Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe was an American science fiction and fantasy author whose Book of the New Sun is widely considered one of the most complex and rewarding works of imaginative fiction ever written, narrated by an unreliable torturer in the dying sun's far future.

Gene Wolfe spent his career as an industrial engineer before writing fiction — he is credited with helping design the machine that makes Pringles — and brought an engineer’s precision to fiction of extraordinary complexity. The Book of the New Sun, a tetralogy (The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, The Citadel of the Autarch), is his masterwork: narrated by Severian, a torturer who claims perfect memory and whose account of events is demonstrably unreliable. The story is set in the far future, in a civilization so old that science has become indistinguishable from magic, and its vocabulary draws on archaic English rather than invented words.

The novel demands rereading: Wolfe plants information that only makes sense in retrospect, and Severian’s claims about his own character are contradicted by his actions in ways that become apparent only on a second pass. Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin both cited Wolfe as among the finest writers in American fiction; Le Guin called him “our Melville.” His influence on subsequent fantasy and science fiction is substantial but largely unacknowledged because his work is difficult to imitate without understanding.

The Long Sun and Short Sun trilogies extend the universe of the New Sun. The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), three novellas about identity and colonialism, is his other essential work. Peace (1975), a seemingly quiet novel about an old man remembering his life in small-town Ohio, is a ghost story in which the horror accumulates so gradually that most readers miss it entirely. Wolfe died in 2019.