G.Wolfe _Shadow of the Torturer_

Dan'l DanehyOakes · 23 Jul 1991, 18:31 · from rec.arts.sf-lovers.1991.mbox

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From: djdaneh at PacBell.COM (Dan'l DanehyOakes)
Subject: Re: G.Wolfe _Shadow of the Torturer_
Date: 23 Jul 91 18:31:41 GMT
Message-ID: <6654 at pbhyc.PacBell.COM>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-lovers

D. Ellis writes:
>I'm nearly finished reading Wolfe's SOTT and just noticed that it says
>"Volume One of The Book of the New Sun".  Does this mean it goes on (an on)?
>Is our main main Severian going to adventure his way through ___ more books?
>PLEASE, will someone let me know the titles?  Thanks!

Okay... First, informational.  Then the titles.

Gene Wolfe set out to write a novella, "The Feast of St. Katherine."  It
grew, as Professor Tolkien puts it, in the telling to what he expected
would be a novel, then a trilogy.  By the time he'd finished a first draft,
he'd sold it to Dave Hartwell at Pocket/Simon&Schuster, but he'd wound up
with a third volume about 50% longer than the first two.  With Hartwell's
concurrence, he broke V3 into two and expanded some sections that interested
him.

This made up THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN, which had always been conceived as
a single story.  Thus, it's a 4-volume novel, not a "series."  The
volumes are:
	THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER
	THE CLAW OF THE CONCILIATOR
	THE SWORD OF THE LICTOR
	THE CITADEL OF THE AUTARCH

With an ancillary volume of essays on "the writing of" which grew out of
a misprint in LOCUS:  THE CASTLE OF THE OTTER.

The series was wildely successful, and deservedly so; Wolfe's play with
myth and story in these four volumes is some of the finest in the history
of science fiction.

Success breeds profits.  Profits breed a demand for sequels.  Wolfe
wrote a fifth volume, THE URTH OF THE NEW SUN, which is as well-written
as the others but frankly unnecessary:  it makes explicit a number of
things which are deliciously implied in the original novel.  Not a
bad book, but something like a vermiform appendix.

			[T]he literary work is not a manipulable object
			completely at our disposal; it is a human voice
			out of the past, a voice which must be somehow
			brought to life.  Dialogue, not dissection, opens 
			up the world of a literary work.  Disinterested
			objectivity is not appropriate to the under-
			standing of a literary work.
				--Richard E. Palmer
The Roach

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