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 Sun is [...]
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.
by Michael Andre-Driussi.
This essay was written for John Clute’s proposed book of essays on Gene Wolfe’s fiction back in the early 90s. Never published until now, we publish it here to promote the publication of Michael’s new edition of Lexicon Urthus.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
