Why does Dorcas hate water and vomit up balls of lead? (There is a good clue in the New Testament). The Sword of the Lictor takes Severian, the banished torturer, along with his lover Dorcas to the city of Thrax, his planned destination though not, as it turns out, his final end. It takes the reader some little time to realize that the prophesied fountain at the heart of the ancient sun will be what physicists call a 'white hole' that 'ships' sail in the electromagnetic winds of space as well as in the sea that the 'Matach in Tower' where the story begins is an ancient spaceship that the 'sailor' Jonas with his metal hand, like Captain Hook's, is not a man of flesh with a metal prosthesis, but a robot with a flesh prosthesis that the soldiers' 'lances' are lasers. Words here are measured, and resonant with an archaic gravity. The language is the language of fantasy, for in the dying earth which is the novel's setting, technology is ancient and strange, and generates none of the jargon used by those for whom, like us, it is mundane and fresh.

It is now clear that The Book of the New Sun, originally touted as fantasy, is in fact straight science fiction, pure if not simple. The apparently straight-line development loops into helices and even into a kind of literary equivalent of the Klein bottle, whose inside is its outside. Just as in an Escher picture, what seems at first to be a wall appears after the onlooker blinks to be a roof or a floor, while downhill stairways mount ever higher, so in Wolfe the surface elements of the picaresque (the hero sets out on a quest and has a series of adventures before becoming king) rearrange themselves in a most disturbing fashion in the reader's mind.

He has done for picaresque fantasy very much what Escher did for architectural drawing. It is rather difficult to say exactly what sort of novel The Book of the New Sun is, for Wolfe has quietly and without any fuss invented a new literary form, the continuously recursive picaresque.

Book of the new sun