by Gene Wolfe
Between the letter I have quoted above and the beginning of February, Virginia and I carried on an extensive correspondence, but it was wholly concerned with the collection and various short stories. On February 1, however, I wrote: “As you see, this is a Xerox of Volume I of The Book of the New Sun. Please read it over and correct my typos and misspellings and so on—use blue (or red) pencil so I can spot the changes. Let me know where the plot seems shaky or the writing muddy, then return this copy to me. I’ll rework the original ms., insert Xeroxes of the altered pages in this file copy, and send you the original to pass to Dave. (Or if you like, I can mail it directly to Pocket.)
“Naturally I hope you like it, but it seems dumb to say, ‘I hope you like it.’ Keep in mind that there are three more coming—Claw takes Severian from a village a day or so outside the gate to the foothills below Thrax, with a long layover at the House Absolute; Sword takes him from Thrax almost to the surging armies in the mountains; and Citadel carries him from the war back to the Matachin Tower.”
In a postscript attached to a letter on the other matters, Virginia told me: “I’m 100 pp into Shadow, wd gladly have stayed up all night if my eyes had lasted.” (February 8)
With firmly crossed fingers, I typed: “I’m delighted, of course that you are enjoying Shadow. By now you will have finished it. I tremble .” (February 12)
As it turned out, Virginia had written again before I wrote that note: “Couldn’t wait until the weekend, but didn’t have sufficient time to roar right through to the end, so I’ll report that I’m up to page 230. My only dissatisfaction is that I had to stop there or have my eyeballs fall out of my head.
“Shadow is enormously effective so far. Severian is already realer to me than many people I know in the flesh. You are a wonder.
“Incidentally, page 215 appears to be lacking. I thought it might turn up a few pages out of order, but I’m more than a decade past it and no sign of it yet.
“You outfoxed me on the technical terms. At this remove, about thirty years after, I have little Latin and considerably less Greek, so I have been assuming (with considerable justification) that you know e*x*a*c*t*l*y* what you are doing.
“This is by far the best system anybody has ever devised for allowing me to mark up a manuscript without having to write it all twice.”
If Virginia’s complaints about eyestrain seem exaggerated, you must remember that she was copyediting—checking each word for spelling and meaning—no dual’s for duel’s, for example—and checking the grammar of every sentence, after having done a full day’s work in her office. She signed her letter “Bleary Ol’ Eagle Eyes,” by the way.
On February 13, I answered: “I can’t tell you how happy I am that you like Shadow so far. I did my darndest—I really did.
“A Xerox of p. 215 is enclosed. Sorry.
“The odd mostly Greek and Latin terms take some explaining, or at least deserve some. Back in 1975 when I started, it struck me that if an sf novel were laid on Earth there would be no need to coin terms of the Tars Tarkas sort to give it an alien flavor—there were plenty of strange but perfectly good ‘dictionary’ words that could be used instead. In writing the four volumes I have been very careful with them, checking almost everything in at least two references; but many of the books I’ve used as sources are obscure, and anyone who tries to follow my tracks is in for a wild time. What I’m trying to say, I think, is that you’ll have to trust me unless you’re willing to spend several weeks on verification.
“Now I’m praying that the last half of Shadow doesn’t let down.”
Virginia returned the manuscript by UPS on the 15th, and wrote (U.S.P.S.): “Naturally, I’d hoped I’d like it too, and it seems equally dumb to be able only to say, ‘Hey, man, I liked it!’ I have learned by now that there is just no way I can vary my reaction to convey the exact degree of pleasure, so I just blurt I LIKE IT and hope that that is somehow sufficient recompense for the years of labor that go into the work; and I guess when thousands upon thousands of I LIKE ITs come roaring in at you, the aggregate effect does begin to equal the aggregate effort.
“Only who gets to hear them in their thousands, except people in the performing arts? Hardly ever the lonely writer.”
In April of 1980, more than a year after this letter was written, I was sent a copy of The Shadow of the Torturer in hardcover, the first I had seen. It had (and has) a superb dustjacket by Don Maitz. On the back of the jacket are quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas M. Disch, Roger Zelazny, Ian Watson, and Michael Bishop; I will not repeat them here, since you will already have read them, if The Shadow of the Torturer is part of The Book of Gold for you; but I would like to repeat my thanks to them and to everyone who took the time to read the book in manuscript or galleys.
Some readers, I think, are more cynical about such praise than they should be. In my experience, it is not given as a matter of routine or as a favor to some friend. If I praise a book and you find you do not enjoy it, I hope you will consider that I may be easier to please, or have a taste that differs from your own. One of my favorite writers, G. K. Chesterton, praised Walt Whitman all his life; I find Whitman barely tolerable at best. For the record, I consider Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas M. Disch, and Michael Bishop my friends, and I know all three well enough to be certain none of them would endorse a book they had not enjoyed. I met Roger Zelazny once, very briefly, over ten years ago—I’m sure he has forgotten it. I have never met Ian Watson at all.
The first review I saw was Orson Scott Card’s in Destinies. Rosemary and I gave a publication cook-in (a cook-in is a cook-out, when it rains a lot), and Paul Marxen, whose paintings hang in my office as well as my study, brought Destinies over. Card’s review said, in part: “He falls in with a troupe of actors, fights a duel that he survives by means he does not understand, performs his first execution on the man who tried to kill him by treachery, and accidentally finds himself in possession of a jewel left behind by a godlike being who lived thousands of years before.
“On the surface, it sounds like a resoundingly good swashbuckling sword and sorcery romp—and it can be read and enjoyed thoroughly on that level. But it is not sword and sorcery. It is science fiction, with a depth of invention few writers are able to match.”
Paul read the whole review aloud to the group assembled in our living room, and somewhere toward the middle Phyllis Eisenstein whispered, “This is getting sickening.” I said it sounded okay to me.
It still does. I think that no matter how long you write, that first review, the first notice a new book gets, is the big one. If it’s good, really good, like Card’s review, you’re braced for whatever may come later; no matter how bad some other review may be, you know you can say the reviews were “mixed,” and your publisher can quote that good review in his ads. I’ve never met Card or even exchanged letters with him, but I feel I owe him something. I owe Paul and Phyllis something too.
There were other reviews, and I can’t resist quoting some. The second I saw was by Algis Budrys, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times: “ … It takes a born artist even to propose a sympathetic story about an apprentice torturer’s passage toward manhood, in a culture so intricately evolved that it no longer cares what starships were for. Wolfe does it in a style that combines the flavors of James Branch Cabell at his most picaresque and Guy Endore at his most somber; again, an accomplishment that must justify itself by nothing less than total success.”
Timescape Books likes that review, I notice. They use it often. It isn’t exactly a review, but I want you to read something I got from John Cramer, my oldest friend. (He was probably five or six when we met; I was about eight or nine. He says I got him interested in science a few years later by giving him a cardboard box full of old Astoundings. He’s now a nuclear physicist teaching at the University of Washington.) In a letter dated May 27, 1980, John wrote: “My overall impression? I feel as if I had received a large box done up in brightly colored Christmas paper, and opened to find it contained
a lovely, intricately detailed tapestry. Not the complete tapestry, however, but only the upper right-hand corner. And hanging from this tapestry-fragment are a very large number of colored and metallic threads; so many, in fact, that I am caused to doubt whether, even if I had the rest of the pieces, it would be possible to connect them all. I have every confidence that you can and will, however.”
If you think John writes too well for a nuclear physicist, I agree with you. Fortunately for the rest of us, he’s been doing some articles for Analog, which is what Astounding’s called now.
Writing in Locus, “The newspaper of the science fiction field,” Jeff Frane said: “Original fantasy. Wolfe has never written better than in this marvelous novel of the far, far future. Written as the memoirs of a man who began life as a torturer’s apprentice, the book introduces the reader to a culture astonishing in its diversity and outright strangeness. The language is magical and I don’t expect to read anything better this year. The drawback? It’s the first book in a tetralogy to be published over the next several years. Still worth reading now. Highly recommended.”
Locus’s circulation is minuscule compared to the Sun-Times’s, but its readers are heavy book-buyers one and all; ads and reviews there heavily influence sales in science fiction specialty bookstores like Change of Hobbit.
From the September 1980 Future Life, another publication big with science fiction fans: “The author tosses Severian into the company of the acting troupe of roguish Dr. Talos and the mysterious Dorcas, a beautiful woman who appears on the shore of the lake of the dead, and he puts into Severian’s hands the miraculous Claw of the Conciliator, a gem that promises to lead him to the throne of the Autarch.
“Sound good? I haven’t even mentioned the duel with poisonous flowers, the race through the streets to the Garden Landing, the sword Terminus Est (Line of Division), or the little kindnesses of the executioner Severian to his victims. This is the beginning of what may come to be one of the very best epics in the genre. Dear Simon and Schuster, do you really have to wait until next year to get the next book out?”—Bob Mecoy.
While we’re on the subject of publications dealing with science fiction news, I should mention that Locus compiles a monthly sf bestseller list that is actually three lists—paperbacks, hardcovers, and trade paperbacks. The Shadow of the Torturer first appeared on the hardcover list in July, in 9th place. In August it moved up to 5th; by September, however, it had sunk to 8th.
The October 1980 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine carried a review by Baird Searles: “But in the past year or so, there have been several major works that are characterized by what is almost a superfluity of imagination and image, by rich and varied language, characters, and events (as opposed to plot, which in some cases is simple to the point of nonexistence), and by settings that are lush and usually downright decadent. And curiously enough, these recent examples have, with perhaps one exception, been science fiction rather than fantasy, laid in alternate Earths or a vastly far future.
“I am thinking, of course, of Moorcock’s Gloriana, Gaskell’s Some Summer Lands (capstone of the Atlan series), Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle, Vinge’s The Snow Queen, and Card’s Songmaster. And the latest, and maybe the best, is Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer.
“I should make it clear that part of the common quality of these books is their very uncommonness; the similarity lies only in this hectic, pyrotechnic phantasmagoricality, and that they are all brilliant achievements.
“And hell to review, come to think of it. Style is almost all, here, and communicating style is like describing Fantasia to a man blind from birth. A mere capsulization of the plot of The Shadow of the Torturer, I can tell in advance, just ain’t gonna work.”
The Daily lowan for October 15th carried a review by my friend Joan Gordon: “The characters, major and minor, are fascinating. Thecla, Severian’s ‘client,’ reacts to imprisonment with uncommon intelligence and ordinary self-delusion; an old man fishes for his dead wife in ‘a dark lake in an infinite fen’; Baldanders, the giant, is sensitive to his isolation but so removed from daily life that it is almost impossible to awaken him. Severian himself is a kind man who does violence casually, an innocent who is also an expert torturer, a man with a perfect memory who sifts his past for clues.
“The world of the novel fascinates as well. Wolfe does not tell us the situation; we pick it up from casual facts. The world is Urth, with a dying sun; the sky is dark blue and the stars can be seen by day; Severian’s guild is housed in a rocket; there is travel between the stars.” Joan has written a book about Joe Haldeman. Buy it!
The Valhalla of science fiction reviews is, of course, The Reference Library in Analog, conducted for so many glorious years by the late Sky Miller. Continuing this column, Tom Easton wrote: “I first met Wolfe when we were both attending the Windy City Science Fiction Writer’s Conference in and around Chicago, along with George Martin, the Eisensteins, Algis Budrys, and others … . Occasionally, Wolfe would bring us all a chapter from a work in progress. The chapters were not in sequence, however. He skipped large stretches of his story, displaying only those pieces he thought needed the thoughts of others. And we were unanimously pissed. His story was good, damned good, and we wanted it all. Fortunately, we now have it, only slightly different from what we saw in first draft.”
Shortly after I read this—let’s face it, heartwarming—review, the October Locus came. Shadow had slipped another notch and was back in 9th place, where it had begun. It seemed plain that in November it would be off the list altogether, but I was by no means dissatisfied. It was the first time I’d had a book on the sf bestseller list at all. Shadow had been there for four months, and at one time had been as high as 5th. It did not (and does not) strike me as a contemptible performance.
Before I saw the next Locus, however, Margie Klise (she is a childhood friend of my wife’s and the widow of Tom Klise, author of The Last Western) sent a clipping from the San Francisco Examiner. It was an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin, and said in part: “It is possible, Le Guin says, for writers to get stuck in science fiction, and consequently their talents go unappreciated by a larger public. She cites Philip K. Dick, whom she considers ‘one of the best American novelists, a first-rate writer,’ as one victim. Of another writer, Gene Wolfe, author of a quartet of novels called The Book of the New Sun, she says, ‘I hope he doesn’t get ghettoized. Anybody who likes Borges and Garcia Marquez is going to like this guy.’” I reproduce this not to show Ursula that I read and appreciated it, or even to give Dick a boost. I do it out of shameless vanity.
The November Locus arrived, and for some loony reason it contained not one but two bestseller lists: one for October (but different from the earlier October list) and one for November. Shadow was tied for 11th place on the new October list, and it was 9th on the November list. Despite this (perhaps largely illusory) gain, Shadow had vanished from the list in December.
Publishers Weekly for January 30, 1981, carried a review of The Claw of the Conciliator: “Like the illuminations of a medieval manuscript, Wolfe’s graceful prose lights up every page. Multi-volume series are a tiresome cliche in the fantasy field, but with the high standard he has set in the first two books, Wolfe makes us glad there are two more yet to come in Severian’s story.” From my point of view, the new year was off to a good start.
Timescape forwarded letters; I’m going to copy them out here: “Gene Wolfe is continuing his masterful major work, The Book of the New Sun, in high style. This is a moving, subtle, exciting work at the very top of the science-fantasy field. Wolfe is both craftsman and storyteller, par excellence.”—Gregory Benford. (Need I mention that Timescape Books takes its name from Greg’s Nebula-winning novel?)
“Thanks tremendously for sending me an advance copy of The Claw of the Conciliator. Of course I want to give you some comments for promotion. My problem is just the opposite of the usual one. (Gene is so good he leaves me speechless.) He is us
ing all the skills that speculative fiction has developed over the last two decades to do something entirely new. (Every book that comes out seems to have superlatives all over the cover. What can you say to make people realize that this, for once, at last, is the real thing?)”—Ursula K. Le Guin.
“Buy this book! You are holding in your hands one fourth of The Book of the New Sun, destined to become one of the most important works of the 80’s, a prodigious novel by a major talent. Too, go find Shadow of the Torturer, its precursor, and buy that too. Await the remaining two volumes with anticipation: Gene Wolfe has proved that speculative literature is alive, well, and uncompromised. Rejoice!” —Janet Morris.
The February Locus appeared and listed Shadow 10th on the hardcover bestseller list. Charlie Brown commented, “The Gene Wolfe novel was off the list for one month. It’s rare for a book to go off and then return.”
The March 22 issue of the Chicago Sun-Times carried a review by Algis Budrys: “Claw continues the maturation of Severian, apt young man of a million years hence who’s making an artwork of his life as an itinerant member of the Torturers’ Guild. If you expect to extend some prior acquaintance with the writings of De Sade, you’ll have to do most of that work yourself. If, however, you’d like to see how writing can be both innovative and lucid, how a setting and a social order can be both imaginary and palpably realistic, Wolfe can provide.”
The March Locus included a review by Jeff Frane: “The Claw of the Conciliator continues Wolfe’s biography of Severian The Torturer and his exploration of the bizarre fantasy world of Urth. It does not, I think, stand alone. It’s confusing enough as it is, its sense of meaning always flickering just ahead. Wolfe does resolve questions raised in the first book, characters are reintroduced and dealt with, and Urth becomes a little clearer with each page. But for each resolution there’s a new dilemma, and at times I merely follow Wolfe’s will-o’-the-wisp dutifully, certain to be led onto firm ground in time.” Shadow was 11th—dead last—on the hardcover bestseller list.