- HTML & XHTML
- Kyoto
- Doctor
- Business Law
- Sanitary & Water Engineering
- Radiotherapy
- Geriatric
- Dean, Pamela
- Energy
- Korean War
- Clark, Leigh
- Preiss, Byron
- General AAS
- Genealogy
- Oe, Kenzaburo
- Engineering
- Enlightenment
- Italian
- Science & Maths
- Girl Power
- Spanish
- Shriver, Lionel
- Baroque 1600-1750
- Health & Social Care
- Hughes, Sean
- ERP
- Zimbabwe
- Historical
- Briggs, Patricia
- Campbell, Rod
- Some of our other sites:
- Books
- Clothing, Shoes and Accessories
- Baby Clothes and Accessories
- Cosmetics, Beauty Products and Fragrances
- Cellphones, Call Plans and Accessories
- Video Games
- DVDs
- Electronics, Gadgets and Computers
- Health and Personal Care
- Home and Garden
- Home DIY
- Jewelry
- Magazines and Newspapers
- Music Downloads
- Musical Instruments
- Office Equipment and Supplies
- Software and Games
- Sporting Goods
- Toys and Games
- Watches
- UK Books
- UK Video Games
- UK Home and Garden
- UK Electronics, Gadgets and Computers
- UK Baby Clothes and Accessories
- UK Software and Games
- UK Sporting Goods
- UK Toys and Games
Books : Science Fiction & Fantasy : Authors, A-Z : W : Wolfe, Gene
-
-
-
-
-
One of the most acclaimed "science fantasies" ever, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980-83) is a long, magical novel in four volumes. Shadow and Claw contains the first two, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, which respectively won the World Fantasy and Nebula awards.This is the first-person narrative of Severian the lowly apprentice torturer, blessed and cursed with a photographic memory, whose travels lead him through the marvels of far-future "Urth", and who--as revealed near the beginning--eventually becomes his land's sole ruler or Autarch. On the surface it's a colourful story with all the classic ingredients: growing up, adventure, sex, betrayal, murder, exile, battle, monsters and mysteries to be solved. (Only well into book two do we realise what saved Severian's life in chapter one.) For lovers of literary allusions, they're here in plenty: a Dickensian cemetery scene, a torture-engine from Kafka, a wonderful library out of Borges and familiar fables changed by aeons of retelling. Wolfe evokes a chilly sense of time's vastness, with an age-old, much restored painting of a golden-visored "knight" who is an astronaut standing on the Moon; an ancient citadel of metal towers which are grounded spacecraft. Even the Sun is senile and dying, and so Urth needs a New Sun.
The Book of the New Sun is almost heart-breakingly good, full of riches and subtleties that improve with each rereading. It is Gene Wolfe's masterpiece and strongly recommended. --David Langford
-
One of the most acclaimed "science fantasies" ever, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980-83) is a long, magical novel in four volumes. Shadow and Claw contains the first two, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, which respectively won the World Fantasy and Nebula awards.This is the first-person narrative of Severian the lowly apprentice torturer, blessed and cursed with a photographic memory, whose travels lead him through the marvels of far-future "Urth", and who--as revealed near the beginning--eventually becomes his land's sole ruler or Autarch. On the surface it's a colourful story with all the classic ingredients: growing up, adventure, sex, betrayal, murder, exile, battle, monsters and mysteries to be solved. (Only well into book two do we realise what saved Severian's life in chapter one.) For lovers of literary allusions, they're here in plenty: a Dickensian cemetery scene, a torture-engine from Kafka, a wonderful library out of Borges and familiar fables changed by aeons of retelling. Wolfe evokes a chilly sense of time's vastness, with an age-old, much restored painting of a golden-visored "knight" who is an astronaut standing on the Moon; an ancient citadel of metal towers which are grounded spacecraft. Even the Sun is senile and dying, and so Urth needs a New Sun.
The Book of the New Sun is almost heart-breakingly good, full of riches and subtleties that improve with each rereading. It is Gene Wolfe's masterpiece and strongly recommended. --David Langford
-
A brothel-keeper's sons discuss genocide and plot murder; a young alien wanderer is pursued by his shadow double; a political prisoner tries to prove his identity, not least to himself. Gene Wolfe's first novel consists of three linked sections, all of them elegant broodings on identity, sameness and strangeness, and all of them set on the vividly evoked colony worlds of Ste. Croix and Ste. Anne, themselves twins delicately poised in mutual orbit. Marsch, victim in the third story, is the apparent author of the second and a casual visitor whose naïve questions precipitate tragedy in the first; the sections dance around each other like the planets of their setting. Clones, down-loaded personalities inhabiting robots, aliens that perhaps mimicked humans so successfully that they forgot who they were, a French culture adopted by its ruthless oppressors--there are a lot of ways to lose yourself, and perhaps the worst is to think that freedom consists of owning other people, that identity is won at the expense of others. It is easy to be impressed by the intellectual games of Wolfe's stunning book, and forget that he is, and always has been, the most intensely moral of SF writers. --Roz Kaveney
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
