Search Results

Following a detailed synopsis of The Urth Cycle, this chapter addresses the critical response to the texts and observes how reviewers have often fallen victim to Wolfe's literary sleights of hand. It argues that the enigmatic nature of The Urth Cycle has resulted in a critical response that has been disappointing, with contradictory assertions, unresolved conjectures and inconclusive arguments standing as testimony to the often bewildering consequences of Wolfe's literary games-playing. Reviewing this response, the chapter highlights what it perceives as the shortcomings of a number of reviews and articles before arguing that any criticism related to The Urth Cycle is an autobiographical exercise. The conclusions reached, it suggests, should indicate that understanding proceeds from earlier misinterpretations that led to a more complete comprehension of the text. These earlier misreadings, it proposes, are invaluable in demonstrating how Wolfe shapes, and misdirects, reader response.

This chapter demonstrates how Wolfe disguises The Urth Cycle, a work of science fiction, as fantasy by recontextualizing genre conventions that encourage critical misreadings. It considers how the novels are designed in part to substantiate Wolfe's definition of science fantasy as ‘a science fiction story told with the outlook, the flavour of fantasy’ whilst constituting a slyly deceptive conflation of the two frequently discrete genres. Drawing on the work of Brian Attebery, Michael McClintock, Colin Greenland, and Carl Malmgren, it reads The Urth Cycle as a science fantasy about science fantasy. It frames the cycle as an historical megatext responding to, and embracing aspects of, the ‘dying sun’ tradition in science fiction. As such, it explores connections between The Urth Cycle and its literary antecedents: Wells’ The Time Machine, Hodgson's The Night Land, Smith's Zothique stories, and Vance's The Dying Earth. It assesses its analogical historicity and concludes that Wolfe's narrative is a means of encouraging the reader to reflect on how meaning is ascribed to a text as a consequence of its generic, or apparent generic, conventions. It reveals how that process of ascription can be manipulated to elicit conclusions contrary to those pertinent to the texts at hand.

Following on from the discussion of the potential effects of Wolfe's obscure diction, this chapter argues that the linguistic, literary and extraliterary eclecticism of The Urth Cycle can be read as part of a textual memory system that encompasses the entire structure of The Book of the New Sun. It also reveals how this structure enables the reader to recall with ease the progression, if not the details, of the narrative from memory. Drawing from Artistotle's laws of association and Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory, the chapter traces the mnemonic patterns occurring through The Book of the New Sun, though it focuses predominantly on the first volume, The Shadow of the Torturer. It argues that the allusions, quotations, intertexts and narrative structure of The Urth Cycle also appear to be mapped onto, though they invert, the planned memory theatre of Giulio Camillo. This mapping, the chapter contends, has significant implications for the reader's reception of protagonist's characterisation and for the texts’ treatment of time as both arrow and cycle.

In this chapter, the hitherto undiscovered story of The Urth Cycle is revealed. Breaking with all current thinking on The Book of the New Sun and The Urth of the New Sun, the chapter argues that The Urth Cycle is a secular rather than a religious text. Accordingly, it sees the novels presenting a human race caught in two complex processes: that of an external cosmological conspiracy masterminded by the alien Hierogrammates who are intent on securing their own evolution across time, and that of its own psychological need for lenitive myths. As such, it offers an entirely materialist reading of The Urth Cycle that draws on evolutionary biology, particularly Richard Dawkins’ concept of the selfish gene. The chapter analyses The Urth Cycle's use of theatrical metaphors, its preoccupation with mythopoesis, and the potential mythmaking has for the process of psychological sublimation. It exposes the cosmological structure of Wolfe's fictional universe and argues that, around this systemic ‘whole’, Wolfe constructs his interpretative game with the reader.

Continuing the exploration of the literary game Wolfe plays with his reader, this chapter examines how Wolfe's subversion of the apparently reliable first person narrative form, the literary conventions of the autobiography, and the quest narrative may also serve as playful means of encouraging misinterpretation. Using close textual analysis and the work of Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, it exposes how Wolfe conceals the inherent unreliability of his narrator by providing him with an eidetic memory. This unreliability, it argues, is obscured further by The Urth Cycle's presentation as memoir-novel, a form which encourages an intimate reader-identification that opposes suspicion and scepticism. Nevertheless, it suggests, Wolfe provides sufficient textual clues to indicate his narrator's untrustworthiness, thereby elaborating the interpretative game played with the reader. This game, the chapter contends, is complicated further by the texts’ monomythic structure, which implies that The Urth Cycle is a genuine narrative of transcendence rather than an act of manipulative mythopoesis both within the storyworld and the reader's reception of the text. It concludes by arguing that The Urth Cycle is, in part, an appeal to the reader's scepticism, intended to overturn reader expectations and habitual literary suppositions.

Exploring how The Urth Cycle's labyrinthine microstructure, and its inter- and intratextual echoes may oppose effective textual analysis, this chapter pays particular attention to Wolfe's unconventional use of conventional metafictional techniques. These techniques, it argues, obscure the narrative's story further by suggesting that The Urth Cycle is an ingenuous, straightforward metafiction. Reading against such an interpretation, the chapter frames Wolfe's metafictional techniques and remarks as a series of playfully obscure allusions to the nature of the texts’ story and to the interpretative game The Urth Cycle plays with the reader. In order to achieve this, it provides close analyses of the texts’ theory of fiction, its use of inter- and intratextuality, the importance of its evolving mise en abîme and aphoristique, and the relevance of Wolfe's short story ‘A Solar Labyrinth’ to a potential decoding of the text.

This chapter argues that Gene Wolfe is one of the most neglected and misunderstood writers of contemporary science fiction and fantasy. It provides a bio-bibliographical introduction to Wolfe's work published between 1965 and 2001 and engages critically with the limited scholarly attention that work has received. In so doing, it identifies and confirms Wolfe's recurrent thematic preoccupations with the subjective nature of perception, the motivating power of engineered myths, memory, and time. Drawing together reviews and commentaries, the chapter emphasises the ambiguity, complexity and elaborate textual puzzles that characterise Wolfe's fiction. It concludes by arguing that The Urth Cycle forms the thematic, formal and stylistic centre of Wolfe's writing. It proposes that an understanding of these five novels provides essential insights into the characteristics of Wolfe's fiction as a whole.

This chapter examines in detail the thematic preoccupations of Wolfe's fiction published between 1966 and 1984 in order to substantiate claims in subsequent chapters that challenge extant critical opinions of The Urth Cycle. Focusing on a range of short stories and novels, the chapter identifies several interrelated psychological phenomena that are significant to a deeper understanding Wolfe's work. These phenomena include: the subjective perception of ontological reality; the reconstruction of perceived reality from memory; the psychological manipulation of the individual within economic, political and spiritual systems; the relationship between internal fantasy and external reality; and the psychological potency of myth, faith and symbolism. It notes that, for Wolfe, life is an ambiguous round of perceptions and misperceptions in which the individual must struggle, and ultimately fail, to apprehend the precise nature of existence. The chapter concludes by arguing that although the literary importance of Wolfe's fiction may appear to derive from the thematic integrity by which this perspective is communicated, its significance lies more in Wolfe's ability to make the reader experience this conception of existence through the reading process.

Exploring the interpretative game Wolfe plays with the reader, this chapter highlights the potential difficulties that such a game may pose for the critic. In so doing, it argues that Wolfe makes a concerted effort to establish parallels between the reader's reception of his work and the trials of his misguided, manipulated protagonists. In essence, it indicates how Wolfe extends his thematic preoccupations into his texts’ hermeneutic circles. It draws attention to how Wolfe compels the reader to experience his particular conception of existence by utilizing, either singly or in combination, four key strategies: the employment of unreliable first-person narrators, the introduction of ambiguity and ellipsis, the inclusion of an often dense intertextuality, and the subversion or hybridisation of familiar generic conventions. The chapter observes that such literary games-playing has fostered consistent misreadings of The Urth Cycle. It concludes by arguing that The Book of the New Sun and The Urth of the New Sun can be productively reassessed in the context of the recurrent themes characterising Wolfe's oeuvre.