Stephen Palmer This is an amended version of an article I wrote almost twenty years ago for the British BSFA magazine Vector. The original version was entitled Looking Behind the Sun: Religious Implications of Gene Wolfe’s “The Book of the New Sun” and was published in the August 1991 edition. The Book of the New [...]
Michael Andre-Driussi examines the wordlist of the Japanese lexicon for The Book of the New Sun.
Republishing electronic copies of Jeremy Crampton’s 1980s Wolfe fanzine THE BOOK OF GOLD.
Michael Andre-Driussi’s 90s essay, written for the proposed Clute collection of essays on Wolfe, but never published until now
by Michael Andre-Driussi 1. The Strange Bear Man at the Threshold The first time I read The Urth of the New Sun, one scene tantalized me more than any other. I could see just enough to know that there was a great deal I could not see yet. The symbols were there, I just could [...]
by Robert Borski I’ve now had the opportunity to read Peter Wright’s “Confounding the Skin and the Mask” several times and it continues to generate much thought.
by Peter Wright Since its publication in 1972, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe’s collection of three inter-linked novellas, has earned a reputation for being the author’s most perplexing single volume. Such a reputation is entirely justified since ambiguity is the watchword to the text. More significantly, it is also an organising principle of [...]
by Jeremy Crampton Abstract This document briefly examines the use of torture and confession in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and how it both differs from and reflects actual historical practice (at least in Europe and America). It is not the purpose of these notes to provide a full or sustained argument, merely [...]
By Nick Gevers Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the Long Sun (1993-6) is a deeply complex expression of momentum: the momentum of faith, of history, of escape, of understanding. Science Fiction is replete with texts that involve such accelerations of vision and concept; but Wolfe, with his penetrating and parodic understanding of the conventions and [...]
By Nick Gevers The title is a multiplex pun, so typical of Gene Wolfe. The Book of the Long Sun (1993-6) can only closely follow, or mirror The Book of the New Sun (1980-3). And just as Severian, the narrator of the first Book, is the New Son of God, a man becoming Christlike if [...]
by Jeremy Crampton The moon is down Taurus was in the sky before: it’s gone. Time is passing. It is midnight and I lie here alone. Sappho. “Who writes? For whom is the writing being done?” So Edward Said began his essay “Opponents, audiences, constituencies and community”, 1 by asking questions he said were vital [...]