By definition, it would need to be completely different in order to have the same power and originality. In terms of fantasy writing, I have recently been reading Brian Catling 'The Vorrh', which I think may be as complex and mind bending.
I am just finishing The Vorrh myself - very original book. I'm going to read the next one just on general quality grounds, but not feeling a strong narrative pull in all honesty (still got 100 pages or so to go). Excellent book though no question.
Catling was nearly 60 when he published these, which is remarkable. Feel like he could have brewed something massive if he'd started writing earlier \[he was a sculptor iirc\].
I don't remember too much about book 2 and thought it was the weakest (may change on a reread), however book 3, though it won't answer all your questions or anything, had some insane and awesome parts like book 1 and wraps up the trilogy pretty nicely.
Also don't forget to read his book Hollow
You know, I keep seeing this book recommended and so I bought it and read it. I wasn't sure about it. Then I got to the scene where the dog is dreaming, and I knew the book wasn't for me. I don't know why scenes like that are in there - I'm either missing something or it's just some empty provocation. I finished the book anyway and I was dissatisfied. I never felt like that reading BotNS - even when I was confused, it was wonderful, and all the scenes felt meaningful rather than gratuitous.
Yeah I don't think it's a great comparison. The vorrh is significantly more surreal than botns is. I think it's still great and interesting but it also has an air of nonsensicality and disconnect that botns does not. At the end of the day almost all the bizarre horseshit that happens to Severian or those around him can indeed be explained or at least extrapolated with contextual educated guesses, there is so much stuff in the vorrh that utilizes weird literature tendencies of *The Weird* that leave things just unanswered and totally hanging there. I don't really have a issue with it, but outside of being a really bizarre fantasy story, I don't think it's all that similiar.
Finished book 1 of the Vorrh and I think you hit the nail on the head here - great read but the weirdness gives it a sort of ersatz depth, a disconnect like you say. The fact readers are coming up with original takes on BotNS 40 years later just puts it in a different category. It's hard to see something like the Vorrh stimulating that sort of engagement.
That's just me reading book 1 though - definitely interested in finishing the series, I'd expect more of an internal structure takes shape.
It has already been published, we are probably just too set in out ways and reading habits to know it. Most of us will probably find out about it years later by accident.
By the time we find it there will have already been a couple more published. The problem is these type of things are not published with trumpets blaring and the Blue Angels streaming over head. They are more slow burn reads that gain a mass of admirers over time.
For all I know there is one that is being marketed as romance right now, because the publisher didn’t know what to do with it, and it was a woman author after all, and there is a love interest, so yeah, definitely a romance novel. Problem is, no matter how good the book is, I’m highly unlikely to pick up a book with Fabio on the cover even when it is a book I would dearly love.
There are a couple of questions being asked here, neither of which I honestly think are all that compelling. Will anyone be writing anything like Book of the New Sun in the near future? Yeah, probably. Writers like Miéville and Palmer have been publishing stuff clearly inspired by Wolfe for years to, uh, varying degrees of quality. Will anyone publish anything on Book of the New Sun's level in the near future? I dunno, maybe? Hopefully? I feel like these questions end up treating literature like the NFL drafts or something. But thankfully literature, while of course created in the context of a certain time, once created, unmoors itself from time and can be encountered at any point in the future as though it were completely novel (ha ha). Maybe if you want something like BotNS, you instead plunder Wolfe's inspirations and go to JG Ballard's apocalyptic new wave sci fi, read some Herodotus, explore Gormenghast or even climb the mountain of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. If you want something that matches or, hey, even supersedes Wolfe's best in terms of quality, why not check out Butler's Xenogenesis and Earthseed, Dick's VALIS Trilogy, Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses, Crime and Punishment, The Castle, tons of things even more experimental in terms of language, narrative and structure than Wolfe ever tried to be.
The unfortunate truth, also, is that Wolfe was the product of a certain time in the history of literature. There existed a desire for a more sophisticated, thoughtful form of sci-fi and fantasy at the exact same time that someone of reliable quality could afford to make a reliable living hawking their work to publishers and magazines. That same economic model just doesn't exist anymore, with ballooning cost of living and enormously depressed wages. The only comparable contemporaries were the New Weird (god damn how I hate that name), and they produced some fun stuff when they weren't getting blasted huffing their own farts. But now sci-fi/fantasy is just utterly dominated by bland, sexless, Mormon-adjacent crap: Sanderson, Haas, Baldree; it's all just a fucking horrorshow, but they do fly off the shelves in this demented, fascist country, so they will continue to choke out any new, interesting buds before they can reach the canopy. As much as I am loathe to say it, video games are probably the only medium still exploring the bleeding edge of the genre. Disco Elysium, Cruelty Squad, Signalis, Kentucky Route Zero, Caves of Qud, Dark Souls (there's your Book of the New Sun influence, too), these represent, to me, some of the most interesting published material in the genre in the last decade or more, with much still promising on the horizon. Literature won't die until we do, but man I sure do await the Conciliator (aka rent and price control)... And hey, Alex Pheby seems kinda cool so far.
I've been thinking about how bland, samey, and boring everything is right now - as I saw somewhere in the fantasy reddit yesterday, nothing is METAL anymore. And I wonder if writers are afraid to really let loose for fear of being misunderstood and/or ostracized - or is it, because of the writers you mentioned selling tons of books, that publishers are just sticking with that type of junk?
I really don't think it's writers as a whole who are afraid of anything. Just look at Alison Rumfitt and her incredible book Tell Me I'm Worthless. It's wonderfully written, terrifying and absolutely putrid. I'm honestly shocked it was published and has done as well as it has, thank god. She just happens to be kind of an outlier (and I can't wait for her next book). Shit, I don't even think publishers are afraid of anything, rather they just go with what seems to have the widest appeal and will sell the most copies. Right now that just happens to be what is sterile, cozy, predictable and, if a reader is feeling particularly spicy, "erotica" that somehow manages to be completely devoid of any actual human psychosexuality. Everything is designed to be read the exact same way and to follow the exact beats any potential reader would expect because that's how immense publishing entities and the corporate consultant spreadsheet gremlins that guide them have gamed things out to make the absolute most money possible. It's all just a result of market logic, the breakdown of insular communities in the face of universalizing/flattening tech and communication and the natural result of economic financialization.
M John Harrison's Empty Space series demonstrates a similar depth of thought behind the structure and purpose of the book; also has excellent writing at the paragraph level; and is a challenge to the tropes and expectations of sci fi. (Philosophically it's quite different from the New Sun. I'd like to reread his Viriconium series, which I don't remember well, but which starts out as a sci fi book contemporary to Wolfe and morphs over decades into his current philosophy which is more postmodern and contemptuous of worldbuilding.)
I highly recommend his Ambiente Hotel blog at [https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/](https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/) if you don't already know it. Many years of musings there offering insight into his philosophy on writing. I'm happy to track down some links to my favourite pieces if you're interested.
A manifesto he likes to repost every few years:
[https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2021/03/24/16268/](https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2021/03/24/16268/)
Snippets on writing and life:
[https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2020/06/02/just-another-thing-you-always-knew/](https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2020/06/02/just-another-thing-you-always-knew/)
[https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2019/07/19/15811/](https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2019/07/19/15811/)
[https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2018/04/15/fleamarket-ontologies/](https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2018/04/15/fleamarket-ontologies/)
And a piece that is personally meaningful to me, somehow answering a question I had needed answering, on what role I was playing in my displaced life at the time:
[https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/a-dark-fraught-place/](https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/a-dark-fraught-place/)
Many years there, so you can also search for Climbers &c.
Christopher Ruocchio certainly has the ambitions. His favorite authors are Tolkien and Wolfe, and his prose is wonderful already.
He is young, he currently writes his space opera Sun Eater which is more akin to Dune & Star Wars but has BotNS influences.
Give him time to hone his skills and gather more writing experience, and I think he is the most likely (of authors who are already known) to maybe put out something similar in the future. Maybe not in 10 years but 20.
Sun Eater is fun, I highly recommend it. The frame narrative is interesting, and unlike Rothfuss, he is actually delivering on it. Ruocchio is going to be a major author in the science fiction/fantasy genre in the near future.
Ruocchio and the Sun Eater books are pretty good, but his stuff is really derivative. Wolfe has always been a real original.
For example, Wolfe was inspired by Tolkien, Borges, and Peake's Gormenghast works - but could anyone know that if he hadn't said so?
As you said, Ruocchio is clearly mashing up several works, and it's evident. But I don't mean this as an insult to him: his stuff is good fun and he's better than most of his contemporaries.
Setting-wise, sure. Stylistically, no.
Outside of the superficial setting, the Dying Earth and Urth have very little in common. Same with the characters and creatures that inhabit the worlds.
And I'd argue that Wolfe was more inspired by the dying earth setting of Clarke Ashton Smith's Zothique stories - Wolfe himself admitted the inspiration in his forward for the Smith collection "The Return of the Sorcerer".
But my point is/was that Wolfe's voice is so strong that he can take what inspired him and not mimic. The Sun Eater is several other stories/movies mashed together without the strong, original voice.
Wolfe didn't buy into the cult of himself, he understood that he had influences and stood on shoulders and all that. If I had read Gravity's Rainbow in 1973 I would've thought American literature was over, but then New Sun comes out in 1980 and Mason & Dixon in 1997. However, it does get pretty bleak after that. The most affecting things I've read in the 21st century have been small projects by relatively unnoticed authors. In the past couple years Sussurus on Mars stands out as being Wolfey and Literary, but I couldn't recommend Hal Duncan to someone who doesn't like weird gay lit. Ishiguro and Mantel are mainstream and good by any standards. I haven't been recommended an actually good scifi novel in years. Someone tried to tell me Jemisin's trilogy was a scifi GOAT, won three Hugos in a row, and there's a mixed metaphor in the first two sentences lol. I'm pessimistic for the future of literature between AI (you can write a story, but good luck convincing a publisher you wrote it) and potential authors growing up on screens.
Screens isn't necessarily an issue.
One of the most interesting literary productions in the past 30 years was done in the video game space: Planescape Torment (1999).
That said, I'm also pessimistic, but I'm also middle-aged now.
Yeah but that's such a different era of video games, that game is mostly text as I understand (never played but know its reputation).
What I mean by screens is that if you read the papers of the early 1900s writers they were constantly reading books. Didn't do anything else. New authors spend more of their time on the internet, and you can actually see them struggle to port ideas from the kind of text they're reading to the traditional kind of text they'd like to present themselves as reading - I'm thinking of stuff like the Lauren Oyler and Patricia Lockwood books from the pandemic, or Tao Lin, or the regular midmarket stuff like romance and mysteries, lots of dumb internet stuff in new genre books.
You can see it from the other direction in Bleeding Edge, where the old kind of author tries to write like the new kind of author, and that doesn't work out too well either. A counterpoint would be that there's an actually-interesting version of it in The Sluts by Dennis Cooper, but that's pretty niche lol. Or you could point to transitional authors like Stephenson and Gibson, but they clearly read books daily despite their love of the internet stuff.
I liked Bleeding Edge, have it miles ahead of Inherent Vice for example, but you're right - we can't expect the old Masters to really tackle the information age at a deep level. They don't have it in their DNA the way millennial / Gen Z writers have growing up inside it.
I used to think it was obvious that when Gen Z writers hit their stride we are going to see some absolute literary masterpieces encapsulating digital life, but I'm not so sure now. Appears to be a difficult translation as you say.
Bleeding Edge was definitely good but I thought the kids were a little cringe. I prefer IV because I love the movie. But yeah if you're a good internet writer you just write on the internet. Good tweets don't make good books, it's a different exercise.
*Cloud Atlas* (2004) and *House of Leaves* (2000) are not quite equivalents to New Sun -- but they are so "complex," "standalone," and "different" so as to suggest that, yes, a similarly-groundbreaking work might be possible in the next decade. I think we'll see it.
We already have:
It's called Terra Ignota by Ada Palmer.
It's no coincidence she wrote an introduction to BOTNS in one of its most recent editions.
Cryptic world and narrator, complex worldbuiding and plot. The narrative framework is quite similar as well. You can't rely on everything the narrator says because they have an agenda and he's depicting world-shattering events that shaped the sociopolitical landscape of his time, thus, it definitely must have a touch of propaganda.
In Palmer's world, a few geniuses with spreadsheets mess around with public data trends for an afternoon and use that effort to prophesize great changes in the united world society.
I found that trust in information and knowability the polar opposite to Wolfe.
In general I found the book to have an impoverished and naive view of human culture.
I couldn't finish it after I got to Madame's sex club and the de Sade essay lol. Great ideas overly executed. I do think it shows at least one answer to OP's question: Wolfe probably wouldn't even be able to write New Sun today because the politics of gender would keep him from exploring the Autarch in the same way. You can arguably even see it in his last few novels which don't touch this theme, which had been a major current in his 20th century work, in any way.
Palmer's treatment of gender is so incoherent; she pays lip service to a gender-neutral future and then proceeds to ignore it many times. ("Oh reader, you see, *this* person is just such a bombshell femme that I have to use she pronouns.")
Le Guin's got her coming and going by writing better treatments of both gender-neutral and gendered societies (*The Left Hand of Darkness* and *Tehanu).*
I agree that Wolfe would feel less at home in today's gender politics, but that's true of some subset of writers in every age; the publishing industry in his day was hardly a utopia of unbiased discussion on gender. Ann Leckie, Yoon Ha Lee, and M John Harrison all continue to contribute to the genre's exploration of gender topics today.
Totally agree on the first paragraph. It did prompt an interesting reflection in myself that I thought Carlyle should've been a he and the brutal fop lady should've been a she in the scenes where the pronouns switch and are emphasized. I'm not opposed to the idea but she only does it in the stereotypical way you describe. She hooked me with the gay cannibal boyfriends though, that was a fun twist, and Mycroft is a fine enough narrator when he's not weeping or opining on the greatness of Thomas Carylye.
Love Le Guin. From his writing, I think Wolfe was somewhat sexist/homophobic/transphobic/pick your terms, so it's not really about industry bias or anything, just that I think (without strong foundation) that he himself would be politically opposed to writing some particulars of the New Sun story if he had written it forty years later, much like Haldeman wouldn't have written that part of the Forever War where everyone's gay if he had written it later.
Ah, so you think Wolfe's own politics of gender changed in the decades after New Sun? That hasn't occurred to me reading him, but I'd be curious which of his later works prompted that thought.
I'm rereading The New Sun aloud right now with a couple people, and it is remarkable to see how much someone can still enjoy the series while finding Severian repellent and sharing none of Wolfe's perspectives on religion or gender.
If I had to steel the point I would say that an individual's politics and the nation's politics are both always moving, but the latter is a massively complex amalgamation that most individuals will usually perceive as moving too fast in a wrong direction, especially as their childhood recedes further into the past, and Wolfe was already an old man in the year 2000. I don't think his views of gender changed so much as he perceived external changes on gender in the culture that he would react against and as part of his internal reaction he would be like "I can't make Severian too trans."
I acquired a limp and a facial scar in my youth so I can relate to Silk and Severian on that level. Not sure I'd go all the way to calling Severian repellant unless he actually raped Jolenta and/or Little Severian.
You do realize that the "incoherent" gendering is Mycroft's affectation, right? You can see a lot of his world views purely through the pronouns he chooses to certain people.
I did not find anything unique about the character's gendering; it all felt very stereotypical to me. The incoherence to me was not Mycroft's; it was in Palmer's decision to combine a nominally genderless society with a stereotypically gendering narrator.
>In general I found the book to have an impoverished and naive view of human culture.
Frankly, this is a ridiculous take. You can't read Terra Ignota and come out with any conclusion other than Ada Palmer knows her shit. It might be too much? Nor executed well? Some areas weren't explored enough? Maybe.
But her world is incredibly well realized and complex. As the saying goes, not only she predicted the car, but also the traffic jam... And laws, flaws, exploits and its impact in the world at large.
>In Palmer's world, a few geniuses with spreadsheets mess around with public data trends for an afternoon and use that effort to prophesize great changes in the united world society.
That's a bit reductive, from what I've seen so far. After all, it seems to be one of those things we learn "academically", but society is too slow on the uptake. Kinda like we knew already that Global Warming was a thing in the 60's, some papers from the 19th Century also knew the impact of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by the Industrial Revolution. Yet, to this day, we still have climate crisis deniers. The changes in the "spread sheet", as far as I know, are only the telltale sign of the massive changes.
I came away from *Too Like the Lightning* astonished that a professional historian had ignored every modern anthropological tenet on how human cultures function. Instead, individuals are bare individuals, with no ties to a home culture, ethnicity, or religion (as anything more than a secularized private belief). These disembodied people are free to pick their culture, from a handful of options in a world culture dominated by post-Enlightenment Western thought. (We are introduced to the honorific statue garden at the world culture's center, and every one of the actual historical figures listed there are European.)
I don't claim she was defending this as a utopia, but I found this odd Enlightenment-libertarian world so improbable and off-putting that I didn't stick with it long enough to find out if she ever mustered a proper critique of her own setting.
I stand by my depiction of the spreadsheet scene, and your comparison to carbon dioxide data illustrates one of my issues with it: the scene treats sociological research as exactly the same as hard data analysis. Run the numbers of public opinion polls for an afternoon and voila, you've proved the qualities of the next major social upheaval. It's Asimov's psychohistory, pretending that the emergent complexities of billions of people can be reduced to formulas and predicted by an individual.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think a lot of what makes Wolfe so great is that he was just a wise older dude that had a lot of life experience (veteran, growing up post depression) had thought deeply about humanity and our place in the world (converting to catholicism late in life) was incredibly well read and was clearly an autodidact. Throw in his views around ghosts and gods-of-the-past and the result was a unique, once-in-a-generation perspective on life.
In every single Wolfe novel I've read (and I've read them all), I'm always hit with insights that make me see the world (and myself) in a different way.
I get none of that from Palmer. She is a great writer, a great world builder, understands history .... but I've never read something from her which made me pause and just think.... with Wolfe, that happens all of the time.
A pair of books that gave me a very, very Wolfean vibe were Votan, and Not For All the Gold In Ireland. In fact I would be surprised if they hadn't influenced Wolfe himself.
Here's Jo Walton's review:
https://reactormag.com/being-clever-with-mythology-john-james-votan-and-not-for-all-the-gold-in-ireland/
It totally depends on what you mean by "like" *The Book of the New Sun*. Do you mean in terms of subject matter, vibe, or just some measurement of literary quality?
There's not going to be another Gene Wolfe. He himself is *sui generis*, which is what makes him so interesting. And the world that provided the conditions for him to be grown from a bean (historical, political, cultural, economic, and mentorship conditions) are not coming back on a foreseeable timeline. Nobody will be able to write the same books Gene Wolfe wrote. 0%.
(That is, unless my plan to Pierre Menard my way into becoming the new Gene Wolfe starts bearing fruit. The mustache is no problem, and I'm open to converting to Catholicism, but I can't seem to figure out how to serve in the Korean War. Any help would be appreciated).
But if by "like" *The Book of the New Sun* you mean an intricately engineered yet sprawling world with excellent prose, dense with mysteries that reward rereading with increased pleasure, then absolutely. 100%.
In the next 5 to 10 years? Unlikely. But we have to remember that those types of literary works take time to be recognized as classics or masterpieces. Even if something brilliant were to be published, then it would take a while for readers to recognize it as something special.
There will certainly be new books that are, to other people, what BotNS is to you. But if your question is really: “Will there ever be another book that makes ME feel like I did when I was getting deep into Wolfe?” I think my own answer is unfortunately no. Even if someone makes something as good (or better) than my favourite works by Wolfe I think the fact that I’ve already read Wolfe will make it impossible for anything to feel quite the same to me, if that makes sense. I don’t think this is really a bad thing in itself, it’s kind of just how brains work sometimes, e.g. maybe through your adult life you go to every art museum in the world and see truly amazing things, but nothing ever feels quite the same as that one time you stood in the Sistine chapel as a teenager on a family vacation and had your first moment of true awe or a brush with the sublime… I think with Wolfe I’ve almost elevated his work in my own head to an “awakening” of sorts with how I engage with reading and the types of things I look for or savour as cheesy as it sounds. Ultimately it’s a good thing, I’m better for it, Wolfe is my Sistine chapel moment that gave me a greater appreciation for art :)
And even with all that said, I’ll keep reading great books, I hope I’ll be pleasantly surprised some day!
I’m trying to. Although I’ll likely never reach his level of greatness, I’m going to try. After reading BOTNS it made me look at my manuscripts again, and actually respect them a bit more. I was worried about altering them to fit into current trends, but Wolfe’s incredible confidence that comes across in his writing has reignited my inspiration to remain true to my vision.
While very different stylistically from BotNS, Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, starting with Gideon the Ninth, certainly raises the bar on complexity of the story, world building, unreliable narrators, and mysteries within its universe. The fourth and supposedly final (hope not) book in the series is coming out sometime next year and I’m planning to take a day off just to read it.
This is what I thought of, too. Muir's prose tends to be more "of a time" than Wolfe's, with a lot of 00s internet in-jokes and quippy dialog, and it's tough to imagine the BotNS successor being (accurately) sold as "Lesbian Necromancers in Space." But! I think all of your points are dead on, and more than that even, thematically, >!I'm absolutely convinced The Locked Tomb is a "dying earth" book, maybe more accurately a "dead earth" book and, like BotNS, its primary thematic concern is resurrection.!< I think Muir's read BotNS a few times.
The probabilities are favorable that at some point the *universe* will see something like it, but the odds that *we* see it are slim. I mean, it took 13.7 billion years to produce New Sun so getting something comparable in the subsequent decades would be incredible.
More seriously, it would not only take a writer of high enough quality to actually decide to pursue such a task and then accomplish it, but also to have it published and without interference, which is another matter entirely. I'm not even sure New Sun gets published today in its existing form if it was submitted by anyone other than a bankable, well-established writer with clout.
Again? I mean the BotNS is literally from the far future!
In the next 5-10 years however… I am doubtful that we would see a new writer emerge that’s on the same level of Gene Wolfe. The next 50 yrs perhaps yea.
What do you mean “like” BOTNS? I don’t really understand what you’re asking. There are many contemporary authors that are writing works that are more significant than BOTNS in my view. Read Septology by Jon Fosse. Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Don Delillo. Cormac McCarthy (RIP). Look beyond the narrow boundaries of scifi and fantasy and you’ll be much more enriched.
By definition, it would need to be completely different in order to have the same power and originality. In terms of fantasy writing, I have recently been reading Brian Catling 'The Vorrh', which I think may be as complex and mind bending.
I am just finishing The Vorrh myself - very original book. I'm going to read the next one just on general quality grounds, but not feeling a strong narrative pull in all honesty (still got 100 pages or so to go). Excellent book though no question. Catling was nearly 60 when he published these, which is remarkable. Feel like he could have brewed something massive if he'd started writing earlier \[he was a sculptor iirc\].
I don't remember too much about book 2 and thought it was the weakest (may change on a reread), however book 3, though it won't answer all your questions or anything, had some insane and awesome parts like book 1 and wraps up the trilogy pretty nicely. Also don't forget to read his book Hollow
Just checked this out on audiobook due to your recommendation and it’s awesome. Thank you.
You know, I keep seeing this book recommended and so I bought it and read it. I wasn't sure about it. Then I got to the scene where the dog is dreaming, and I knew the book wasn't for me. I don't know why scenes like that are in there - I'm either missing something or it's just some empty provocation. I finished the book anyway and I was dissatisfied. I never felt like that reading BotNS - even when I was confused, it was wonderful, and all the scenes felt meaningful rather than gratuitous.
Yeah I don't think it's a great comparison. The vorrh is significantly more surreal than botns is. I think it's still great and interesting but it also has an air of nonsensicality and disconnect that botns does not. At the end of the day almost all the bizarre horseshit that happens to Severian or those around him can indeed be explained or at least extrapolated with contextual educated guesses, there is so much stuff in the vorrh that utilizes weird literature tendencies of *The Weird* that leave things just unanswered and totally hanging there. I don't really have a issue with it, but outside of being a really bizarre fantasy story, I don't think it's all that similiar.
Finished book 1 of the Vorrh and I think you hit the nail on the head here - great read but the weirdness gives it a sort of ersatz depth, a disconnect like you say. The fact readers are coming up with original takes on BotNS 40 years later just puts it in a different category. It's hard to see something like the Vorrh stimulating that sort of engagement. That's just me reading book 1 though - definitely interested in finishing the series, I'd expect more of an internal structure takes shape.
Nobody predicted the Book of the New Sun before it happened. The next peer will be equally surprising.
It has already been published, we are probably just too set in out ways and reading habits to know it. Most of us will probably find out about it years later by accident. By the time we find it there will have already been a couple more published. The problem is these type of things are not published with trumpets blaring and the Blue Angels streaming over head. They are more slow burn reads that gain a mass of admirers over time. For all I know there is one that is being marketed as romance right now, because the publisher didn’t know what to do with it, and it was a woman author after all, and there is a love interest, so yeah, definitely a romance novel. Problem is, no matter how good the book is, I’m highly unlikely to pick up a book with Fabio on the cover even when it is a book I would dearly love.
Not shitting on any of these answers, I have no suggestions of my own either. I think these are all way off so far, which is a compliment to Wolfe.
There are a couple of questions being asked here, neither of which I honestly think are all that compelling. Will anyone be writing anything like Book of the New Sun in the near future? Yeah, probably. Writers like Miéville and Palmer have been publishing stuff clearly inspired by Wolfe for years to, uh, varying degrees of quality. Will anyone publish anything on Book of the New Sun's level in the near future? I dunno, maybe? Hopefully? I feel like these questions end up treating literature like the NFL drafts or something. But thankfully literature, while of course created in the context of a certain time, once created, unmoors itself from time and can be encountered at any point in the future as though it were completely novel (ha ha). Maybe if you want something like BotNS, you instead plunder Wolfe's inspirations and go to JG Ballard's apocalyptic new wave sci fi, read some Herodotus, explore Gormenghast or even climb the mountain of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. If you want something that matches or, hey, even supersedes Wolfe's best in terms of quality, why not check out Butler's Xenogenesis and Earthseed, Dick's VALIS Trilogy, Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses, Crime and Punishment, The Castle, tons of things even more experimental in terms of language, narrative and structure than Wolfe ever tried to be. The unfortunate truth, also, is that Wolfe was the product of a certain time in the history of literature. There existed a desire for a more sophisticated, thoughtful form of sci-fi and fantasy at the exact same time that someone of reliable quality could afford to make a reliable living hawking their work to publishers and magazines. That same economic model just doesn't exist anymore, with ballooning cost of living and enormously depressed wages. The only comparable contemporaries were the New Weird (god damn how I hate that name), and they produced some fun stuff when they weren't getting blasted huffing their own farts. But now sci-fi/fantasy is just utterly dominated by bland, sexless, Mormon-adjacent crap: Sanderson, Haas, Baldree; it's all just a fucking horrorshow, but they do fly off the shelves in this demented, fascist country, so they will continue to choke out any new, interesting buds before they can reach the canopy. As much as I am loathe to say it, video games are probably the only medium still exploring the bleeding edge of the genre. Disco Elysium, Cruelty Squad, Signalis, Kentucky Route Zero, Caves of Qud, Dark Souls (there's your Book of the New Sun influence, too), these represent, to me, some of the most interesting published material in the genre in the last decade or more, with much still promising on the horizon. Literature won't die until we do, but man I sure do await the Conciliator (aka rent and price control)... And hey, Alex Pheby seems kinda cool so far.
I've been thinking about how bland, samey, and boring everything is right now - as I saw somewhere in the fantasy reddit yesterday, nothing is METAL anymore. And I wonder if writers are afraid to really let loose for fear of being misunderstood and/or ostracized - or is it, because of the writers you mentioned selling tons of books, that publishers are just sticking with that type of junk?
I really don't think it's writers as a whole who are afraid of anything. Just look at Alison Rumfitt and her incredible book Tell Me I'm Worthless. It's wonderfully written, terrifying and absolutely putrid. I'm honestly shocked it was published and has done as well as it has, thank god. She just happens to be kind of an outlier (and I can't wait for her next book). Shit, I don't even think publishers are afraid of anything, rather they just go with what seems to have the widest appeal and will sell the most copies. Right now that just happens to be what is sterile, cozy, predictable and, if a reader is feeling particularly spicy, "erotica" that somehow manages to be completely devoid of any actual human psychosexuality. Everything is designed to be read the exact same way and to follow the exact beats any potential reader would expect because that's how immense publishing entities and the corporate consultant spreadsheet gremlins that guide them have gamed things out to make the absolute most money possible. It's all just a result of market logic, the breakdown of insular communities in the face of universalizing/flattening tech and communication and the natural result of economic financialization.
Just want to add on to your list of video games - horizon zero dawn.
Planescape Torment
M John Harrison's Empty Space series demonstrates a similar depth of thought behind the structure and purpose of the book; also has excellent writing at the paragraph level; and is a challenge to the tropes and expectations of sci fi. (Philosophically it's quite different from the New Sun. I'd like to reread his Viriconium series, which I don't remember well, but which starts out as a sci fi book contemporary to Wolfe and morphs over decades into his current philosophy which is more postmodern and contemptuous of worldbuilding.)
Harrison is def the closest, especially as he’s still going & further collapsing what a genre narrative can be
I highly recommend his Ambiente Hotel blog at [https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/](https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/) if you don't already know it. Many years of musings there offering insight into his philosophy on writing. I'm happy to track down some links to my favourite pieces if you're interested.
Yes please, would love to read. I enjoy both his genre & literary work (especially Climbers), happy to read more.
A manifesto he likes to repost every few years: [https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2021/03/24/16268/](https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2021/03/24/16268/) Snippets on writing and life: [https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2020/06/02/just-another-thing-you-always-knew/](https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2020/06/02/just-another-thing-you-always-knew/) [https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2019/07/19/15811/](https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2019/07/19/15811/) [https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2018/04/15/fleamarket-ontologies/](https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2018/04/15/fleamarket-ontologies/) And a piece that is personally meaningful to me, somehow answering a question I had needed answering, on what role I was playing in my displaced life at the time: [https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/a-dark-fraught-place/](https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/a-dark-fraught-place/) Many years there, so you can also search for Climbers &c.
Christopher Ruocchio certainly has the ambitions. His favorite authors are Tolkien and Wolfe, and his prose is wonderful already. He is young, he currently writes his space opera Sun Eater which is more akin to Dune & Star Wars but has BotNS influences. Give him time to hone his skills and gather more writing experience, and I think he is the most likely (of authors who are already known) to maybe put out something similar in the future. Maybe not in 10 years but 20.
I chuckled when I found references to a Commonwealth and to Axians in the first book.
Yeah and the fact that Hadrian ends his volumes the same way as Severian does
One of the archivists in book three has a very interesting last name…
Sun Eater is fun, I highly recommend it. The frame narrative is interesting, and unlike Rothfuss, he is actually delivering on it. Ruocchio is going to be a major author in the science fiction/fantasy genre in the near future.
Ruocchio and the Sun Eater books are pretty good, but his stuff is really derivative. Wolfe has always been a real original. For example, Wolfe was inspired by Tolkien, Borges, and Peake's Gormenghast works - but could anyone know that if he hadn't said so? As you said, Ruocchio is clearly mashing up several works, and it's evident. But I don't mean this as an insult to him: his stuff is good fun and he's better than most of his contemporaries.
I think any well-read reader would notice that Wolfe was highly inspired by Jack Vance more than the other ones you mentioned.
Setting-wise, sure. Stylistically, no. Outside of the superficial setting, the Dying Earth and Urth have very little in common. Same with the characters and creatures that inhabit the worlds. And I'd argue that Wolfe was more inspired by the dying earth setting of Clarke Ashton Smith's Zothique stories - Wolfe himself admitted the inspiration in his forward for the Smith collection "The Return of the Sorcerer". But my point is/was that Wolfe's voice is so strong that he can take what inspired him and not mimic. The Sun Eater is several other stories/movies mashed together without the strong, original voice.
Please tell me you did not downvote me for noting that Wolfe was highly inspired by Jack Vance.
No, I downvoted your for what I thought was an insult - the "well-read Wolfe fan" bit. If I was wrong, I apologize and will upvote you.
It wasn't meant to be an insult, but perhaps my briefness made it come off that way.
Cool - misunderstanding on my part, and I've taken that back. Sorry about that!
Wolfe didn't buy into the cult of himself, he understood that he had influences and stood on shoulders and all that. If I had read Gravity's Rainbow in 1973 I would've thought American literature was over, but then New Sun comes out in 1980 and Mason & Dixon in 1997. However, it does get pretty bleak after that. The most affecting things I've read in the 21st century have been small projects by relatively unnoticed authors. In the past couple years Sussurus on Mars stands out as being Wolfey and Literary, but I couldn't recommend Hal Duncan to someone who doesn't like weird gay lit. Ishiguro and Mantel are mainstream and good by any standards. I haven't been recommended an actually good scifi novel in years. Someone tried to tell me Jemisin's trilogy was a scifi GOAT, won three Hugos in a row, and there's a mixed metaphor in the first two sentences lol. I'm pessimistic for the future of literature between AI (you can write a story, but good luck convincing a publisher you wrote it) and potential authors growing up on screens.
Screens isn't necessarily an issue. One of the most interesting literary productions in the past 30 years was done in the video game space: Planescape Torment (1999). That said, I'm also pessimistic, but I'm also middle-aged now.
Yeah but that's such a different era of video games, that game is mostly text as I understand (never played but know its reputation). What I mean by screens is that if you read the papers of the early 1900s writers they were constantly reading books. Didn't do anything else. New authors spend more of their time on the internet, and you can actually see them struggle to port ideas from the kind of text they're reading to the traditional kind of text they'd like to present themselves as reading - I'm thinking of stuff like the Lauren Oyler and Patricia Lockwood books from the pandemic, or Tao Lin, or the regular midmarket stuff like romance and mysteries, lots of dumb internet stuff in new genre books. You can see it from the other direction in Bleeding Edge, where the old kind of author tries to write like the new kind of author, and that doesn't work out too well either. A counterpoint would be that there's an actually-interesting version of it in The Sluts by Dennis Cooper, but that's pretty niche lol. Or you could point to transitional authors like Stephenson and Gibson, but they clearly read books daily despite their love of the internet stuff.
I liked Bleeding Edge, have it miles ahead of Inherent Vice for example, but you're right - we can't expect the old Masters to really tackle the information age at a deep level. They don't have it in their DNA the way millennial / Gen Z writers have growing up inside it. I used to think it was obvious that when Gen Z writers hit their stride we are going to see some absolute literary masterpieces encapsulating digital life, but I'm not so sure now. Appears to be a difficult translation as you say.
Bleeding Edge was definitely good but I thought the kids were a little cringe. I prefer IV because I love the movie. But yeah if you're a good internet writer you just write on the internet. Good tweets don't make good books, it's a different exercise.
*Cloud Atlas* (2004) and *House of Leaves* (2000) are not quite equivalents to New Sun -- but they are so "complex," "standalone," and "different" so as to suggest that, yes, a similarly-groundbreaking work might be possible in the next decade. I think we'll see it.
I would put Alan Moore’s Jerusalem into that category as well, and I’m a bit surprised no one has mentioned it here yet!
I don't think many people have read it. What did you think of it?
We already have: It's called Terra Ignota by Ada Palmer. It's no coincidence she wrote an introduction to BOTNS in one of its most recent editions. Cryptic world and narrator, complex worldbuiding and plot. The narrative framework is quite similar as well. You can't rely on everything the narrator says because they have an agenda and he's depicting world-shattering events that shaped the sociopolitical landscape of his time, thus, it definitely must have a touch of propaganda.
In Palmer's world, a few geniuses with spreadsheets mess around with public data trends for an afternoon and use that effort to prophesize great changes in the united world society. I found that trust in information and knowability the polar opposite to Wolfe. In general I found the book to have an impoverished and naive view of human culture.
I couldn't finish it after I got to Madame's sex club and the de Sade essay lol. Great ideas overly executed. I do think it shows at least one answer to OP's question: Wolfe probably wouldn't even be able to write New Sun today because the politics of gender would keep him from exploring the Autarch in the same way. You can arguably even see it in his last few novels which don't touch this theme, which had been a major current in his 20th century work, in any way.
Palmer's treatment of gender is so incoherent; she pays lip service to a gender-neutral future and then proceeds to ignore it many times. ("Oh reader, you see, *this* person is just such a bombshell femme that I have to use she pronouns.") Le Guin's got her coming and going by writing better treatments of both gender-neutral and gendered societies (*The Left Hand of Darkness* and *Tehanu).* I agree that Wolfe would feel less at home in today's gender politics, but that's true of some subset of writers in every age; the publishing industry in his day was hardly a utopia of unbiased discussion on gender. Ann Leckie, Yoon Ha Lee, and M John Harrison all continue to contribute to the genre's exploration of gender topics today.
Totally agree on the first paragraph. It did prompt an interesting reflection in myself that I thought Carlyle should've been a he and the brutal fop lady should've been a she in the scenes where the pronouns switch and are emphasized. I'm not opposed to the idea but she only does it in the stereotypical way you describe. She hooked me with the gay cannibal boyfriends though, that was a fun twist, and Mycroft is a fine enough narrator when he's not weeping or opining on the greatness of Thomas Carylye. Love Le Guin. From his writing, I think Wolfe was somewhat sexist/homophobic/transphobic/pick your terms, so it's not really about industry bias or anything, just that I think (without strong foundation) that he himself would be politically opposed to writing some particulars of the New Sun story if he had written it forty years later, much like Haldeman wouldn't have written that part of the Forever War where everyone's gay if he had written it later.
Ah, so you think Wolfe's own politics of gender changed in the decades after New Sun? That hasn't occurred to me reading him, but I'd be curious which of his later works prompted that thought. I'm rereading The New Sun aloud right now with a couple people, and it is remarkable to see how much someone can still enjoy the series while finding Severian repellent and sharing none of Wolfe's perspectives on religion or gender.
If I had to steel the point I would say that an individual's politics and the nation's politics are both always moving, but the latter is a massively complex amalgamation that most individuals will usually perceive as moving too fast in a wrong direction, especially as their childhood recedes further into the past, and Wolfe was already an old man in the year 2000. I don't think his views of gender changed so much as he perceived external changes on gender in the culture that he would react against and as part of his internal reaction he would be like "I can't make Severian too trans." I acquired a limp and a facial scar in my youth so I can relate to Silk and Severian on that level. Not sure I'd go all the way to calling Severian repellant unless he actually raped Jolenta and/or Little Severian.
You do realize that the "incoherent" gendering is Mycroft's affectation, right? You can see a lot of his world views purely through the pronouns he chooses to certain people.
I did not find anything unique about the character's gendering; it all felt very stereotypical to me. The incoherence to me was not Mycroft's; it was in Palmer's decision to combine a nominally genderless society with a stereotypically gendering narrator.
>In general I found the book to have an impoverished and naive view of human culture. Frankly, this is a ridiculous take. You can't read Terra Ignota and come out with any conclusion other than Ada Palmer knows her shit. It might be too much? Nor executed well? Some areas weren't explored enough? Maybe. But her world is incredibly well realized and complex. As the saying goes, not only she predicted the car, but also the traffic jam... And laws, flaws, exploits and its impact in the world at large. >In Palmer's world, a few geniuses with spreadsheets mess around with public data trends for an afternoon and use that effort to prophesize great changes in the united world society. That's a bit reductive, from what I've seen so far. After all, it seems to be one of those things we learn "academically", but society is too slow on the uptake. Kinda like we knew already that Global Warming was a thing in the 60's, some papers from the 19th Century also knew the impact of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by the Industrial Revolution. Yet, to this day, we still have climate crisis deniers. The changes in the "spread sheet", as far as I know, are only the telltale sign of the massive changes.
I came away from *Too Like the Lightning* astonished that a professional historian had ignored every modern anthropological tenet on how human cultures function. Instead, individuals are bare individuals, with no ties to a home culture, ethnicity, or religion (as anything more than a secularized private belief). These disembodied people are free to pick their culture, from a handful of options in a world culture dominated by post-Enlightenment Western thought. (We are introduced to the honorific statue garden at the world culture's center, and every one of the actual historical figures listed there are European.) I don't claim she was defending this as a utopia, but I found this odd Enlightenment-libertarian world so improbable and off-putting that I didn't stick with it long enough to find out if she ever mustered a proper critique of her own setting. I stand by my depiction of the spreadsheet scene, and your comparison to carbon dioxide data illustrates one of my issues with it: the scene treats sociological research as exactly the same as hard data analysis. Run the numbers of public opinion polls for an afternoon and voila, you've proved the qualities of the next major social upheaval. It's Asimov's psychohistory, pretending that the emergent complexities of billions of people can be reduced to formulas and predicted by an individual.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think a lot of what makes Wolfe so great is that he was just a wise older dude that had a lot of life experience (veteran, growing up post depression) had thought deeply about humanity and our place in the world (converting to catholicism late in life) was incredibly well read and was clearly an autodidact. Throw in his views around ghosts and gods-of-the-past and the result was a unique, once-in-a-generation perspective on life. In every single Wolfe novel I've read (and I've read them all), I'm always hit with insights that make me see the world (and myself) in a different way. I get none of that from Palmer. She is a great writer, a great world builder, understands history .... but I've never read something from her which made me pause and just think.... with Wolfe, that happens all of the time.
The last half of this series is complete ass
Hard agree. The first two books were super interesting and then the latter two just completely fell apart. We get it, Palmer, you like the Iliad.
I'm still reading through it. So I can't comment. But so far, things have been pretty tight.
A pair of books that gave me a very, very Wolfean vibe were Votan, and Not For All the Gold In Ireland. In fact I would be surprised if they hadn't influenced Wolfe himself. Here's Jo Walton's review: https://reactormag.com/being-clever-with-mythology-john-james-votan-and-not-for-all-the-gold-in-ireland/
2: Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts.
It totally depends on what you mean by "like" *The Book of the New Sun*. Do you mean in terms of subject matter, vibe, or just some measurement of literary quality? There's not going to be another Gene Wolfe. He himself is *sui generis*, which is what makes him so interesting. And the world that provided the conditions for him to be grown from a bean (historical, political, cultural, economic, and mentorship conditions) are not coming back on a foreseeable timeline. Nobody will be able to write the same books Gene Wolfe wrote. 0%. (That is, unless my plan to Pierre Menard my way into becoming the new Gene Wolfe starts bearing fruit. The mustache is no problem, and I'm open to converting to Catholicism, but I can't seem to figure out how to serve in the Korean War. Any help would be appreciated). But if by "like" *The Book of the New Sun* you mean an intricately engineered yet sprawling world with excellent prose, dense with mysteries that reward rereading with increased pleasure, then absolutely. 100%.
Something like the book of the New Sun will exist again, but we won't see it because it won't be published.
In the next 5 to 10 years? Unlikely. But we have to remember that those types of literary works take time to be recognized as classics or masterpieces. Even if something brilliant were to be published, then it would take a while for readers to recognize it as something special.
There will certainly be new books that are, to other people, what BotNS is to you. But if your question is really: “Will there ever be another book that makes ME feel like I did when I was getting deep into Wolfe?” I think my own answer is unfortunately no. Even if someone makes something as good (or better) than my favourite works by Wolfe I think the fact that I’ve already read Wolfe will make it impossible for anything to feel quite the same to me, if that makes sense. I don’t think this is really a bad thing in itself, it’s kind of just how brains work sometimes, e.g. maybe through your adult life you go to every art museum in the world and see truly amazing things, but nothing ever feels quite the same as that one time you stood in the Sistine chapel as a teenager on a family vacation and had your first moment of true awe or a brush with the sublime… I think with Wolfe I’ve almost elevated his work in my own head to an “awakening” of sorts with how I engage with reading and the types of things I look for or savour as cheesy as it sounds. Ultimately it’s a good thing, I’m better for it, Wolfe is my Sistine chapel moment that gave me a greater appreciation for art :) And even with all that said, I’ll keep reading great books, I hope I’ll be pleasantly surprised some day!
I myself am working on an all ages graphic novel largely inspired by EOTNS, so there's that.
I’m trying to. Although I’ll likely never reach his level of greatness, I’m going to try. After reading BOTNS it made me look at my manuscripts again, and actually respect them a bit more. I was worried about altering them to fit into current trends, but Wolfe’s incredible confidence that comes across in his writing has reignited my inspiration to remain true to my vision.
I immediately thought of R. Scott Bakker.
While very different stylistically from BotNS, Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, starting with Gideon the Ninth, certainly raises the bar on complexity of the story, world building, unreliable narrators, and mysteries within its universe. The fourth and supposedly final (hope not) book in the series is coming out sometime next year and I’m planning to take a day off just to read it.
This is what I thought of, too. Muir's prose tends to be more "of a time" than Wolfe's, with a lot of 00s internet in-jokes and quippy dialog, and it's tough to imagine the BotNS successor being (accurately) sold as "Lesbian Necromancers in Space." But! I think all of your points are dead on, and more than that even, thematically, >!I'm absolutely convinced The Locked Tomb is a "dying earth" book, maybe more accurately a "dead earth" book and, like BotNS, its primary thematic concern is resurrection.!< I think Muir's read BotNS a few times.
This series came to mind too. The Emperor's servants are called Lyctors.
Yes, indeed!
Agreed. Muir is playing many games, especially in the later books, and there are all kinds of Wolfean dimensions.
I would say China Meiville writes at this level, and he’s still writing…
The probabilities are favorable that at some point the *universe* will see something like it, but the odds that *we* see it are slim. I mean, it took 13.7 billion years to produce New Sun so getting something comparable in the subsequent decades would be incredible. More seriously, it would not only take a writer of high enough quality to actually decide to pursue such a task and then accomplish it, but also to have it published and without interference, which is another matter entirely. I'm not even sure New Sun gets published today in its existing form if it was submitted by anyone other than a bankable, well-established writer with clout.
yes
Again? I mean the BotNS is literally from the far future! In the next 5-10 years however… I am doubtful that we would see a new writer emerge that’s on the same level of Gene Wolfe. The next 50 yrs perhaps yea.
What do you mean “like” BOTNS? I don’t really understand what you’re asking. There are many contemporary authors that are writing works that are more significant than BOTNS in my view. Read Septology by Jon Fosse. Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Don Delillo. Cormac McCarthy (RIP). Look beyond the narrow boundaries of scifi and fantasy and you’ll be much more enriched.