In a 1998 poll of its subscribers, Locus magazine ranked the tetralogy number three among 36 all-time best fantasy novels before 1990. It is at war with Ascia, its totalitarian northern neighbor. Severian lives in a nation called the Commonwealth, ruled by the Autarch, in the Southern Hemisphere. It is a first-person narrative, ostensibly translated by Wolfe into contemporary English, set in a distant future when the Sun has dimmed and Earth is cooler (a " Dying Earth" story). The tetralogy chronicles the journey of Severian, a journeyman torturer who is disgraced and forced to wander. Despite being published with a year between each book, all four books were written and completed during his free time without anyone's knowledge when he was still an editor of Plant Engineering, allowing him to write at his own pace and take his time. Gene Wolfe had originally intended the story to be a 40,000-word novella called "The Feast of Saint Catherine", meant to be published in one of the Orbit anthologies, but during the writing, it continued to grow. It inaugurated the "Solar Cycle" that Wolfe continued by setting other works in the same universe ( The Urth of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun series, and The Book of the Short Sun series). once into it, there is no stopping.The Book of the New Sun (1980–1983) is a four-volume science fantasy novel written by the American author Gene Wolfe. Wolfe creates a truly alien social order that the reader comes to experience from within. The Book of the New Sun contains elements of Spenserian allegory, Swiftian satire, Dickensian social consciousness and Wagnerian mythology. "The Book of the New Sun establishes his preeminence, pure and simple. "Arguably the finest piece of literature American science fiction has yet produced the four-volume Book of the New Sun."- Chicago Sun-Times The Claw of the Conciliator continues the saga of Severian, banished from his home, as he undertakes a mythic quest to discover the awesome power of an ancient relic, and learn the truth about his hidden destiny. the best science fiction I've read in years!" The Shadow of the Torturer is the tale of young Severian, an apprentice in the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession - showing mercy toward his victim. Shadow & Claw brings together the first two books of the tetralogy in one volume: The Book of the New Sun is unanimously acclaimed as Gene Wolfe's most remarkable work, hailed as "a masterpiece of science fantasy comparable in importance to the major works of Tolkien and Lewis" by Publishers Weekly, and "one of the most ambitious works of speculative fiction in the twentieth century" by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
0 kommentar(er)
