Your mileage may vary on “greatness”, especially when it comes to art. What are its contours? Where does greatness begin and almost-greatness end? To put it in pretentious philosophical terms: what’s the qualia? And also isn’t greatness all just a question of personal taste anyway?
Yeah yeah, okay whatever, I’ll grant you all that. However…
Gene Wolfe is one of the greatest American writers ever.
It’s a shame he’s not more well-known. The reason is fairly comprehensible: his work sits in a sort of in-between place where it’s too “literary” for your average facts-and-logic science fiction fan, and too “genre” for everyone else. This tension also existed in the reception of Wolfe’s contemporary, Harlan Ellison, who, as a famous asshole, would straight out berate fans for asking nerdy questions about the logistics of his stories.
Wolfe’s work would not fare well with the contemporary reader who spends more time reading wikis about science fiction worlds than the novels on which they’re based. This is because his approach to “worldbuilding” is sophisticated and enigmatic. And this approach is weaved into the very language of his novels. I am trying to move beyond being a sentence-level guy, to become more populist and story-brained, but old habits die hard. I just love sentences, okay. And Uncle Gene’s are exquisite. Not just because they hit at the level of rhythm and structure, but because so many of them feel like a mystagogic initiation. The presence of “something” is brought forth, and its contours aren’t always clearly defined, but it’s also not vague. I struggle to find the words to describe this quality, but I’d call it something like “vibrational precision.” You see the sights and hear sounds he conjures, but more importantly you also feel the activation of a higher level of imagination at play. Both Wolfe’s imagination and your own. It’s not just encouraging you to flesh out his fantasy lifeworld, to literalise it in your mind as you might do in so much basic fantasy fiction. You are actively invited to de-literalise your own lifeworld, to appreciate symbols and signs and their everyday working on you. This is hard to talk about without the experience of reading Wolfe. So here’s an excerpt from Shadow of the Torturer, the first volume of The Book of the New Sun. For context: the story is told to us by Severian, an exiled torturer who wanders a world millions of years in the future. Severian mentions early on that he is now the Autarch, the absolute ruler of the known world, and the story he is writing is essentially his memoirs. No bullshit, I have chosen this passage at random:
No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death—every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.
You can turn to literally any page of this book and find textured paragraphs like this. It’s a seemingly tangential musing of Severian while he’s in the middle of a conversation with another character. The wrong way to read this passage would be to look for clues as to the identity of “those figures” he mentions. You could say angels and demons, gods, primordial forces, spiritual emanations, even aliens, because these things exist (or could exist) in the world of The Book of the New Sun. There are countless essays, Youtube videos, podcasts and so on puzzling over the who, what, and where of the events of these books but next to none considering the feeling of the numinous it both describes and generates in the reader.
John Clute, in an early review of The Book of the New Sun, claimed the cycle was heavily informed by its author’s Catholicism, saying that Wolfe “must be taken as attempting something analogous to Dante’s supreme effort.” But I don’t think it’s that theologically specific. The sedimentary nature of Wolfe’s writing, where layer on layer works to produce a sense of wonder not necessarily tied to fantastic images but to the recurrence of spiritual truths that transcend collective and individual history. You could apply any religious outlook to this if you really wanted. Or none. Atheists love his shit too.
While Gene Wolfe mostly worked in science fiction, the trappings of The Book of the New Sun are fantasy: Severian is a torturer, he goes on a journey, he finds a “magical” gem, he has a big fucking sword. Wolfe often called it “science fantasy.” Looking at it as fantasy is revealing. Especially when you think of the history of the word, rather than just the genre. I know etymology is like uber-nerd shit that doesn’t seem relevant to how words are actually used. But in this case I think Uncle Gene is actually up to something. The origin of fantasy in Greek, phantasia, literally meant “a making visible”, then in the Middle Ages it took on a more philosophical hue, meaning “the mental apprehension of an object of perception.” As Ursula Le Guin pointed out, in modern times it comes to mean almost exactly the opposite: “things that aren’t perceived or present in our experience.” In Gene Wolfe’s work you have every one of theses meanings at play, but also their opposites. The world of New Sun, Urth, is made visible, but many aspects of it are also kept from us due to the narrowness of the narrator’s perception, but the narrator’s perception of things is all we have to cling to. Likewise, while things that aren’t perceived or present in our experience are in there (like weird flowers you can kill people with, witches, etc), he connects us to the transcendental reality of spirituality, both at the level of world building—people in this world believe in the numinous—and at the level of reading—the process of reading Wolfe accesses the numinous.
This is so much more interesting and rewarding than the stock fantasy stuff. Which, it should be said, is in there, and a lot of fun. Uncle Gene clearly loved the genre he worked in, but had the chops to do so much more with it. And I think that’s beautiful.
I could go on, and in fact I will, but in another forum: I have embarked on a four part series on The Book of the New Sun over on my podcast, Getting Lit. I will be joined every month by
and from the Agitator podcast. First episode in this series—where we cover The Shadow of the Torturer—is embedded on Spotify below, or you can listen on Apple or pretty much anywhere you get your podcasts.
I was already stoked to dive back into this world, and now, even more so. Thanks for helping me frame these books in a way that's so appealing.