THE URTH OF THE NEW SUN - GENE WOLFE

Man, fuck JRR Tolkien, fuck George RR Martin, fuck LITTLE, BIG even, if the Solar Cycle can be considered one book or one series and if you consider them Fantasy not Sci-Fi then it’s easily the greatest Fantasy series ever written. If it’s Sci-Fi then it’s the grandest achievement in Sci-Fi, or at least tied with PKD. I’m not even done with the damn thing yet, though the end is in sight. The whole Solar Cycle consists of The Book of the New Sun series of 4 books, which I’ve read, another series called The Book of The Long Sun, also 4 books and also read by me, then an addendum or coda to the BotNS quartet, i.e. THE URTH OF THE NEW SUN, which I’m currently reviewing, and finally another series of three novels collectively called The Book of the Short Sun which I’ll read soon to polish off the whole thing. Let’s not even consider the handful of short stories that are set in the Solar Cycle world. And even that accounting that doesn’t even take into account the real length of this achievement since to read Wolfe is to reread Wolfe. I don't think I’ve ever read an author more confident that he knows what he’s doing and has no problem asking his reader to do a lot of work or to spend pages and pages without knowing what is going on. I’m guessing I caught about half of what was going on. I actually read this one with an accompanying podcast, Alzabo Soup (s/o to them), which gives each chapter a ~1hr episode and goes through it. It was an interesting way to read a book, especially a book as involved and complicated as this one, and especially since it’s been a few years since I finished the core 4 books in the Book of the New Sun tetralogy, to which this acts as an addendum. Apparently, it’s widely (or as widely as opinions about a book a few entries into a 12 book series) considered to be weak or a letdown compared to the others. People complain that it gives too much away, which I find truly insane. Maybe I will feel different when I go back to read the cycle and pick up the subtle ways that the revelations in this book were artfully implied. Not to go too deep on the plot but our hero, Severian, picks up where he left of, headed to Yesod, a separate universe, to stand trial and see if he can bring a new sun back to Urth, which is dying. This being Wolfe, he undercuts this almost immediately and tells us without any tension being built that Severian passed the trial and it’s all good. There’s almost ¾ of the book left at this point and I started to wonder what the rest of this thing would be. No need to worry, Severian hops around time and universes weaving in and out of the events of the previous books and adding to our (or at least my) sense of the overall arch of plot and theme w/r/t the BotNS series. I did not feel like this gave anything away to me, but that might just be because I’m dumb and missed some of the revels in the previous books. I dig the super far-out space stuff, especially since, as you might be able to tell from the name “Yesod,” it’s all Kabbalah flavored. I love the tone of deep, deep strangeness that Wolfe is able to conjure, he really has no equivalent in terms of style. It’s also amazing to me that this book was written before the internet which makes his vocab and deep references even more impressive. I was able to quickly google a strange word and learn that it’s an obscure, less-common variant name for an already obscure Babylonian fish/wisdom god or the scientific name for some ice age beast. How the fuck did he write this thing? The only thing I noticed the smarter people haven’t commented on already has to do with how Severian calls himself White aka YT and muses on how his skin isn’t actually white (the color) but that’s what people call it and they value it which means that YTness has survived a couple thousand years into the future in Severians world. I had assumed everyone was quite pale by 2021 standards given the dying sun but I’ll have to think more about it. These books give me this strange feeling that is unique in my experience reading, the feeling that I really want to reread these things. The feeling that I already know that the rereads will be so much richer, and that this first go-through is basically pro forma. And I’m not even done with the whole cycle, there are still 3 books for me to finish before I begin to reread these things. The task of a lifetime. Either way, Wolfe remains undefeated, I can’t believe one human wrote these things. 1 divine year.