a interesting story to tell and tells it superbly. I have read and reread the Book of the New Sun several times and each time I come away with that dreaming sense of the sublime.

I think this is so because the Book of the New Sun is a great work in the genre of Science Fiction and Fantasy, but it also transcends those vague gray boundaries and rises from the level of simple entertainment to touch the realm of art and myth. The character of Severian is as complex and intriguing as any portrait we will find in Stendahl or Tolstoy and the style is as beautiful and elaborate as a Byzantine mosaic. The story moves swiftly full of action and pathos and yet following the convolutions of the narrator's pen draws us into a world of ideas as exciting in their own way as the story itself.

Stories are, I think, gifts that we give to the larger human world. They are gifts which can shape us delight us and create and renew us as persons. This, at any rate, has been my experience of The Book of the New Sun. I can think of no higher praise.

Absolutely Wonderful!
This is the opus of one of the greatest contemporary American writers. If you have a soul, you'll love it!

I just don't get it, I suppose
First let me say that Gene Wolfe writes wonderful prose and that's the only thing that kept me going to the end. Go into this book without expectations and I imagine it could be a very good read. I went into it believing that it may be on par with the fantasy worlds of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, thanks to otherwise reliable reviewers and an abundance of 5-star ratings. It is not even close.

First off, it lacks the epic scope of those masterpieces. If Tolkien's Middle-Earth has the scope of Eurasia, Wolfe's Urth is about as big as the state of Massachusetts. In LOTR, a character had to send messages through other characters, then search for months just to meet up with someone they were looking for. On Urth, you can seemingly run into the same person (and persons) multiple times just by stepping into a building that's along your path. By the time I was into the second book, I knew that when Severian met a character, he was going to "accidentally" come across them again. It's pretty ridiculous. I think the timeline of this story is probably supposed to span half a decade, but it seemed less than half a year. More like a month. Contact between characters is contrived, and therefore the scope of the landscape seems almost claustrophobic.

In relation to this lack of time and distance, the theme of Fate seems to be Wolfe's main goal within this story. That's why Severian meets up with most characters more than once, and some characters half a dozen times. Well, Fate don't work that way. Fate has just as much to do with NOT meeting up with someone again as it does with reuniting. Sure, the narrator is looking back, but even in reminiscence, the coincidences become ridiculous. I lost my suspension of disbelief early on, and I never got it back.

The narrator, Severian, who happens to be the main character, is the main flaw of this series. I think what Wolfe was trying for was to give us an unreliable narrator who believes he has a photographic memory. It could have been an insanely brilliant concept, but it's just not taken far enough. Instead of showing us some sort of struggle inside Severian, I was shown the struggle to keep reading the words of an utter bore. Severian is a braggart and a jerk. He's in love with every woman he meets, and you're going to hear about it. He's been through the ringer, but is neither a hero nor a coward. He's pretty brave at times, but a wuss in general. He switches between matter-of-fact stoicism to whiney romanticism, from wise philosopher to naïve pawn. It sounds like it may be interesting, but it's not. And it's tough to get through four books of it all. In the end I don't care about Severian in the least. I just want him to shut up and move along to his freakin' destiny already. Leave me alone so I can go read something else.

As far as the series goes: Book one is great; Book two is a sharp turn in the wrong direction; Book three heads back the right way; but then Book four gets convoluted in tying up loose strings. In the end, it's better than a lot of Sci-Fi and Fantasy out there (the inane serial stuff), but not even close to the classics and the masterpieces. It's got unique concepts and nice style, but it's an insult to Tolkien to even put this set on the same shelf. And it's certainly not the best fantasy literature of the last century, as some would have you believe.