The Book of the New Sun

Severian tells you upfront that his memory is perfect and that you should not trust him anyway, which is either the most honest unreliable narrator setup in fantasy or the least, depending how you look at it. He’s a torturer by guild training, exiled from his order after an act of mercy toward a prisoner, and the four volumes here follow him across a version of Earth so far in the future the sun itself is dying, technology and magic have blurred past telling apart, and half the vocabulary Wolfe uses is genuine obscure or archaic English rather than invented, which gives the whole thing a texture I haven’t found anywhere else in the genre.

The Proust comparison gets made a lot and it earns itself, the best passages are self reflective in exactly that way, Severian circling back on a memory to examine what he missed the first time rather than just reporting events. When that’s working, and for a long stretch of the first two volumes it is, nothing else in speculative fiction reads quite like it.

I’ll be honest that my enthusiasm dipped in the back half, past the crash at the altar sequence specifically, where the surreal set pieces started to feel looser and less anchored than the tightly controlled first half promised. I know plenty of readers who consider the back half the real payoff and think I’m the one missing something. Fair enough. I also can’t fully wave off the complaint that shows up again and again about how thin the women in this story are compared to everything else Wolfe is doing with such care.

Four stars, a genuine achievement in prose and structure that I still recommend constantly, with the caveat that book four asks a very specific kind of patience the first hundred pages don’t fully prepare you for.