The Book of the New Sun - The Ultimate Guide

It was inevitable that something like this would happen one day. The Book of the New Sun has seduced me like no other. The more I read it, the more I want to understand and share what I've uncovered.

Over the years, I've made several YouTube videos on this topic, from standard reviews to 2-hour long explanation essays. But this, to the best of my ability, is my ultimate Love Letter to Gene Wolfe, fans of the book, and those that are looking for answers. This video is divided into distinct parts and additional sub-chapters if needed. Don't worry, all the timestamps are clearly labeled in the description and on the progress bar of the video. You can jump directly to whatever chapter you want—like a synopsis of a particular book or my explanation of the timeline of the series—or you can just watch the video from start to finish. It does have a nice linear flow. You decide.

Even though I have put my heart and soul into this project, I feel there is still so much to discover and an eternity of discussion. So please comment below or over on Discord and let's keep this conversation rolling. Here I pause; if you wish to walk no further with me, viewer, I cannot blame you. It is no easy Road. [Music]

Before we peek under the skin of The Book of the New Sun, a very quick history lesson. Gene Wolfe's original plan was to write a short novel called *The Feast of St. Catherine*. But then the idea, the world, the themes, and the story grew to be a bigger novel, a trilogy, a four-book series, and eventually the completed five books that we have today. It's the late '70s; Wolfe was an established author, not a superstar by any stretch of the imagination, but titles like *The Fifth Head of Cerberus*, *Peace*, and his short stories had garnered a reputation. Still, he's not successful enough to be writing full-time yet, so all the work on *The Book of the New Sun* was done around his day job. The first draft was the complete story, roughly what we now have in those first four books. *The Shadow of the Torturer*, the edited, revised version, was published in 1980. Then Wolfe settled into a rhythm of revising the next part and publishing the following year. The third and originally final part of the trilogy, *The Sword of the Lictor*, was so much bigger than the first two books; it was remolded and divided into two books. The series was completed with the publication of *The Citadel of the Autarch* in 1983.

However, the publisher wanted a sequel. Now, there is a lot of debate why that would be. Was it a cynical cash grab because the original four books were quite successful—give the audience what they want—or did the publisher actually read the books and feel like the series had unfinished business or deserved some answers? Whatever the reason, *The Earth of the New Sun* was published in 1987. My personal opinion on this book is that it fits the meta-narrative of the original series perfectly. It gives us many answers, but many more questions, because Gene Wolfe is a genius. He knew exactly how to deliver an extension of the story, expose the blind spots of what we just read, and even present it in a slightly different style that suits the narrational circumstances and the journey of the physical memoir itself. To put it bluntly, you need to read *The Earth of the New Sun*. It's not a sequel; it's not a coda; it's not an afterthought; it's book five in a five-book series. [Music]

In theory, at least, this should be a relatively simple part of the video. I can just deliver a general overview of the books, leaving all the symbolism, the unreliable narration shenanigans, and the twisty time-loop puzzlement for another chapter. But in practice, I think a summary of each book works best. If we hold hands through the thickest part of the forest and avoid the big revelations and the recontextualization that future books and a rereading of the series will provide. An example would be explaining the long con of AIA and Agilus as it's happening—something which is quite confusing as you're reading it but is resolved by the end of *Shadow of the Torturer*—but not explaining the appearance of Apu Pancha at the end of *The Claw of the Conciliator*, because that doesn't start to make sense until much later in *The Earth of the New Sun*, and even then it's complicated. Also, the grand scheme of things—like which sea monster is controlling the government, or who the hell put a black hole in the middle of the sun (yes, really)—or even the finer details of the geography or what year exactly this is all taking place in, don't need too much explanation in this part of the video. We'll talk about that later.

As Michael Andre-DuSolier states in his excellent reference book, *Lexicon Urthus*, the synopsis is Severian's narrative, an abbreviated snapshot of his memoirs, his point of view, and what we garner from that. So obviously, spoilers ahead if you haven't read any of the books, personal interpretations that you are encouraged to disagree with, and a recapitulation for the rest of us.

We open at the locked gates to a graveyard. Severian, an apprentice torturer having just survived a near-drowning, is trying to gain access so he can get back to his home at the Torturer's Guild. After another apprentice lets him in, they encounter a group of shady characters, apparently exhumed in a body. One of the grave robbers is a guy called Velus, a well-known revolutionary, an enemy of the government. Severian saves Vas's life by killing a guard who was just about to attack him. Vus gives Severian a coin, and this gesture seems to bond Severian to the rebels' cause. He explains that he somehow experienced the kind of awakening and will serve Velus if needed, but he'll stay loyal to the guild and remain a torturer.

We then get some very handy world-building. We're in this huge, sprawling city called Nessus, entirely encircled by a giant metal wall, and we're in South America, almost definitely on the West Coast, post-in what used to be the Peru-Chile-Bolivian border region, probably. Like I said earlier, it's not that important to the story. We also know that we're in the distant future; the sun is dying, and although this does read like a fantasy novel at first glance, we're surrounded by ancient and advanced technology, depending on your perspective. This part of the world, this country if you like, is called the Commonwealth, and it's ruled over by the Autarch, the supreme leader who resides in the House Absolute.

Severian becomes the senior apprentice and is tasked with monitoring a client, a lady that will soon be tortured, called Thecla. Thecla is the half-sister of Thea, Vus's lover, making Thea a pawn in the Autarch's resistance against Vus's revolution. She is a political prisoner. The Guild Master can see that Severian has a soft spot for Thecla, so he sends him off to a brothel that has clone prostitutes, including a clone of Thecla. But that doesn't call his hot loins enough, and Severian falls in love with Thecla anyway. Having completed his apprenticeship, Severian then becomes a journeyman and soon after directly witnesses the torturing of Thea, breaking the code of the guild. Severian gives Thecla a knife so that she can commit suicide, which she does. His punishment, and a way for the guild to save face, is to be banished from the city. He's ordered to walk to the distant province of Thrax, where he will become the new Lictor—kind of like the boss of the prison. Severian is packed up with a pouch of money, a brown book, a letter to the chief magistrate of Thrax, his figan cloak blacker than black, striking an imposing figure, and, of course, *Terminus Est*, a beautiful, terrifying, big bastard executioner sword.

We learned that Severian has never actually gone beyond the walls of the city before; in fact, he's never even left this part of the city, and he severely underestimates the scale of the place. He thought he would leave through the guarded gate to the north, be strolling through the countryside, and sleeping under a tree by nightfall. In fact, we spend the rest of the book wandering through the megalopolis of Nessus. He spends his first night in a lodge house, sharing a bed and a dream sequence with a giant man called Baldanders. No, not like that; they were just the sleeping arrangements. In the morning, he meets Baldanders' friend, his partner, his keeper, a weird little fellow called Dr. Talos. Little bit of a reveal here: if you read closely, you can see that Dr. Talos is some sort of robot, or at least an unnatural, manufactured creation. The details are well hidden, but it's definitely there. Among other things, Dr. Talos is a playwright, and he's putting together a traveling show, and he thinks Severian would make a perfect addition to the cast. Non-committal, Severian just wanders off.

So far in this book, the events and even the motivations of the characters have mostly made sense. Yes, the terminology and the dream sequences have kept us on our toes, but it's probably not the formidable book that most of you were expecting. But from this point forward, *The Shadow of the Torturer* steps up a gear. Much is unexplained and often inexplicable until later, so hold on tight. Severian goes to a clothes shop because his torturer's outfit is drawing way too much attention and scaring the locals. The shopkeeper, a guy called Agilus, straight away spots *Terminus Est*. He knows that it's a very valuable sword, and he offers to buy it from Severian. Of course, Severian won't sell it at any price, so somewhere between the pages a long con is concocted. Agilus runs the shop with his sister, AIA, who now appears disguised as a city official and serves Severian with a duel to the death with poisonous plants. Although Severian doesn't know who his opponent will be yet, he's been hoodwinked into fighting Agilus, who is obviously a great duelist, and the plan is to kill Severian and take the sword. AIA then returns out of disguise and offers to help Severian prepare for the duel. She knows where to find the poison plant and can keep an eye on Severian and the sword.

On the way to the botanical gardens, AIA and Severian are involved in a cab race, like two Rick Shores whizzing through the streets of Nessus. They crash into a big tent which houses the Altar of the Pines, a religious sect which is devoted to the Conciliator, a messianic, Jesus-like character. They have a relic, the Claw of the Conciliator. Ah, ah! The crash smashes the altar, causing chaos, and this is where Nea spots the claw and then slips it into Severian's boot without him knowing, so now she can't be accused of stealing it, and she's hoping to retrieve it later. Then it gets weird. They reach the botanical complex and visit various different gardens. The sand garden warps time; Severian thought he was there for just a few minutes, but AIA said he was gone for hours. There's a room with dimension-warping mirrors, some sort of broken portal, maybe. The hut in the jungle garden seems to be projecting a window into 20th-century Africa; there's a modern-day (to us) plane flying in the sky, and people are reading from the King James Bible. Eventually, they get to the Garden of Everlasting Sleep and the Lake of Birds, an underwater graveyard where the poison plant also grows. Severian drops his sword into the lake; he dives in after it; he finds it; and then he's helped out of the water by a young woman with amnesia called Dorcas. Another reveal here: Dorcas was a dead body at the bottom of the lake just 2 minutes ago. Was it the magic claw tucked in Severian's boot that resurrected her? Let's keep going. Severian picks the poison plant and then is ferried back across the lake by a guy called Hildred, who Severian recognizes as one of the grave robbers hanging out with Velus the other night. This bloke loves hanging around graveyards.

Then our newly formed crew of Severian, the gullible; AIA, the deceptive thief; and Dorcas, the clueless dead woman, walk back into town. After a quick bite to eat in a restaurant in a tree, Severian is escorted to the dueling field where he comes face to face with a... Severian is killed in the duel; at least that's what everybody thinks, until he sits up, all revived and alive. That pesky claw again! This freaks Agilus out, who runs from the field, killing several people with his poison plant in the panic. In a poetic twist of irony, Agilus is sentenced to death, an execution that is performed by Severian, making AIA his sworn enemy for the rest of the series. After the execution, with Dorcas by his side, Severian assumes that he'll finally be able to leave the city, but then he bumps into Dr. Talos, Baldanders, and a new character called Yenta. Well, she's not exactly new; we did see her very briefly at a cafe that morning, but I forgot to mention her. Don't worry about it. They all get roped into performing that bloody play. Then the whole troop approaches the city gate; they meet an old spaceship sailor called Jonas who instantly falls in love with Yenta. The book ends with a confusing kafuffle in the crowd breaking out into a violent riot. Severian kills a man; the group are split up; and the story is cut short just as Jonas is explaining something. Then Severian addresses the reader, saying that he's carried us thematically from gate to gate. He writes, "Here I pause; if you wish to walk no further with me, reader, I cannot blame you. It is no easy Road." We're left wondering what the hell happened, what does it all mean, and what's on the other side of that city wall. [Music]

We've jumped forward in time from the end of *The Shadow of the Torturer*. I think it's about a week or two since the incident at the gate. Severian and Jonas, who are friends now, are in the small town of Suus. It's certainly far enough away from Nessus to have a different vibe, but it's really just down the road. Severian has figured out that his skills as a torturer and executioner are a commodity; the authorities insultingly pay him to do what he does, including the execution of a spy of Velus. So now we can see that this rebellion reaches beyond the walls of the city, and the Autarch has power outside of Nessus. At the execution, Severian notices his old foe, AIA, in the crowd. Afterwards, while searching for her, he comes across the Green Man—literally a man with green skin who uses some sort of photosynthesis. He's been held as a slave. Oh yeah, he's also from the future, and Severian gives him a tool so that he can escape, and he promises to repay the debt one day. Well, he does actually repay the debt one day; he already knows this because he's from the future. Severian then receives a letter, apparently from Thecla, the woman he loved, the woman he gave a knife to, the woman who committed suicide. "Severian, my lover, I'm still alive; my death was staged as part of a deeper plot. I'm hiding in a mine just outside town; come and find me, and we can ride off into the sunset together. But don't tell anyone about this letter." I'm paraphrasing. So off he goes to the mine, where instead of finding Thecla, he encounters a pack of man-apes who attack him. He escapes by using the power of the claw, probably. As he's leaving the mine, he's attacked again, this time by the real author of the letter; of course, it's AIA and her band of nasty assassins. He escapes with the help of Jonas, and he allows AIA to go free. Back at the inn, Severian and Jonas are kidnapped by Vus's henchmen. They're taken to him, where he asks if they would be willing to join him in his rebellion against the Autarch. They both accept, probably because Vus would have killed them otherwise, and then they take part in the initiation ceremony. This involves drinking the blood, or the special juice, from an alien monster called an Alabo. The Alabo has the ability to take on the personality of its prey when it eats them. So if a person drinks this special Alabo juice and then eats the brain of another human, it can gain their memories and even their characteristics. The effectiveness depends on how susceptible they are to the Alabo analeptic. This explains why Velus and his followers are robbing graves; they need brains to eat, obviously. There's a deeper reason, but I'll talk about that much later. Severian is made to eat none other than Thea. I know this is supposed to be a synopsis, but I just wanted to linger here for a minute and bask in what is the most important pivot point in the story so far.

At the start of *The Shadow of the Torturer*, we are told by Severian that his writing, his account, his memoirs, when he eventually becomes the Autarch (Chapter 1): "It was in this fashion that I began my long journey, by which I backed into the throne." The reader naturally assumes that although Severian will mature and his character evolve, it will essentially be the same person, just writing from the future. Now we learn that the author of the account that we've been reading so far is the mental hybrid of at least Severian and Thecla, and who knows who else, by the time he becomes Autarch. This is, hands down, the greatest, best-executed recontextualization of a story that I've ever encountered. It's so tempting to just go right back to the beginning and read it again with this revelation in mind, but we must move forward. Severian and Jonas are given the mission to go to the House Absolute—that's the residence of the Autarch—to deliver a message to a spy. They actually get captured in the grounds and then thrown in the antichamber, a dungeon underneath the House Absolute that holds prisoners of the Commonwealth. The Thecla part of Severian's consciousness has memories of being in the antichamber in the past and knows of a secret door, so Severian and Jonas escape. Among other things, Severian finds his sword; Jonas uses a teleportation device to leave Earth completely; and then Severian bumps into the spy he was looking for all along, who turns out to be the Autarch himself. Back in the garden, Severian is reunited with the old gang of Dr. Talos, Baldanders, Dorcas, and Yenta, who were there to perform that bloody play. The performance is interrupted by aliens in the audience shooting up the place with laser guns, and the gang flee, leaving the House Absolute, hitting the road. The new plan is for Dr. Talos and Baldanders to return home to their castle by the lake, and for Severian, Dorcas, and Yenta to continue along the road to Thrax, where Severian will start his new job—nasty business.

Now it turns out that Yenta was transformed, genetically and surgically manipulated by Dr. Talos to be an object of beauty, probably to create more interest in his play. This almost explains why Jonas literally fell in love with her at first sight—probably some sort of selective pheromone—but now Dr. Talos is done with her, and he refuses to take her with them, leaving her withdrawn from whatever drugs he was pumping into her. It gets worse; it's suggested, maybe, that Severian raped Yenta the night before the play, and she attempts to commit suicide. Back on the road now, and Severian is awakened in the middle of the night by the calling of an undine from the river. It's a big animal-fish-woman thing that tells Severian that he is meant for greater things and offers him the ability to breathe underwater, which he turns down.

Now we get a series of events that are probably the most confusing part of the whole *Book of the New Sun*. The reader is left perplexed until much later on in the story, so I'll just recount as it happened. The group comes across a stone town where there's a character called the Kaman—she's likely an alien posing as a sorcerer—her assistant, Marin, who's a witch; and Hildred, that Velarian guy that we saw at the graveyard and the lake where Dorcas came back to life. This bunch are performing some sort of séance. All six of them perform a summoning of an ancient Incan godly figure called Apu Pancha. When he appears, Hildred pounces on him. The orientation of the action becomes very wobbly as Severian finds himself grappling with Hildred, but he also sees another Hildred, apparently fighting an invisible foe. Reality itself is flashing before Severian's eyes—visions of the ancient past, memories, and dreams swirling around in his brain. A crack of thunder brings him back; Hildred is dead; the Kaman, Apu Pancha, and the witch are nowhere to be seen; Dorcas is there, but Yenta has finally passed away. Once again, Severian addresses the reader, now saying that he's carried us from town to town, and we now stand at the gateway to the mountains. "Here I pause; if you wish to walk no further with me, reader, I do not blame you. It is no easy Road."

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A few months after the strange events at the stone town, Severian and Dorcas are living in Thrax, Severian fulfilling his professional obligation by becoming the Lictor, the chief officer of the prison. It's not exactly the perfect romance in paradise; Severian has the stress of the job, and Dorcas is starting to recover from her amnesia. There is a scene where she coughs up some round lead stones; these were forced down her throat when she was dead to add ballast to help weigh her body down in the aquatic graveyard. Eventually, Dorcas remembers enough to realize that her husband and child could still be alive back home, so she leaves Severian and returns to Nessus. The chief magistrate of Thrax gives Severian the task of attending a costume party and eliminating one of the guests. He meets a woman called Siraka at the party; he has sex with her; and then realizes that she's actually the target. He does not follow orders, knowing that this will enrage the authorities. He plans to leave Thrax, but he's attacked by a fire-breathing salamander. He escapes the city through the sewage system.

The middle of the book feels like an odyssey; Severian wanders through the mountains, encountering one enlightening, fantastical event or character after another. He finds a house in the middle of nowhere, home to a family including a young boy called Little Severian and his twin sister, but who's hiding upstairs waiting to attack him—his old enemy, AIA—and then an Alabo shows up and threatens to kill them all. In the melee, the dad and the daughter are killed by the Alabo, but with the upper hand, Severian offers a deal to the monster: leave them alone, and he promises not to hunt him in the future. A truce, a deal is done, and he escapes again. After abandoning the house, the remaining members of the family walk through the mountains, with Severian following behind. The family are attacked by a group of zoanthropes, lobotomized madmen. The Alabo jumps in and kills all the zoanthropes, but only Severian and Little Severian survive. Heading deeper into the mountains, the two Severians come across a village occupied by some wizards who kidnap Little Severian. Severian is in the middle of fighting a sorcerer duel to win the boy back when they're interrupted by a giant killer slug. It's worth noting at this point that these regular appearances of weird alien monsters that are trying to kill Severian belong to a space merchant called Heather; he is Zia's lover; he's using portal mirrors to drop his pets in Severian's path—very cool. So escaping the wizard's village, they start to climb Mount Typhon, an entire mountain carved into the statue of the once ruler of the land, Typhon. In the statue's lap lies a gathering of old buildings and construction machines, and in one of the buildings, the dehydrated husk of a two-headed body. They climb up to the statue's giant hand to take a closer look at the gold ring on one of its fingers. Little Severian touches the ring and is instantly vaporized. Severian sleeps in one of the buildings; he's kicked awake by a man with two heads. It's the body they saw the day before, now revived and alive. Is it that pesky claw doing its magic healing again? This is Typhon, the thousand-year-old monarch whose image is immortalized on this very mountain. He takes Severian prisoner and escorts him to his lair in the head chamber of the statue. Typhon offers Severian the throne of the earth. I'm not sure how he can offer such a thing, but anyway, Severian kills Typhon by attacking his other head. He climbs down the mountain all the way to Lake Datera, where he struts into a village, confident that he has some sort of power or a knack for survival, and demands free room and board. So the villagers drug him, steal the claw, tie him up; they're taking him on a boat across the lake to their master in the castle—that's also where they've delivered the claw. On the way, Severian escapes by igniting some explosives. He's rescued by the people of the floating islands. The new plan is for Severian and the floating island people to assault the castle and try and retrieve the claw first; Severian will just walk up to the front door and pose as the Lictor of Thrax, just ask for the claw back, or cause a distraction. The front door is answered by Dr. Talos. Come on, Severian; we all knew that Dr. Talos and Baldanders lived in a castle by a lake.

The end of the book has a now typical slingshot ending where we get loads of new information, some questions answered, but many more posed. We learned that Dr. Talos is, in fact, the creation of Baldanders, and not the other way around, as it quite often seems, and Baldanders is potentially somehow extremely important to the bigger picture of this story. There are three visitors present; that's their spaceship parked on top of the castle—three aliens, or Huls. The names are Osie, Barbatus, and Famus. It's complicated, but just know that the Huls are experiencing time backward, and they've already met Severian in the future—their past, of course. They seem to be keeping an eye on Severian and Baldanders and were in the middle of some sort of negotiation or interview with Baldanders when Severian turned up. Apparently unsatisfied for now or then, the Huls leave, enraging Baldanders. He blames the presence of Severian for the unsatisfactory conclusion to the meeting, and he throws the claw from the top of the tower. The floating islanders take this as a sign to advance and attack the castle. When the dust settles, Baldanders has escaped by diving into the lake; *Terminus Est* is destroyed; and Severian finds the claw in the rubble, without his fancy encasement. Severian can see that the claw is just a simple rosethorn, and he's left doubting its power, his connection to it, and his place in the world.

This book is set against the backdrop of the war between the Commonwealth, ruled by the Autarch in the south, and the Asians in the north. The war has always been the backdrop to *The Book of the New Sun*, but until now it hasn't really affected Severian directly. Severian, once again alone, a few days after the battle at Baldanders' castle, finds a dead soldier on the ground. Still uncertain of its power, Severian tries to use the claw to revive him, and hey presto, it seems to work. Groggy and zombie-like, the soldier gets to his feet. As Severian and the soldier make their way to a field medical facility, the soldier's health improves while Severian's declines. So when they do reach help, it's Severian that's taken in, recovering from his strange fever. Severian meets his fellow patients: a beautiful young woman and two men who both want to marry her. The woman decides that the best way to choose a future husband is for the men to have a storytelling contest. In between these stories, which we get to hear in full, Severian is trying to convince various members of the medical staff to take the claw from him, to accept it as the holy relic that it once was, that it still is, apparently. The medical facility is run by the Pines, the same religious group that worshipped the Claw of the Conciliator in the first book—the very same claw that Severian still has. This part of the book is full of metaphor and proverbial gymnastics—well, more than usual anyway. The stories that we hear are reflections of the true scope of the narrative and kind of a nuanced reward for getting this far and paying attention. Another patient joins in the contest; the woman herself tells a story; Severian is the judge. Before we get a conclusion to the contest, the head Pine asks Severian to go and rescue a holy man that lives somewhere out in the wilderness that's about to be overrun by the Asians. He hides the claw in the altar and goes off on his mission. He finds the holy man, Master Ash, at his shack, a place called the Last House. Severian stays the night, sleeping upstairs, and in the morning discovers that the whole world is covered in ice. This is one of the possible futures of Earth: Ragnarok, the final winter. The different levels of the house show Severian the different strands of fate, the alternate futures. He drags Master Ash from the house, who then disappears, and the Ragnarok timeline collapses. This does suggest that the future now favors the Green Man's timeline, where the new sun does come to Earth and produce enough heat and light so that some sort of evolved human can photosynthesize, but we'll cover that in much more detail in another chapter. Severian returns to the hospital and discovers that the Asians have attacked and completely destroyed the place. He wanders around for a couple of days before joining the Autarch's army as a mercenary. Severian is wounded on the battlefield and is inexplicably rescued by the Autarch himself. They fly off in a little copter thing, and then they get shot down behind enemy lines. The Autarch, badly injured, close to death, about to be captured by the enemy, explains to Severian that he is next in line to be the Autarch. "There's no time to waste; drink this Alabo analeptic that hangs in a cock-shaped bottle around my neck; cut my throat and kill me; then eat my brains so that you can absorb all the memories of all the Autarchs that came before me, thus continuing the chain of consciousness transference. This is what the Hroes told me would one day happen; I've always known that you would be my predecessor; this is your destiny." So Severian kills the Autarch and eats his brains. Inexplicably again, Severian is rescued by AIA and the Green Man, who opens up a corridor through time and space and drops him on a beach near Nessus. Then we, and Severian, because he's now the Autarch, get a big revelation from—let's call it—an AI projection from an alien computer. The secret history of time is mostly explained to Severian; it's the concept of a Divine Year, the time span from the Big Bang to the heat death of the universe, or whatever else stops existence before then; the idea of creating a bubble universe so that humanity, or another life form, can be uplifted so that we can take existence, life, into the next universe, the next Divine Year. I know it's a lot to take in, so I've dedicated an entire chapter to trying to explain the timeline, but for a synopsis, it's enough that Severian now kind of understands his purpose and his potential. He boards a riverboat and travels upstream to Nessus. He sees Dorcas mourning her dead husband; he visits the Citadel; the prodigal son returns; and then he goes back to the restaurant in the tree, puts two and two together, and figures out that the waiter is Dorcas's son, also his father, making Dorcas his grandmother—nice. The story ends with Severian preparing to leave Earth on a spaceship to go to a pocket universe where he will be judged by a bunch of aliens to see if he is indeed worthy to bring the new sun. Oh, and just before the end, Severian drops the bombshell that he's not the only Severian that walks the corridors of time, and he intends to marry his one true love, Valeria, a character that we met for less than two pages at the start of *The Shadow of the Torturer*. And that's it—*The Book of the New Sun*, everything you need to know, all wrapped up in a nice, tidy package with a bow on top. Ah, no way.

And so we come to the sequel. The coda, cynics would say; the contractual obligation. It's all of those things, giving us many answers, but so many more questions. Ten years after the end of *The Citadel of the Autarch*, Severian, now the Autarch, leaves Earth on a spaceship bound for Yesod, a place that exists outside of our time and space. Probably. Sort of. The entire first act of the book takes place on the spaceship, and in my opinion, although a lot of amazingly weird and wonderful things happen, they don't have too much bearing on the plot, especially on a first read. But this is where Severian throws his memoirs, *The Book of the New Sun*, into a wormhole. This is the book that then travels back in time and falls into Gene Wolfe's possession, which he then translates into this book. He also meets a woman called Gunny, who stays by his side for a fair chunk of the book, and he has his penultimate encounter with the three Huls—Osie, Bargo, Barbatus, and Famus—but it's their second meeting with Severian because they experienced time backward. When we get to Yesod, Severian is then judged to determine if he is indeed worthy, or at least compatible, to be the New Sun, to be the chosen one. He encounters a Hierro hierogram—her hero, something like that—called Aeta. She is of the species, the beings that were created in the last universe by the people whose job it was to uplift—remember, we're in the business of ensuring life from one universe to the next. The Hierro grits are observing, monitoring, possibly even guiding and manipulating this process through the Hroes and God knows who else. Aeta has sex with Severian, creating a white fountain. It's like he's ejaculated a whole new universe, another Big Bang. In simpler terms, this is what travels back to Earth and changes the old, dying sun into the new sun. It turns out that Severian wasn't being judged at all; these guys just needed him to create the white fountain so that they could then look into the future and just double-check to see if he really is the chosen one, which he is. Time-travel logic hurts my head. Severian and Gunny are then, after a few very strange dream sequences and time-paradox visions, transported on a spaceship back to Earth. We then get what my friends at Alabo Soup like to call the Gospel of Severian. Much of what will be written as the story of the Conciliator happens around now. You can—I help—Severian heals a little girl's arm, rejuvenates a man on his deathbed, and, for one of a better phrase, resurrects a zombie. All will be noticed and add fuel to the Conciliator mythos. He's attracting a lot of attention now with his miraculous powers, and he's arrested and thrown in prison in Nessus, right where he used to live and work. He's picked up a few followers along the way—disciples who visit him in prison. He tells them about his incredible story so far, which is overheard by the guy in the next cell, who then writes down this text, becomes another *Book of the New Sun*: the story of the Conciliator. This is the book that Dr. Talos will adapt into his play, *Eschatology and Genesis*, about a thousand years in the future. Severian is taken to the ruler of the land, the Monarch, and it's Typhon from *The Sword of the Lictor*. This meeting of the two explains the strange comments by Typhon when he meets Severian in

Would, in the last book, and just like he said he would, twice in the second book. So don't tell me Gene Wolfe didn't have all of this planned out right from the very beginning. This is book five in a five-book series. Sarian returns to Usas, which is the next Earth, the next Divine Year, probably. We think so, anyway. Where the scraps of humanity have to start all over again, and Sarian is considered a living God, called the Sleeper. We end the entire series with some wisdom from Sarian, our god of many names. And I'm paraphrasing here, but it's pretty much, "Be excellent to each other." Yes, the Book of the New Sun is actually Bill and Ted's Excellent [Music] Adventure.

Okay, pay attention. The Book of the New Sun is primarily talking about the span of human civilization from the Incas in the past to the Apocalypse in the distant future. Sarian is the constant, the somewhat oblivious architect of the whole thing, but also a servant of something much, much bigger—possibly the biggest expression of space and time in all of science fiction. This isn't a scale, but we can place Sarian as Apu Pancha here at the beginning, the furthest point in time that he travels back to, therefore the furthest point that he influences Humanity. We can actually pin this down to a rough date. I'm going to say it's about the 10th or 11th century, when the pre-Inca tribes started using complex building materials, the Keystone, and when they started worshipping the sun god Inti. Apu Pancha, Sarian.

The other end of the scale is the period where the plot to the first four books takes place—the time of the Autarch, jewel-encrusted with poison plants, the journey to Thrax, a torturer walking around town with a great big scary sword, all that great stuff. Very close to the end of the world. We know the sun is dying, and we also know that hydrogen fusion will slow down and enter its red giant phase about 5 billion years from now. That just feels way too far in the future, even for this story. But there is evidence to suggest that either aliens, advanced humans, or maybe machines have manipulated that natural process, keeping the geological and tectonic scale within grasp. Anything between about 10,000 and a few million years is plenty of time to bury our current age under layers and layers of history, barely recognizable but not massively detached. The Earth of the New Sun floats around the entire timeline and also sometimes takes place in another dimension. Yes, OD is a place that exists outside of our space and time, but it's also parallel or folded up inside the Claw, or inside Sarian's head, or nowhere, I think. And all of this is just a slither of the true scale of what's really going on. The purpose of everything is to continue a chain of universes and take life, existence, into the next Divine Year. Effectively, a Divine Year is the cycle of a universe from Big Bang to heat death, or whatever else stops existence. That's the genius of the scale of the Book of the New Sun—it's concentric layers of consciousness and intelligence, a very human story, but it overlaps into religion, folklore, the unknowable, and from a postmodern perspective, it's rock-hard science fiction that loops back on itself into the Divine and everything in between.

Let's go back to this scale, the playground of the characters that a human mind can grasp. The journey and the evolution of the physical Book of the New Sun is almost as fascinating as the story itself. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that directly affects its own content, its own existence, and the history of the world that it occupies several times over. Draft number one: Sarian writes his memoirs when he is the Autarch, right at the end here. He finishes the book and he puts it in Alton's library in Nessus. Draft number two: Just off the end here, on a spaceship on the way to Yesod, whatever the hell that means. Sarian rewrites his memoirs, which must be identical to the first draft because he has a perfect memory. Yeah, right. And then he takes that book and he throws it into a wormhole. I'm not making this up. That book travels back in time. We can't be 100% certain where in space and time that it lands, but we do know that a metafictional version of Gene Wolfe himself finds the book in the 1970s, translates it as best he can, and that's the version of the book that you can now buy on Amazon. And that's why the original story, these four volumes, finishes where it does, because Sarian hadn't yet completed his Odyssey.

Now it gets really interesting. When Sarian travels back from Yesod to about a thousand years before his own birth, the time of the first Autarch, he's held prisoner, and he recounts his tale so far to a comate. That guy thinks, "What a great story," and he adapts Sarian's account into another Book of the New Sun, this time leaning the emphasis more into the tale of the Conciliator, this savior figure, which is, of course, Sarian. And that's where you get the parallels with Jesus, the Bible, Christianity. By the time we pick up the story in *Shadow of the Torturer*, which is in the future at this point, Sarian is unwittingly living in a world of his own legend. This is also the Book of the New Sun that, centuries later, Dr. Talos will further adapt into his play, *Eschatology and Genesis*. So yes, in essence, that play is a warped version of this timeline that we're only halfway through witnessing when we get to see it performed. *The Earth of the New Sun* is yet another memoir written by Sarian after all these events have happened, but I'm not entirely sure how this got back to Gene Wolfe from what is effectively the next Divine Year, a whole other universe, I guess. Sarian moves in mysterious ways.

The other mega-important aspect of this timeline, as well as it being a map of Sarian's influence on this universe, it's also the span of influence of the New Sun itself, the actual star, and how the two of those are intrinsically linked. Right, let me think about this and try and get it right. When Sarian creates the New Sun in Yesod, which is technically outside of our space and time, it still takes a finite amount of time for the sun to physically travel to Earth. It takes this amount of time. It arrives 50 years after Sarian left on the spaceship, 50 years after the end of *Citadel of the Autarch*. Let's work back to front on this one. When the New Sun arrives, it melts the ice caps, it causes that biblical flood, and it wipes out humanity. I think this is the end of this Divine Year, from Big Bang to the point when it arrives. Well, technically, I think it's the start of the transition into the next Divine Year, but let's not go there. Sarian gets in a little bit of trouble round about here, about a thousand years before the start of *Shadow of the Torturer*. He's held in a prison cell, and he escapes by jumping back in time as far as he possibly can. Now we know that this ability is powered by the New Sun, so now we know its limits. The New Sun must have been born in Earth-equivalent time around the 10th or 11th century, around the time of the pre-Incas. So that's why Sarian can't jump all the way back to the time of the dinosaurs, or the Big Bang, or into another universe or Divine Year. The New Sun must be in existence; it must be in the sky somewhere. It's not explicitly explained, but it is suggested that the New Sun gives Sarian more power the closer it gets to Earth, either that or he just learns to harness the power better as he gets older. It's complicated. Either way, the physical New Sun in the sky is like the book's magic system. If you read closely, you'll see that Sarian dies about 15 times in the book. He brings a dog back to life, he pulls Dorcas from a watery grave, and loads of other miraculous things. Gene Wolfe double-bluffs and sometimes triple-bluffs us into thinking that the power was coming from the Claw, the Claw of the Conciliator, but it was Sarian and the New Sun all along. But then again, Sarian is the Conciliator, and he could have transferred that power into the Claw at any time, or it could have been a bit of both. It's a paradoxical Dumbo's feather. Beyond the rigid structure of the timeline lies interpretation for the plot and for every reader's personal experience. Even when Gene Wolfe writes or translates *The Earth of the New Sun*, which is arguably a book that solves many of the mysteries of the original vision, he just expands the horizons and gives us even deeper questions. Is divine intervention molding this timeline above the Hrulls? Is this a story about God's plan? It certainly proposes it, but it's not a requirement. Or is this a story about the nature of infinity, and Sarian just happens to be the character that stumbles through history in just the right way? Keep an eye on a trillion galaxies, a googolplex of suns, and somebody will eventually appear miraculous or Divine. You don't need to understand the timeline; you don't need to understand the Book of the New Sun. We love this book because we are forever searching for meaning. [Music]

Theories, symbols, and postulations. This is the part of the video that I've been both looking forward to and dreading in equal measure. It's an opportunity for me to present an amalgamation of years of, obviously, reading the book, listening to Book of the New Sun podcasts, piggybacking on very smart people's work, and simply discussing the book with other fans. I think it's important to note that pretty much every crumb of speculation and interpretation has been publicly debated and recorded many, many times. It's the perfect book for that, but the nature of the unreliable narration and the often cryptic delivery of the text means that opinion and interpretation holds more currency than cold, hard fact, and it's a lot more fun. However, there is still a relatively solid consensus on most of the mysteries, which I will try my best to deliver. Please, if you disagree or you have something to add, comment below or over on our dedicated discussion channels on Discord. We need all the help we can [Music] get.

Even the most casual reader of the Book of the New Sun, if that's even a thing, will surely notice the parallels between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster and Dr. Talos and Balanders. Yes, Wolfe subverts the reader at first by presenting Dr. Talos as the brains and Balanders as the lumbering oaf, but we soon learn that Balanders is the creator. Let's assume that Gene Wolfe is doing something far more elaborate than simply referencing Frankenstein, and let's talk about the concept of the information echo influencing the past by way of time travel. We know that Sarian travels back in time and creates his own mythos, his own Gospel. He is that very same Conciliator that he's heard about at the beginning of *Shadow of the Torturer*, or he will be in his subjective future, which is actually the linear past. Another great example is when he travels back to the 10th or 11th century and teaches the pre-Inca tribes construction techniques from the future, uplifting this slice of humanity, which in itself is a microcosm of the Divine Year, White Fountain idea, but let's not get distracted. The point is, his actions in the past must affect everything after, like the butterfly effect. He spent quite a few years with the tribe, so who knows what stories he told, what information he dished out, just how much did he mold that timeline? Is the entire saga built on Sarian's foundational echo? Back to Frankenstein: Sarian as Apu Pancha, who is a living God to his tribe, remember, is telling stories about a funny little android playwright and his giant companion. Surely, the word of God is recorded, revered, and repeated. I understand that the Promethean Greek myth involves creating humanity from clay and has heavy uplift themes, which is the true deep inspiration for Shelley's Frankenstein, but the image of the Creator and the monster still tracks. There is room for all of these origins to exist concurrently in the Book of the New Sun: Prometheus, Frankenstein, Dr. Talos and Balanders, and Sarian as the Creator and the uplifter of his tribe and beyond, making Sarian the modern Prometheus, which makes Frankenstein the postmodern Prometheus. And that's just the example of Frankenstein; there may be a hundred more examples buried in the text by Gene Wolfe just waiting to be discovered.

It doesn't stop there. As we've now established that going back in time creates echoes of influence, we can conclude that any time traveler can manipulate the timeline, not just Severian. The Green Man has the ability to walk the corridors of time and I think doesn't necessarily need the presence of the New Sun to power that ability. Indeed, he rescues Sarian from his Apu Pancha tomb when Sarian doesn't have enough New Sun power to time travel himself out of trouble. The Green Man's physical nature is due to him coming from the very far future, or maybe just one possible future that is yet to be determined. Does this mean that the Green Man and others like him, the Hrulls and the Hierogrammatists, can play with time, history, and fate at will, and this story is just one of an infinite number of possible scenarios?

Talking of things stuck in a time [Music] loop, the Claw of the Conciliator—not the book, the actual Claw—is the perfect example of Gene Wolfe's playfulness. His version of the puzzle box. Symbols have power, and the double, triple, and quadruple bluff. On a reread of the Book of the New Sun, it's the Claw that exposes Sarian's miraculous ability, because by then the reader understands that the Claw is just a simple rose thorn. In my opinion, it also exposes just how much control Wolfe had of the narrative. We're deep into *The Earth of the New Sun* before the Claw is elevated to Relic, when Sarian gives the rose thorn, covered in his own blood, to a soldier right after he heals and resurrects people and right before he jumps into the corridors of time. About a thousand years later, the time of *Shadow of the Torturer*, the Pines care for the Claw, which is now entombed in a nice, shiny gem. All sorts of allegory and symbolism there. When we pick up the story, why wouldn't we mirror Sarian and attribute power to the Claw? Wolfe guides us down that path. Pay attention: he resurrects a dead woman, he survives a fatal alien plant attack—oh, he didn't realize that he had a magic claw tucked in his pouch the whole time. I solved a Wolfe puzzle. Then Sarian discovers the Claw and joins the reader in that assumption. It guides his actions and emotions for a big chunk of the story. He forms an assault squad to retrieve the Claw from Balanders Castle; he wrestles with the realization that it was just a shiny gemstone, and he still believes in the healing powers of the Claw, even though the Hrulls and the Pines tell him that it was never a magic Relic. But it gives him confidence and inner strength, and it masks the true, somewhat supernatural power of the New Sun, like a Divine placebo. Symbols have power. The Claw is Sarian's Dumbo's feather, but it's also a perfect science fiction time loop paradox artifact, right up there with *Donnie Darko*'s jet engine and the Terminator's hand.

Hopefully, we all understand that the Book of the New Sun is a work of fiction, therefore taking place in its own bubble of space and time. However, it's fun and interesting to look for clues that link the book to our real world, try to fit the fictional narrative into a specific place and time. One of the first clues that this is the far future of our Earth is a painting hanging in the Citadel in Nessus. It's pretty clearly the famous Apollo 11 mission, Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, but it's kind of suggested that this isn't common knowledge. I'm not sure if that's saying that this is so far in the future that the greatest events in human history are almost forgotten, or that Sarian has lived such a sheltered life that he hasn't been exposed to that information. Let's be honest, there are lots of people that could name you all of the Kardashians but don't know who the hell Neil Armstrong is. So inconclusive time frame, but let's agree that it's our Earth, in the future.

Talking of the moon, it's now a green disc in the sky; it's covered in trees and much closer to Earth. That's the opposite of what our current understanding predicts. This doesn't help pin down a date, but it does illustrate that we're so advanced that we've learned how to terraform and to pull the moon closer. There are references to a technological Golden Age which happened sometime between now and the time of the book, where humans traveled to a thousand star systems and conducted business with alien races. It seems we repeated the atrocities of the old Empires and the Conquistadors, and we're now being pegged back by the galactic community. There are still star sailors and some off-world shenanigans, but as a species, we are doomed to go down with the sun itself. And that sun, the sun, is big, big, and red, and about to die—something that won't happen naturally for a few billion years yet, which is way too far in the future, even for this book. We have an explanation that links all of this together: the Hierogrammatists put a black hole in the middle of the sun, speeding up the process. This was to punish us and to keep us under control, but now they've realized that a human on Earth is needed to take life into the next Divine Year. So, to kill two birds with one stone, they provide the means to save humanity and the entire universe by positioning an Autarch as the Savior, who then brings the New Sun to Earth. And this rather complicated, often overlooked, mind-blowing science fiction concept is the heart of the Book of the New Sun. Without the cosmic chain of events that take place millennia before the Book of the New Sun, there is no story to tell.

None of this helps us date the events in the book. If aliens are throwing around black holes and possibly moving moons, then this is no longer a calendar of human progress. I'm happy with anything from about 10,000 years in the future because we do still see the traditional archaeological layering of civilizations, in about a million years. The geography. Okay, it's almost universally agreed among Wolfe fans and scholars that Nessus, the Commonwealth, the setting of the book, is in South America. There are loads of speculative maps online, almost all showing the familiar position of the Andes, the Amazon, the equator, and Nessus on the west coast, where the borders of our modern-day Bolivia, Peru, and Chile convert. Put in Nessus somewhere near the city of Arica. That would make Lake Titicaca Lake Datera, where Balanders and Dr. Talos live, and Leas could be Thrax. It's important to consider that these towns are not necessarily the future versions of our current-day towns, but also human settlements exist in geographically favorable locations. So Leas could indeed be Thrax, even if it is a million years in the future. There is yet more evidence that we're in South America when we see references to certain plants and animals, even customs and language, Apu Pancha being the biggest flashing light. I don't think the time frame affects the geography all that much. Forests, rivers, and deserts change quite quickly, but a continent doesn't move very far in a million years. And of course, we have alien forces at play that can manipulate all of that as well.

One thing that throws me off slightly and even starts to derail some of my own theories if I think about it too much is the stone town where Apu Pancha appears at the end of *The Claw of the Conciliator*. If Sarian traveled back to the 10th century, where he influenced the pre-Inca tribes, and the stone town is the ruins, the place where he once lived, there wouldn't be any trace of it after a million years, would there? So either the time of Apu Pancha is much further in the future from now, another time when civilization needed lifting up, so post-apocalyptic but still clinging on to the imagery and the embers of the Inca, or the events of the Book of the New Sun take place not many thousands of years from now. I favor this time scale because there is tantalizing evidence, and it means I haven't wasted half of this video. This video, well, all of our videos actually, cost a lot of time and some money to make—money that we don't have. You can support this operation by donating on Buy Me a Coffee, which is an online tipping service. Get yourself some merch over at the merch store, or you can join the cult on Patreon and gain access to our exclusive Discord and the podcast Radio Death Cult. Links to all that good stuff in the description. Thank you so [Music] much, Jonas and Yenta.

Why would I dedicate an entire chapter of this video to two characters that we don't spend very much time with and who arguably don't affect the story all that much? Arguably, I stress. The details of who they are are great examples of informing the reader of the wider universe, the layers of technology, and just how different and weird this future Earth can be. This is one of my favorite aspects of Wolfe storytelling—how he dictates a much grander narrative through the lens of a memoir without heavy info dumps and clunky exposition. Jonas latches on to the narrative in the last few pages of *Shadow of the Torturer*, instantly declaring that Yenta is the most beautiful woman that he's ever seen. He is in love, and I believe him. Well, I believe that he believes it. More on that in a minute. His story is amazing and one that I wish Gene Wolfe would have dedicated an entire novel to. Like many of the side stories in the Book of the New Sun, Jonas was maybe 100% machine, a walking, talking AI, when he was originally built by the Koreans, probably. I have to say probably and maybe because it's not crystal clear if he was part organic, and the Korean origins come from when he talks about his original given name and the ship that he served on. He was a spaceship operative who left Earth during the First Empire. This is the period when humanity spread out to a thousand stars, very much a Golden Age, the height of our technological powers before the aliens pegged us back for being too aggressive. He returned to Earth, we think, about 200 years later, but I suspect that time dilation has played its hand and it's much later than that because the spaceport that he intended to dock at isn't there anymore. Let's assume that that spaceport was originally in Nessus, and let's also assume that the ruins of that spaceport became part of the Citadel. The Matachin Tower, where Severian lived and worked as a torturer, is an old rocket, as are many of the buildings in Nessus. That may all be completely wrong. He may have been aiming for a completely different city; he may have crash-landed 10,000 years ago and has only just now made his way to Nessus, but I like the assumption. It's elegant, and more importantly, it means that Wolfe is rewarding us for paying attention. Anyway, Jonas is severely injured, or whatever it is that happens to machines when they crash, and he repairs himself using the flesh and the bones and the organs of a human that was killed in the same incident. I love that switcheroo of the usual all-humans repairing themselves with artificial parts trope. We arrive at the same philosophical question—where does the machine stop and the human start—but from the opposite side. Jonas seems to have absorbed some personality and memories from the dead man, making him a true human-machine hybrid, drawing comparisons with the Tin Man from *The Wizard of Oz*, Blade Runner's replicants, and take your pick from science fiction history. In my opinion, Yenta is that same expression of the human-artificial portmanteau, but now we explore that concept from a much darker angle—darker than harvesting a human to make a machine feel better. Dr. Talos finds a waitress in a cafe and offers her the chance to become the most beautiful woman in the world, and she takes the L. What could possibly go wrong? Off camera, Talos conducts transformational surgery, probably some horrible futuristic genetic engineering, and he gives her outward beauty—every red-blooded man's desire—and I suspect advanced pheromones as well. And then he renames her Yenta. She suffers extreme exploitation; she's the eye candy in Dr. Talos's play and totally reliant upon the drugs that are keeping her beautiful, keeping her body alive. After the transformation, she's a rape victim, the focus of disproportionate infatuation, discarded and beaten by the one who gave her the curse, and then she commits suicide. Did Jonas fall in love due to a simple chemical reaction, a kindred understanding of a similar predicament, or is this a platform to explore the male gaze? It can, of course, be all of those things and [Music] more.

Here's an interesting observation—well, I think so, anyway. If the cover artwork for the Book of the New Sun featured a tentacled Lovecraftian monster fighting a winged angel, it probably would have sold more copies. And technically, that's quite accurate. The war between the Commonwealth and the Asians is not only the window dressing, the backdrop to the whole series, it's also a very important driver of the plot and the action. We just don't see that much of it because, obviously, we're following Sarian, and he doesn't come into direct contact with the conflict until *Citadel of the Autarch*. But Gene Wolfe still wants to tell us that story, so he brilliantly leaves details sprinkled all over the series. So here is my cobbled-together overview of the situation and the far-reaching ramifications. At some point in Earth's history, a gang of aliens, or more likely the seed or the eggs of these aliens, lands on Earth. There is a line somewhere about somebody casting some beans into the sea or something like that. I think Jonas tells that story. There were seven, 17 of them, referred to in a book that we spot in Alton's library called *Lives of the 17*. Means monsters—alien monsters. I'm not sure if all of them are sea monsters specifically or how many of them are still alive around the world, but there are at least a handful still active, including a Beyar as big as a mountain and with a horde of Undines doing his bid. In yet another corner of this book that would make a fantastic individual novel. As far as I can tell, Beyar wants some sort of control of the Commonwealth, possibly the entire world, maybe with the other sea monsters, or maybe he just wants to be the king of the Earth. He has raised an army, or at least he already has control of the area north of the Commonwealth, probably North and Central America. These are the Asians. He must also know about the Sarian situation to some degree—that he will possibly become the New Sun and take Earth into the next Divine Year, scuppering Beyar's plans for world domination. We see quite a few cases of these Undines, big, weird female fish-servant things, traveling upriver, invading Sarian's mind, trying to manipulate him, trying to get him on their side, or maybe even kill him. It's more complicated than that, of course it is. Beyar represents one possible future of humanity, one ideology where all humans are the same. The Asians are like clones, brainwashed to do the same, to be the same, to think the same. Conversely, the Autarch program, instigated and manipulated by the high Hrulls and the Hierogrammatists, is the opposite. They are taking hundreds of humans, all of humanity, and putting it all into one person, using the alabo analeptic technique. You eat the brains, and you absorb all of the Autarchs that came before. And that's why it's okay for a torturer to become the savior because he has a soldier, an accountant, a beekeeper, a YouTuber, a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker in his brain. In this chain of consciousness, two sides to a war, two competing opposite ideologies, and humanity caught in this proxy crossfire. Yes, it's a little bit like *Star Wars*. The Empire has a clone army, disposable people with no heart, while the Rebel Alliance is a dynamic bunch comprised of many colors, creeds, and alien races. I'm not giving George Lucas any credit for the Book of the New [Music] Sun.

In literature and film, we see examples of the unreliable narrator all the time, but the magnitude at which it affects the story depends on the intent of the writer. It can be a part of the story itself, right from the very beginning. The reader or the viewer is aware that the person who is telling us the story is not always telling the truth, the fictional truth, but their inconsistencies are consistent—the tall tale. Sometimes it's used as a plot device or a twist. We find out at the end of the story that this character is, in fact, somebody else, or they may be mad or have a problem with memory or something like that. And then there is the kind of narration where the narrator thinks they are telling us the truth, but they have a limited worldview. They may be a child, or oblivious, or stupid, or they may be a dog or a rabbit. One thing that all of these have in common is the observer is privy to the fact that the narration is unreliable at some point. And then Gene Wolfe comes along and gives us Sarian, who claims that he has a perfect memory—a pretty useful gift for someone who is writing their rather complicated memoirs. Let me address that phrase, "perfect memory," because I think it's often misconstrued. I don't think it means the same to us as it means to Sarian. Do we think of a photographic memory when we hear "perfect memory"? So there should be no mistakes or contradictions, unless, of course, Gene Wolfe made a mistake when he was actually writing the book, and his editor also missed it. But we see contradictions; we see mistakes. For example, Sarian names two characters in one scene, and then a few pages later he gets one of the names wrong. Not that perfect. This could be deliberate by Wolfe, merely to make us pay attention. I tell you that he has a perfect memory, and then I show you that either he doesn't or something else is going on. The truth is, many, many things are going on, and top of that list is Gene Wolfe is translating this book as best he can. Sarian is writing this in what must be a very warped language from the future, so nothing will ever be 100% accurate. Sarian is not the most wholesome; he's not the best example of how to conduct one's business. In fact, he's very likely a murdering rapist. If you're writing your autobiography, you have the power to bend the truth at will. He does leave in plenty of details about the awful things he's done, but you can also tell when he's been vague, probably because he's ashamed of his actions, or when he's exaggerating when he was particularly brave in a certain situation, or just how much the ladies loved him. Remember, he's writing this from the position as Autarch. He may have to leave out some details, either to protect himself or the Commonwealth. And most glaringly, by the time he's writing this version of the Book of the New Sun, he's consumed the memories and personalities of about a thousand other Autarchs. Maybe that, through translation, is what a perfect memory means to Sarian. He has an ability better than anyone else in the text to absorb and retain the memories and experiences of dead people using the alabo analeptic pass. The real story, through all of those filters—opinion, perspective, language, time, propaganda, translation, and [ __ ]—and the fact that it's coming from a pseudo-schizophrenic brain, and you bet it's unreliable.

One final note on this: Of all the details that Sarian gives us about the world, the characters, and the story, it's what he leaves out that I find particularly fascinating. He marries Valeria, his one true love, and he rules the Commonwealth for 10 years with her by his side, but he barely mentions her in the book. Granted, we don't really get any of the action from those 10 years, but his sudden declaration of love and the lack of word count surely means something. Was she the one woman that he truly felt something for, or was her position as consort to the Autarch the reason for her absence? Or did he fear that she would one day read his memoirs? Or something else entirely? The question is left hanging. [Music]

Anybody that has read the Book of the New Sun will surely have something to say about that bloody play, *Eschatology and Genesis*. I found it very confusing and quite jarring the first time I read it. So we're actually going to read this entire play within the book—yes, well, until it gets interrupted. Now I know that it's a warped version of the Book of the New Sun, told by Sarian when he was the Conciliator, recorded and then adapted by Dr. Talos when he read it about a thousand years later—time travel in it. So, upon repeated readings, I think the play is a really interesting comment on the passing of information, sacred texts in particular, and it's a double meta-headspin of the book that we're reading—a Russian doll of storytelling. Do I understand the play? Uh, yes, to my satisfaction, uh, I do understand the play. The play is relatively easy to understand. It's what happens when a cheeky android, who apparently has a good understanding of theater history from the Greeks up to the Elizabethan and Jacobean era, tries to write a play that aggrandizes his master and at the same time does a satirical takedown of the current leader of Earth. People have a lot of theories about it. I think he, um, has set it up—Gene Wolfe has set it up—so that we are, on the first read, we are led to believe it is this vaudeville comedy take on the Bible and therefore a candidate for the epitome of it, not knowing that he's cast somebody in the play who happens to be the author of the religious text that he's based this play on, after that guy goes thousands of years into the future and then gets transported from another world back thousands of years into the past to write said religious texts. So he doesn't even know that he's acting in that play as he performs pivotal roles in it on the stage. I mean, the title of the play is *Eschatology and Genesis*, so we take that as meaning this is the end of things, like the Book of Revelation, and then and Genesis, so it's almost like the record just starts over again where it's not supposed to, but it has. Or you might be asking, is this the actual Book of the New Sun, which is referenced by the title of the series? Or perhaps you're thinking this is like the true history of the Conciliator. There's all these options, but none of them quite fits right, and Wolfe delays it, delays and delays all the way past the normal ending of the book out into the coda, and that's when we finally get it, and it becomes understandable. So it's no wonder that it has this reputation for being difficult. On first attack, it really is something else, but he put in the answer for us. We're quite lucky. And it's not until you read the fifth book, *The Earth of the New Sun*, that you realize how much was actually being foreshadowed. Then you throw in the fact that there are some aliens watching it who do know all of this context, and that Balanders starts to glean onto it while the play is happening and decides to attack them because he thinks they're making fun of him, and you really understand that it's been right in front of you the whole time. It's not that Sarian is the new Noah; Sarian's the angel of the flood; Sarian's the angel of [Music] destruction.

This one is quite fun on subsequent rereads, once you know what you're looking for, if indeed your idea of fun is searching for clues of certain death. We have established that, in all likelihood, Sarian uses the power of the New Sun to perform the miraculous—miracles like jumping through time and healing the sick and resurrecting people, even animals and himself. From a first read-through, I think the most obvious case is when Sarian is struck down by Agilus with a poison plant. He then seems to shake off death and sit up looking a little bit confused, freaking out Agilus, who is convinced that a bite from the poison alien plant should have been fatal, which it was. Those paying attention and quickly adjusting to the strangeness of *Shadow of the

The Bible, the uncomfortable truth: what if the chosen one was a complete [ __ ], or what if we completely flipped the biblical foundation? Jesus was God personified in man, whereas Sarian is man ascending into godhood. He's not the Antichrist either; it's the opposite. Humanity is far from perfect, and he's reaching for the Divine—that's his Odyssey, I suppose. Also, bear in mind that this is how Sarian wants to be perceived; remember, he's writing his memoirs, his own Gospel. This suggests that if this is a new religious text—one that actually happened or will happen one day in the future—it's a presentation of what humanity is rather than what we should be. I see this as both a rejection of traditional religion and submitting to a greater power. And Wolfe leaves plenty of room for some version of God. He ends the whole saga with "Be excellent to each other." I could prattle for hours if you allowed me. That's the beauty and the stunning achievement of *The Book of the New Sun*. Every page, every character, everything we witness can provoke a deep discussion.

Personally, I feel I have a pretty firm grip on what actually happens in the story. I think I understand a fair amount of the analogy, the metaphor, and the symbolism. I'm no expert, but yeah, I can talk about this book with some confidence. I've accepted long ago that the mega-concepts of the Divine Year, the possibility that a pan-Creator is looming over the whole book, or the proposal that all of this is just the ramblings of a gibbering madman, is all just part of the experience. But there is still something, a feeling of unfinished business, a fundamental piece of this puzzle that I still struggle with.

When I think about time travel within this book, I've always seen it as a fairly standard plot device. Sarian has absolutely altered reality, but it could have been so much more complicated. The way Wolfe presents it reduces the effects to clever revelations and the odd "aha" moment. The time travel elements and their consequences feel more like accidents rather than him exploiting that power, except when the hul step in. I see the timeline of Adua, Panchea, yes OD, or usas—the new Earth—as a timeline that's set in stone, and it's just us and Sarian that floats around. Coincidences and odd things happening are half explained by the nature of the narrative. We can never truly believe what Sarian says.

However, what melts my brain every, every time I think about it, and potentially upsets this entire video project, is the idea that this is not the first Sarian. This isn't buried in the text; he even says it out loud at the end of *The Citadel of the Autarch*. He even assumes, probably correctly, that the first Sarian has already completed the mission. He became the Orar, and he brought the new sun, and it was him that built the MOs with the rose, the spaceship, and the white fountain carved on it. So what we're actually reading is a timeline that's already happened but is now populated by more than one Sarian and has been manipulated by him and other agents. Not only is that totally awesome, but I also think Wolfe has crafted yet another layer to this book, one that is true and vital but somehow hardly ever mentioned. It's also a commitment to those science fiction roots and the biggest head-spinner of the entire saga, and it was hiding in plain sight. May I add that no matter how much you understand of all of this, or how much of it actually happened, it adds yet another theme to the story: one of identity. Will this miraculous protagonist ever figure out his place in the universe, or who he is, if different versions of himself keep butting in? I… I need to read the whole thing again. You see, it's not just "Be excellent to each other," it's also "Hey Jude, take a sad song and make it better." I don't get it. [Music]

Hello, book club! Welcome to a special slice of media death cult nostalgia. The purpose of this video is to cover as many angles and aspects of *The Book of the New Sun* as I possibly can, explore the many layers while also keeping it relatively approachable. But I think there's also room for a standard old-school book review, the details of which will be inevitably sprinkled all over this video, but encapsulated here for your convenience. Spoilers ahoy if you haven't read any of the books before, but let's be honest, a book review without a few spoilers is just a waste of everybody's time. *The Book of the New Sun* [Music] Ladies and gentlemen, *The Book of the New Sun*. Just to clarify, I am including *The Earth of the New Sun* in this review. You can all argue amongst yourselves whether it's a coda, a true sequel, or something that the publishers forced Gene Wolfe to write. I don't give a [ __ ]; it's book five of a five-book series, disjointed by a metafictional wormhole. This is actually quite refreshing.

I talk about and think about this book on a daily basis, and during the research of this video, my brain has been flooded with details and nuances. It's nice to just talk about this in a simple lump. My history with this thing is I first read it about 20 years ago. You know what? I don't think I even finished *Earth of the New Sun*. I can clearly remember most of *The Shadow of the Torturer* for some reason, but then I just have flashes of interesting scenes from some of the other books. The main thrust of the narrative was completely lost over the years. I read the odd chapter or paragraph just to experience the prose, but it was something that I left on the back burner and intended to return to one day. I had a big plan of reading the whole thing back-to-back, doing a ton of research, and really nerding out. And now I've done exactly that. I read the whole thing about 5 years ago and then again when this channel hosted a full read-along in 2020. What year was it, Charlie? 2022? 2023? 20… sometime around then. Please understand that this is a dream come true for me to have a platform where I can make videos and share my reading experience, introduce new people to Gene Wolfe, and virtually hang out with other *Book of the New Sun* enthusiasts. Yeah, we rock! This video—well, all of our videos—actually cost a lot of time and some money to make—money that we don't have. You can support this operation by donating on Buy Me a Coffee, which is an online tipping service; get yourself some merch over at the merch store; or you can join the cult on Patreon and gain access to our exclusive Discord and the podcast Radio Death Cult. Links to all that good stuff in the description. Thank you so [Music] much.

I used to start these reviews with the plot. The plan was to divide the video up into the plot, the writing, and some sort of wrap-up explanation thing to avoid a scattergun of verbal diarrhea. Is that still the plan? I will endeavor to do that, but please forgive me if I keep sloshing over the sides and jumping around those categories. It's all interl… Okay, so the plot, in its purest form, if I was to explain what's going on with one single sentence: In the distant future, the sun is dying, and one man has the ability to bring light and warmth back to Earth by delivering a new sun. It's right there in the title. And that man-boy is an apprentice torturer called Severian. He's our main character. I don't think we ever leave his side or his perspective because he's telling this story of his own life from a point in his future. Occasionally, the narrative will take a detour through other poems or short stories, but they're either being read by Severian to someone else, or he is present when someone else is reading them. They're part of the scene and important to the plot. I think the grand arc of saving the planet and fulfilling a destiny on a universal scale doesn't really become apparent until you've finished the entire series. It's not written as "Once upon a time there was a time-traveling Messiah who triggered the mechanism to ensure that life would continue in the next universe beyond the heat death of all matter." Instead, the story focuses on the geographical journey of Severian as he embarks on this Odyssey-like trip, mostly unaware of where he's going or what the hell's going on. We know right from the beginning of the book that Severian will one day become the Autarch—it's like the emperor of the land, the highest seat of authority in this part of the world. So he's writing what we're reading as the Autarch—the current Orar, the future Orar. I love how this gives us some sort of destination to aim for in chapter one. Gene Wolfe is very aware that we're about to be quite confused, so he creates this invisible force that pulls us through the story. He's in complete control—control of our reading journey.

The plot concentrates: Severian helps a woman who has been held awaiting torture in the Guild's Tower. He slips her a knife so she can commit suicide. He's banished from the city of Nessus—this is the place where he was born, the city that he has never left his entire life. His punishment, probably to save face for the torturous Guild, is to walk to the far-off city of Thrax, where he will become the new torturer. He kind of got away with it; he's just been transferred. To cut a long story short—very short because you've all read these books before, haven't you, and I've covered this in much more detail in the synopsis part of this video—it takes two books to get to Thrax. Some weird things happen; some people try and kill him; he leaves Thrax; some aliens from the future tell him that he is indeed the chosen one; and then he becomes the Autarch. He rules the land for about 10 years, and then he leaves on a spaceship and travels to a weird planet where he is judged, and then he brings the new sun back to Earth, and everybody lives happily ever after. I'm being very flippant with the plot because, for the vast majority of the time spent reading this book, the plot wasn't my main source of entertainment or interest—not until we get to about the second half of *Earth of the New Sun*, and then… then the plot is the best thing about it.

The setting of *The Book of the New Sun* is, aesthetically at least, a declining, tired civilization—medieval feeling, maybe—where the level of technology appears to be inferior to what we have right now, but we're so far in the future it becomes obvious there are lots of clues that there are remains of unfathomable technology just lying around. Sometimes it's really obvious, like a portal to another dimension, androids, laser guns, and flying cars. But the genius is in the execution. Sarian is writing this for the people of his time, so why would he explain flying sorcerers and genetically modified horses and aliens walking among us? It's normal to him. And in many ways, Sarian is the author of this book, not Gene Wolfe. So the plot, the setting, the language, the action itself is a mystery to discover, a puzzle to unlock, and I loved every second of it. Gene Wolfe intended these books to be read over and over again, so I do understand that if you arrived at *The Book of the New Sun* expecting a traditional fantasy quest that you would be a bit pissed off at the obscure presentation—what the hell is going on—but I don't think it's that hard to grasp the ground-level story, the day-to-day of this book. But I expect many people attempting this for the first time will experience quite a bit of "what the hell is going on." When you reread this book, you will discover more layers and hopefully realize that "what the hell is going on" is a beautiful thing. I know loads of people that have read this book numerous times and will read it again many, many more times—people that write books and make podcasts about it—and they all still shrug their shoulders at certain points, all with a smile on their face. So the surface-level story is relatively straightforward—relatively. Gene Wolfe increases our exposure to the science fiction elements and the complexity of the plot as we go. He just has a unique twist on the way that he delivers it to our brains. Thanks for joining us on this episode 247. Sure to check out the writing—my favorite aspect of the in-the-moment reading experience. I… I really hope I have the words to convey just how much I loved it. Let's talk about prose. I believe that, by definition, prose is the language in its most natural form—so without rhythm or flourish, kind of like the opposite of poetry. Did I get that right? In this case, the prose is the voice of Severian writing his memoirs. However, it's not that bloody simple, is it? We know from paying attention that these four books—the original *Book of the New Sun*—traveled back in time, obviously. Gene Wolfe just imagined this; they traveled back in time, and they were quite hard to read, so he translated them as best he could. *The Earth of the New Sun* done the same, but the language is slightly different because now Sarian is a bit older and wiser, and again it was translated by Wolfe. On top of all that, Sarian is writing his memoirs from memory, claiming that this is how the events in the book took place. His brain, his consciousness, changes as the story progresses; he's actually a different configuration of memories by the time we get to the end of the book. He even interacts with some of the people that he'll one day consume. Don't worry about it. And Gene Wolfe—the actual Gene Wolfe—that's right—in this book balances all of that and passes it through these interacting filters and adjusts the prose accordingly. And as if that wasn't enough, Sarian is an unreliable narrator. He's purposely vague when it suits him; he often depicts himself as a heroic stud, and sometimes he just lies and contradicts himself. Wolfe has to leave those breadcrumbs in the text just for us so that we know all of that without it looking like Severian is showing his hand or breaking the fourth wall. So we never truly know what is really happening or what is complete bollocks. All of these things are about perspective—the volume and the clarity of information that's getting through to the reader after it's gone through that meat grinder of time, interpretation, and quite possibly propaganda. The language—I'm getting bogged down with definitions here—what many people refer to as the prose, the actual words used, the atmosphere created, is probably the best I've ever read. But why does that even matter? I don't judge a book solely on how complicated or dense the writing is. I don't need great prose if the story and the ideas are amazing. A lot of really good science fiction has [ __ ] writing. Now this is the bit that I really struggle to explain, so please bear with me. He paints a picture that is vivid because it's very close to poetry. Descriptions can be purple, but they're also practical. Severian is constantly reflecting on his own situation, so within this pseudo-historical account of events, we get a very personal character study. Everything I've just mentioned about the writing is just the toit—the ingredients—for a great writer to tell a great story, and I've read a bunch of books that do this very successfully. The magic ingredient—and this is always just slightly out of reach—is the way that almost everything is slightly obscured from view. The balance of that execution is perfect, and it also evolves as we go through the series. The city could have been half constructed out of plastic and yellow glass; Severian could have had a completely different personality, or maybe never even existed at all. And as for the events that happen in the book, well, Severian is effectively right in his own Gospel. Somehow, Gene Wolfe gives us just enough information to paint the landscape, describe the characters, and let us know kind of what the hell is going on—just enough to pull us through the narrative. We have to fill in the gaps ourselves. It's so rewarding; you feel smart when you figure something out for yourself, but it's delightfully frustrating when you don't understand because it makes you open your eyes and pay attention, and you instinctively know that it goes much, much deeper—just like your [Music] mom.

All right, so we have this wonderfully crafted book. The technique is second to none. I had a blast reading every single page, and once all the pieces slot together, I'm in love with the plot. I can't stop thinking about it. But what does it all mean? I think it's important to point out that I follow my own interpretation—death of the author, birth of the reader concept—meaning I don't have to accept Gene Wolfe's intentions. That's how I think all art should be reviewed. We take *The Book of the New Sun*, we take my brain, and we squish them together, and a new thing is born. It will probably look a lot like Brad Pitt with a massive mustache. That doesn't mean that I go off on some weird tangent and throw away the whole Jesus thing that this book is clearly, probably about. Not at all. I'm just not into so-called experts telling other readers that they didn't understand it because it doesn't line up with what they think Gene Wolfe was talking about. I'm saying that the debate should never end. My take is that this is an obvious parallel to the Messiah story. Sarian does save the world, sort of, and he is the conciliator that is prophesied to return one day with a big cross on his back, his sword, and he is a very naughty boy. I think Wolfe wants us to… it's like he's playing a trick. He presents us with a puzzle that we think we've solved—this is a Bible analogy—but then he sidesteps that and shows us that Severian is an absolute piece of [ __ ]. He's not teaching anyone to be a better person. Or is this, in fact, an anti-religious story? An Earth that has left God so far behind that its savior is a lying rapist, and now we need faith more than ever? I… I think it's about all of those things, but just like the prose, it's a very personal thing. It's one man's journey from lowly apprentice to the king of the land to live in God. And that's why you have to read *Earth of the New Sun* to get that full character arc. I'll leave you with this image—something that blows my mind every time I think about the book: the zoom-in, zoom-out effect of ever-deeper concentric layers of meaning, physical space, and Providence. We start with this relatively small, local story about a guy wandering around, getting in trouble, and banging chicks. Then it's sea monsters controlling and manipulating the politics of the land, and then it's about birthing a star and moving it across space and time to Earth. Further out, and it's interdimensional aliens uplifting humanity so that we can save the universe, and then the next universe. The secret history of time, how life can abide and survive an eternal chain of universes, and beyond even that, looking down on the whole thing, maybe then we can see the face of God. And the concentration of information and understanding fades the further out we go. Gene Wolfe knows that humanity—the reader—has limits, and all of this exists and overlaps at the same time, in the same book. And then it shrinks all the way back down, and it's a little time travel story about some people that done some stuff. I don't know how he pulled it off. It feels so chaotic a lot of the time, but it always unpicks itself, and you know that every word is exactly where it should be. It's miraculous. And all of this was written in lunch breaks while he was making crisps.

A score for *The Book of the New Sun*? Don't be silly; you can't score something that is beyond perfection. This is my number one book of all time, and it lives rent-free in my pantheon. At the risk of sounding pretentious, this is the only book that I've ever read that I will completely disagree with other reviewers who don't think it's amazing. Any other book—you think *Frankenstein* is boring, you hate *Ender's Game*, *The Left Hand of Darkness* is overrated—okay, I get it. Let's agree to disagree; that's fine. But if you don't love this, let's just say that that says more about you than it does about the book. Did you love *The Book of the New Sun*? Did you hate *The Book of the New Sun*? A judan People's Front! Let us know in the comments, please. Thank you very much for watching. There isn't another video to click on, cuz we're right in the middle of one big massive *Book of the New Sun* video, so just stay where you are and keep watching. [Music] Peace.

So you've made it to the end. You've read all five—yes, five—books in the series, and you loved it. What could you possibly read next that will give you a similar experience or galvanize what you've just been exposed to? You could take inspiration from the man himself. Here's a quote from Gene Wolfe: "My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader and reread with increased pleasure." So if we stay within the *Book of the New Sun* bubble for a while, you could—and definitely should—just read the whole thing again. It was written with the reread in mind. In my experience, the first read-through, although great, was full of questions and half-baked theories. I loved the mystery, but it was the wonderful prose and the surface-level story that impressed me most. The increased pleasure that Wolfe talks about came much later, with illuminating foreshadowing and unlocking little puzzles, especially constructing more of that much bigger picture: What is the book actually about? When you're ready for some help—and some people will remain purists and never read beyond the actual novels, which is admirably—but when you're ready, you have options. If you want to go deeper, *Lexicon Earths*, a dictionary for the Earth cycle by Michael Andre-DuSeuil, it's an A to Z of character profiles, a glossary of names and terms, maps, synopsis, and so much more, meticulously researched and essential for any *Book of the New Sun* connoisseur. *Solar Labyrinth: Exploring Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun* by Robert Borski is a collection of essays theorizing many of the more head-scratching conundrums. And there is a plethora of websites and podcasts offering hand-holding explanations, intricate synopsis, and discussion. In particular, *Rereading Wolfe*, which goes chapter by chapter, full spoilers for the entire series, encouraging theories and debate, and *Alabo Soup*, also breaking down each book one slice of at a time, but more suited as a spoiler-free companion as you read along—and clarity for the rest of us. In my opinion, the real joy of obsessing over *The Book of the New Sun* is using this vast bank of knowledge and enthusiasm and molding your own relationship with the text. Death of the author; the true meaning comes from the reader's interpretation, anyway.

Further reading: You could just continue. *The Book of the Long Sun* is a four-novel series set in the same universe as *The Book of the New Sun*. It's a separate story, but it has tenuous links, and then that story continues in the three-part *Book of the Short Sun*. The whole thing is known as the Solar Cycle, so that's 12 novels and a handful of short stories and essays. Gene Wolfe wrote over 60 novels and short stories from the 1970s to just a few years ago. Among the best-received and well-regarded are *The Fifth Head of Cerberus*. This is published as a little collection of three novellas: *The Fifth Head of Cerberus*, *A Story by John V. Marsh*, that's actually the name of the novella, and *VRT*. They are absolutely connected and together form one complicated novel. I would say *The Fifth Head* is even more challenging than *The Book of the New Sun* in places. It has that same mesmerizing style, but the rewards for paying attention and rereading are huge. It's brilliant. *The Wizard Knight*, typical Wolfe, displaying a traditional fantasy story with dragons, questing, and magic swords, but with the twist of linking it to the modern world and shrouding the tale with dream logic and fragmented storytelling. *Peace* is a psychological fantasy ghost story. It's probably best if I paraphrase from Gene Wolfe himself: "The basic idea is that a man has died, and he is haunting his own mind, his own past." If there's a tree on a grave, when the tree falls, the falling of the tree releases a ghost on the earth. In *Peace*, that ghost prowls through the memories throughout the book. Critics have always disagreed and debated what this book is actually about and what happens, so why don't you give it a try and add to that pile of opinions. And *The Soldier* series; it's set in ancient Greece. It's about a soldier, obviously, who suffers a head injury and has both forms of amnesia, so he can't recall old memories, and he can't make new memories. So it's a bit like *Memento*, but double *Memento*. We read his account of his travels and how he makes sense of the world around him, of course with a twist; he can sometimes communicate with the gods. This video—well, all of our videos—actually cost a lot of time and some money to make—money that we don't have. You can support this operation by donating on Buy Me a Coffee, which is an online tipping service; get yourself some merch over at the merch store; or you can join the cult on Patreon and gain access to our exclusive Discord and the podcast Radio Death Cult. Links to all that good stuff in the description. Thank you so [Music] much.

There are quite a few references to other authors and works in *The Book of the New Sun*, but none more prominent than H.P. Lovecraft. He influenced Wolfe so heavily that Tan, the librarian of Nessus, is a reference to Lovecraft himself. His short stories deal with the concepts of infinity and thought experiments and the complications that arise when both of those are expressed. Nothing is quite like *The Book of the New Sun*, but I do have a list of books that has a similar style or setting and at least attempts some of the same narrative flourishes. *The Dying Earth* by Jack Vance has a very similar science fiction in fantasy clothing vibe. It, too, is set in the far future where the sun is dying, and humanity is on its last legs. What first appears to be wizards using traditional fantasy magic and spells is mostly explained to actually be mega-advanced scientific applications. It's a fascinating texture of a medieval-style existence and aesthetic but camping in the ruins of once-great civilizations and technology. *The Sorcerer of the Will-O'-Wisps* by Kacen Callender; it's about the sorcerer or demigod hired to accompany a trader's caravan through the treacherous Will-O'-Wisps, a dangerous weave of shifting worlds that none but the gods dare enter safely. It sounds like weird fantasy, but then maybe something else going on as well. Gorgeous prose and deep interrelated character profiles. *The Terror* by R.M. Palmer—not a dying Earth story, but set a few hundred years in the future with amazing technology while also echoing back to the Renaissance, the Roman Empire, the Enlightenment, and everything in between. This perfectly suits that Gene Wolfe quote: "My definition of great literature is that which can be read by an educated person and reread with increased pleasure." Right? I didn't get all of the references—well, I didn't get many of them to be honest—but I still found it extremely rewarding and positively challenging, and it even has a self-confessed unreliable narrator. *The Crying of Lot 49* by Thomas Pynchon; this is one of Pynchon's shorter works and a great introduction to his literary puzzles. If you loved following Severian through seemingly random encounters with people who obliquely explain scientific, economic, and historical concepts to him, you'll enjoy watching the main character, Oedipa Maas, do the same thing as she searches for a shadow post office. There's even a confusing play. *One Hundred Years of Solitude* by Gabriel García Márquez loves to talk about families, emotional attachment, and thematic events that loop back on themselves in this classic work of magical realism. *Piranesi* by Susanna Clarke is a short but punchy novel about a character called Piranesi who lives in a world of infinite halls and rooms lined with statues. He thinks that he's always lived in that place and that there's only 15 people in the whole world. Piranesi records every day in his journal, but flicking back through the pages, he can't even remember writing the old entries. That's all I'm saying. And finally, I think I need to mention *Malazan*, or *Malazan Book of the Fallen*. It's the fantasy series that always gets put on the meta shelf right next to *The Book of the New Sun*. Fans of Wolfe seem to be drawn to this series by the lack of traditional fantasy storytelling. It's that "pay close attention and get big rewards" kind of thing. Personally, I'm only halfway through the second book, but I already see the parallels. I get why the admirers of *Malazan* will reread this over and over again. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I didn't even get to talk about Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, Jeff VanderMeer, Mervyn Peake… for so many more recommendations of a similar… the comment section of this video and the Media Death Cult Discord will be fertile hunting ground. [Music] [Music]