Gene Wolfe's Sun

Over at the Guardian, Alison Flood has been reading some science fiction and fantasy classics, and has gotten around to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series — the first half of it, anyway. She is impressed, as she should be. But I have never been quite sure how highly to rate this series. It's brilliant in so many ways, but I have always suspected that Wolfe never really grasped the essence of his own design — that he followed an imaginative trail that was very rewarding in many ways, for him and for his readers, only to find that it concluded in a dead end. To shift metaphors, there seems to be no heart to the series, no core or center — just a magnificent series of images and events that add up to nothing in particular.

Someday I will try to express this more clearly.