In The Book Of The New Sun we are introduced to Severian as a young apprentice of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, the guild of torturers in the sprawling city of Nessus. It is a powerful and unique work of fiction that deserves to be more widely read today.

These books demonstrated a new modernist sensibility in Fantasy, with Wolfe’s deft use of the unreliable narrator and heavy use of symbolism creating a text that begs for multiple readings and interpretations, as well as forever destroying the boundary between Fantasy and Science Fiction. Over the course of its four books – The Shadow Of The Torturer (1980), The Claw Of The Conciliator (1981), The Sword Of The Lictor (1982) and The Citadel Of The Autarch (1983) – Wolfe tells the story of Severian the exiled torturer and his wanderings in a far future Earth in which our current culture and technology is no longer even a memory. Gene Wolfe’s The Book Of The New Sun is one of the key works of Fantasy of the past forty years, a series that shows a staggering breadth of imagination and which reconfigured what the genre was capable of. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.” I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious magic.

Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life – they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. The truth is that they invent us we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.

The book of the new sun collection