# THE CITADEL OF THE AUTARCH is out in paperback *The SF-Lovers list — 1 messages, 1 voices, undated* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### decvax!ittvax!dcdwest!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn *undated* [This is part of a batch of articles from San Diego that the rest of the net never saw, because our net connection was down -- sorry if you have seen this before, or if the discussion seems dated.] Date: Fri, 21-Oct-83 23:50:34 PDT This book is the last volume of Gene Wolfe's tetralogy, THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN. There are some very good reviews in the front, even from the New York Times. My own glowing review has appeared on the net. A warning: if you haven't read the previous three volumes then you probably won't understand CITADEL; of course this is no guarantee that you WILL understand the book if you read the previous volumes... but you're off to a good start. I re-read all four volumes this summer in hardback and learned lots of new things... Buy it. I also read Avram Davidson's strange book THE PHOENIX AND THE MIRROR. I am tickled that there appear to be a couple connections between this book and Wolfe's tetralogy; in particular Davidson's protagonist at one point wears a cloak of 'that nameless color which is darker than black', and mentions the term 'lictor', meaning executioner. Curiously, the word 'lictor' is absent from Wolfe's glossary of words from THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER in THE CASTLE OF THE OTTER; perhaps he considers this word so common as to be not worth describing... (Not that the glossary is anything like complete! And the words are not always for real, merely 'almost always'. A funny definition: 'ONEGARS: My erroneous spelling of ONAGERS. I should look these things up.') Did anyone else like THE PHOENIX AND THE MIRROR? My feelings are somewhat qualified, but there are parts of the book that really shine... ---