It is an honor to be able to revisit a favorite author after he has passed. Gene Wolfe had the best metaphysical sense among science-fiction writers. The Urth of The New Sun is a book-long epilogue to the four-volume Book of the New Sun. In the original four volumes the orphan apprentice of torturers journeys upward through the digestive tract of an evil and ancient civilization residing on a dying earth. He becomes the ruler, or Autarch, vested through a genetic AI infusion with the memories of his predecessors: good, neutral and evil. He discovers that once he has achieved rule of his small civilization, that he must now journey through the corridors of Time to find the will of the Increate or Pancreator, of God.
Throughout hiss journey into the past and the future, on a time ship, hung with vast gossamer sails, Severin is confronted once again with his ignorance, that even after rising to rule a civilization as a warlord, from the most humble beginnings, and possessing a flawless memory, that he has more to learn than he is able to. The hero, more curious and compassionate than is compatible with the needs of rule, inhabited by the souls of those he met, loved, fought, journeyed with and extinguished, becomes the object of dueling conspiracies.
On one side are the extra-human intelligences, some of whom he had previously interacted with, and others who are new. There are also the humans sailor on the Sea of Time who hope to return to Urth, to see loved ones, or descendants or even ancestors of their blood, souls of their world, one last time. Severin is the last to realize that he has been placed on board the Time Ship as a potential savior to be judged by Eternity for fitness to return and usher in the New Sun, to give another lease on life to a dying world.
The manner in which Wolfe handles his heroes, in this and other works, is that of learning through action and experience, of understanding dawning through reflection, introspection and misadventure. Wolfe’s novels are generally concerned with salvation, personal, racial, civilizational. His heroes are sometimes hero pawns, prophets, priests, and, in some cases possible saviors of a world, even of a mere nether world that might exist only as a dream of a soul, or of Creation itself.
Where historical saviors of earth are born into our would fully wise, fully informed by God, in need of no earthly learning, beginning life as a teacher and ending life as Ascension, Wolfe’s potential saviors suffer and learn throughout their span among the living. The sufferers, pawns, spectators, monsters, conspirators and rulers of Urth and Wolfe’s other fantasy and science-fiction worlds do not possess and dispense total narrative knowledge to the protagonist or the reader. This is rendered myopically searching by the device of the first person journal used by the author of his five major cycles comprising New Sun [5], Long Sun [4], Short Sun [3], Soldier [3], and Knight & Wizard [2]. It is a pleasure to wander in these lands of soul-seeking imagination, in which the mythological, military and social astuteness of the author serves as a loom on which he weaves paths for his heroes on a quest for the unknowable—the reader peering over their shoulder.
The effect of mystery is had by oblique exposition without the need for hidden and contrived secrets. Some things are learned by the reader before they dawn on the hero, but not all, making the story pleasantly revealing. In this last volume, the human means of constructing a religion in the wake of divine interaction, present’s a savior’s view of intercession.
How does one communicate with the descendants of those whom you visited in ages past?
How does a pure desire to help those on a lower plane contend with the webs of social adaptation and power generation grown out of a previous contact; the constant conspiracy of social control?
How does an incarnate deal with those priests dedicated to his own higher ideal?
The Urth of the New Sun offers one of the more interesting science-fiction takes on time travel, as well as one of the more striking explorations of the question of salvation in relation to the fields we call Time and Life.
I marked off 12 quotes for selection here. Below I will give the first and last.
Page 12:
“… tall as an exultant and having the skin not of the pinkish brown we are pleased to call white, but truly white, white as foam…”
It is a relief to read writing by one who understands how our observable reality is constantly overridden by terms imposed by our own nefarious social programming.
Page 361
“You’re a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism doesn’t make materialism true.”
So spoke an angel of sorts, to the unenlightened hero, who had no idea that he was being selected by higher powers conspiring for the good of his race, his world, and his rampant persecutors, far beyond the myopic scope of his egotistical lens.
Thank you, Gene Wolfe, and thank you Rick, my only childhood friend who went into a coma in Pennsylvania the day I opened this book in California, and passed from this sorrowful world the day I finished it in Utah. Rick fell righteous victim to a half dozen malignant conspiracies. But, like Severin, he never stopped trying to help people even worse off than himself. The day he held my hand in his own shaking hand for the last, he insisted that I take some of his meager money and spend it compassionately somewhere on the road that had been barred to his passage.
