New Sun

Tuesday, June 4, 2019 at 6:02am

The Folio Society recently announced a limited edition of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series. I owe my initial resistence solely to the amount listed on the pricetag. It held out right up until I got the physical mail promotional materials for the set.

My set arrived last Friday, and I'm now about halfway through the first book, The Shadow of the Torturer. Gene Wolfe's prose is subtle, complex. You can tell that he enjoys playing with words, especially in how he turns old words to new meanings. Neil Gaiman hints in his introduction that the novel's narrator, Severian, is naming the things of his world not as we would name them.

The Book of the New Sun will undoubtedly take a few week's worth of energy away from my endeavor to read up on as much ecological SF as I can in preparation for next year's International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts. It will be energy well spent.