Product Description

This study of the fiction of Gene Wolfe, one of the most influential contemporary American science fiction writers, offers a major reinterpretation of Gene Wolfe's four-volume "The Book of the New Sun" and its sequel "The Urth of the New Sun". Eschewing the conventional spiritual reading of the novels, Peter Wright employs evolutionary theory to argue for a controversial secular reception of a narrative in which Wolfe plays an elaborate textual game with his reader. After exposing the concealed story at the heart of Wolfe's magnum opus", Wright adopts a variety of approaches to establish that Wolfe is the designer of an intricate textual labyrinth intended to extend his thematic preoccupations with subjectivity, the unreliability of memory, the manipulation of individuals by social and political systems, and the psychological potency of myth, faith and symbolism into the reading experience. Drawing evidence not only from the first 30 years of Wolfe's career but from sources as diverse as reception theory, palaeontology, the Rennaissance hermetic tradition, mythology and science fiction's sub-genre of dying earth literature, Wright provides an accessible interpretation of Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Sun".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1480732 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

Attending Wright: Countered Intuitions and Explanatory Power
Gene Wolfe is a Catholic; The Book of the New Sun features a messiah figure who apparently performs miracles, raises the dead and himself returns from the tomb. Gene Wolfe has right wing political views; his series shows his main character submitting to higher authorities of every kind. It seems obvious, if we are to accept the author has having any influence on our interpretation, how we should read The Book of the New Sun - it's a Christian allegory employing the resources of the dying earth sub-genre to set loose an array of allusive and ideological weapons against its reader.

However, Gene Wolfe is also a very clever man, and an ingenious literary artificer, and this reading never seemed quite right. The overwhelming feeling left after reading Wolfe's series is of having seen a master magician perform - you know you've been tricked, but you just don't know how.

In this book, Peter Wright has turned the stage around and revealed the trapdoors and hidden speakers, the concealed assistants and Kirby wires, that allow the trick to be performed. Wolfe is revealed as a master of misdirection, and also as a more sophisticated thinker than the vision of him as a religious allegorist would allow.

Wright's vision of the New Sun series is defiantly secular. Wolfe is showing his messiah figure, Severian, to be a gull, manipulated all along by the alien Hierodules, for their own purposes. This is no Catholic book, instead purely Darwinian impulses drive the manipulating aliens - humanity is a seed species, whose obedience is required if the various Hierodule species are ever to come into being. Using persuasive evidence drawn from throughout the series Wright constructs a reading that see the story as an exercise in deception, from the fabric to the plot to the way it is told. As the Hierodules manipulate Severian, so Wolfe manipulates his reader.

Through chapters covering Wolfe's use of genre, of narratological techniques, of renaissance theories of memory and much more Wright demonstrates convincingly his thesis that Wolfe is an artificer, constructing his texts as puzzles to be unravelled. The book moves from point to point with an elegance that draws the reader into its initially counter-intuitive argument and ultimately convinces that this authoritarian Catholic author has produced a libertarian, secular tale, that an author who takes such obvious pleasure in story, should have produced a text that tells us to be suspicious of story in all it's forms.

Attending Daedalus is everything literary criticism should: surprising but not illogical, theoretically sound, indeed adventurous, but not trapped by theory, rigorous, but accessible. For anyone with more than a passing interest in Gene Wolfe's work, this is an essential book.