The Book of the New Sun

A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge Dune, by Frank Herbert Diaspora, by Greg Egan The Clockwork Rocket, by Greg Egan The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

It was a tough read, but I really liked it. I’m going through the rest of the book of the new sun now. Im sure it’ll be rewarding to read it again after finishing the series.

I've never really felt like Kafka seems to have and I read a lot, mostly novels. For what it's worth, I don't love Kafka's novels: I think he wanted them burned for a reason -- they're meandering failures. Very clever but they don't go anywhere. His short stories, though, are excellent. Off the top of my head, the most moving books I've read are The First Circle, any long Dostoevsky novel, The Master and Margarita, The Tartar Steppe, any Elena Ferrante, any Cormac McCarthy, some Murakami (Ryu and Haruki), Gene Wolf (The Book of the New Sun), 2666, parts of Moby Dick, any Alice Munro. All well known "good books".

The Book of the New Sun is an amazing set of books, from the language (Gene Wolfe uses the conceit that the account comes from the far future and must be translated into English) to the ideas.

"A Canticle For Leibowitz" "The Sparrow" "Lord of Light" "The Immortal" "Hyperion" "The Last Question" "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" "Stranger in a Strange Land" "The City and the Stars" "Childhood's End" "Anathem" "Eifelheim" "A Case of Conscience" "VALIS" trilogy "The Book of Strange New Things" "Behold The Man" "The God Engines" "Book of the New Sun" "The Parable of the Sower" "The Dosadi Experiment" "Grass" "Project Pope" "Calculating God" "Factoring Humanity" "Jesus on Mars" "Surface Detail

I can second the New Sun series. The bizarre thing about this series is that it is a hole in my memory. I can remember reading it, I can remember liking it, and I can remember little snippets, but I can't remember most of the specifics. I've read the series twice, but even the second reading hasn't resolved this failure to recollect. Ironically -- likely on purpose -- that's the point. The series centres on an unreliable narrator, which is a part of the charm. You forget moments because the narrator wasn't clear. The narrator wasn't clear because the he didn't understand what he was seeing. You have to re-read the series, perhaps several times, to figure out what's truly going on.

Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun series. As someone who read a lot of sci-fi, I'm surprised I've discovered it only now. It's considered the Dostoevsky of scifi, very different from golden age hard scifi. Already started books of the Long Sun. Disappointment of the year - The three body problem. Feels like buying on amazon a product with thousand of rave reviews only to realize its all fake Chinese reviews.

I read BotNS + Urth this year and followed the chapter by chapter analysis at Alzabo Soup. It was one of the best experiences of my life. No doubt.

Plato - Meno, Symposium, Parmenides, Gorgias, Protagoras Plotinus -Enneads Markus Aurelius - Meditations Descartes - On method Descartes - Meditations Spinoza - On the improvement of Understanding Leibniz - Monadology Leibniz - Grace Voltaire - Candid Diderot - D'Alembert's Dream Kant - How to orient oneself in thinking Kant - Critique of Pure Reason Kant - Critique of Judgment Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel - Logic von Kleist - Marionette Theatre Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death Heidegger - Being and Time Sartre - Being and Nothingness Sartre - Flies Sartre - Nausea Deleuze - Difference and Repetition Kafka - Metamorphosis Kafka - The Castle Lem - Magellan Nebula Lem - His Master's Voice Cioran - A Short History of Decay Pessoa - Book Of Despair Wolfe - New Sun tetralogy

Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series is great

Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun. A four-part science fantasy novel included in the Fantasy Masterworks series. Quote from The Guardian: "science fiction's Ulysses?" I can also recommend J.G. Ballard. A well-known and venerated writer, but who seems under-read, especially in the U.S. I generally like his short stories and a few of his novels.

here's another fiction book for you: The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. a professional torturer is exiled for showing mercy to a client. what it's really about is love, self, and how self relates to other. if you'd think this covers the whole spectrum of what it means to be human, you wouldn't be far off. i have read and re-read this book in great lengths of leisure, frequently leaving my paperback copies with friends wherever i travel before finding another in some dusty second-hand store. i have grown up with its main character, Severian, and can no longer tell you how much of me is him. my ethics, my perspectives, how i ruminate and how i love someone can all find some trace of impression in this masterwork.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I put this book off for years because I hated the covers of them. Amazing read, best sci-fi I ever read. The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Must read for a sci-fi fan.

One book more than any other: The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Why? Darwin opens up the door of Deep Time when he explained his discovery. An appreciation of the immensity of time happens to be linked to explanations of how and why things are. Wolfe also deals with Deep Time but in the context of society. What Gene Wolfe does is he creates books where you need to read between the lines, you need to create hypotheses to understand what's going on. I won't describe it further because it may lose some of the import, it's probably the most important fiction book written in the 20th century. What I'd like is a photograph of Peter Thiel's library, I'm fascinated by the range of ideas, the meta-ideas he explores. Maybe @sama can smuggle in a camera or we could hijack a roomba.

Ha! You read two essays but won't read the first chapter of the book? :-) The reviewer is kind of wrong. I can think of high probability answers to half the questions that he posed and I've read the volumes just once. The observation on text stability is one that all books with unreliable narrators have, not just the Book of the New Sun, but I don't think we're about to throw out all that literature. More important I think is that the reason to have an unreliable narrator is because it is more realistic - the world around us, its people, its ideas, its history, it's all unreliable on a good day. That's part of why I like Gene Wolfe's wriing: it's multi-layered and multi-faceted, that is why I said it feels real. People with the Wolfe Gene aren't part of a mystery cult, most things I can think of in the text have answers, only perhaps you need to have read widely e.g. greek myth, dark age/enlightenment philosophy to get at all of it. If you have a bad habit of scanning text very quickly, like many readers of science fiction with their enormous multi-thousand pageturners, then you shall inevitably lose resolution on what's going on, I think that happens to quite a few readers new to…

Possible spoiler alert: Can think of two examples. I am readying myself for a reread (including Urth, as yet unread), so this is all IIRC, but there is a paragraph mentioning how Erebus or Abaia have influence in the world - likely through a computer network similar to the Internet (as telegraph to Net, Net to ...) but unimaginably more sophisticated e.g. embedded into everything, like the IoT. Of course there are other entities with access to infrastructure that the peasants are either ignorant of or dimly aware of e.g. cacogens, Father Inire. Another example is Jonas's past life as a sailor. I believe at first he is a sailor, but later... very poetic. The bit that is bugging me about BOTNS is part of the final book, where a young woman is seen by Sevarian in an old part of the city - it's beautifully written and this feels familiar but I can't place it, I know there's something I'm missing about that experience. That has settled it, next time I take notes ;-) Great moments for me include: Sevarian's explanation of his craft's morality (which he later discounts!) The battle of the flowers. I could see it. Realizing Agia's betrayal.…

Yes, this tetralogy* is spellbinding. The world is vast and cannot be fully comprehended. As you said, it feels quite real, and everything that happens around Severian hints at so much more. This book ought to be at the top of every SF aficionado's reading list. It's that good. I'm glad yours is the top comment right now. I have been thinking about how the trend in long-form television would be very favorable for translating some of Wolfe's books into film and exposing them to a broader audience. There are so many things in New Sun that would make for compelling television, and we have the technology to do the special effects right--that is, not a CG-fest, but (mostly) subtle and in service of the story. His fuligin cloak alone I would love to see in motion. Though I think the way the story is told would have to change drastically, unless they were to keep the narration--which is a tricky prospect. Part of the book's charm is that you never know if what you are imagining based on what the narrator says really happened that way, and people put enough faith in what they see to lose that aspect.…

Typically I'd agree. I don't mean the text has no answers or is subjective - the text does contain the answers to nearly every puzzling thing within it, if you can see it. Wolfe is an engineer and the pieces fit together. Neil Gaiman has a nice essay on how to read it properly (Gene Wolfe is the favorite author of many famous authors you've heard of): https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2007/gwng0704.htm The main character is an unreliable narrator. However consider all the veils that would have to be cast aside to understand reality: 1. The narrator could be lying to you. 2. The narrator could not understand what is truly happening. 3. The narrator may have mental models which are not accurate. 4. The narrator may be passing on inaccurate information or lies. 5. The narrator may be using words in a way that you think you understand, but do not. 6. The narrator may be expecting you to implicitly understand something that you do not e.g. we make certain assumptions about information because the Internet now exists, something similar exists in the world of the New Sun. 7. The narrator may be using the language of metaphor to describe something that is quite real but not what we think it is.…

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It's hard to describe. Rather, the story is easy to describe: it concerns the travel of a man from a future age. Nothing is what it seems. There was a moment when I realized "Oh shit. This is real." The book may be fiction but almost nothing about it is fake. The Big Questions, in History, in Philosophy, in Politics, in Theology, in Technological Progress, in interpreting reality, it's all there. Most non-fiction work of fiction I've ever read, and the best one, above Tolkien, above the Bible, it towers above all texts I have read. It will take multiple reads to understand what it is saying, different parts will appeal to you each time. In terms of the people you know: imagine that Stewart Brand, Peter Thiel and Christopher Nolan somehow had a lovechild - it would be The Book of the New Sun.

I second Accelerando and Book of the New Sun. Both challenging in their own ways.

It seems that everybody has been recommending sci fi and fantasy... Well, so will I. - The Lies of Locke Lamora: fantasy (think fantastic Renaissance Venice), fairly light read, very well written, great characters. - Accelerando: from our own cstross. Postuhumanist episodic scifi, pretty much a required read for the average HN reader. - The Book of the New Sun: fantasy (or is it?), On the surface episodic adventures of an executioner, but it is built on multiple layers. Not an easy read, but masterfully written. Might require multiple reads. Long series. - Blindsight, bleak diamond hard scifi, about first contact, consciousness and life. Not an easy read, but strongly recommended.

Definitely The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.

"The Gods Themselves" is a easy to read but truly mind blowing book. Asimov's characters are a bit wooden but the ideas in the book really got me to look at the world differently. The line "I have an idea, a simple idea, based on the quite obvious fact that the number two is ridiculous and can't exist." has stayed with me for over a decade now as has the surprising lovemaking of the aliens. For a hard read that you may enjoy I'd suggest "The Book of the New Sun". I'm re-reading it for the fourth time and it just gets better.

Not much fantasy here yet, so Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tetralogy, republished as two books: Shadow & Claw and Sword & Citadel.

Almost anything by Vernor Vinge. "A Deepness in the Sky" in particular is amazing. I was/am particularly impress by how he handles the idea of fundamental limits on the scope of human achievement, and by how he weaves that into the story so that it's there at all levels. "Diaspora" by Greg Egan has a great story, huge ideas, and probably the most cogent explanation of sentience/sapience ever written. "The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" and "Accelerando" have already been mentioned. "Reteif!" Made me laugh out loud. Larry Niven's "Destiny's Road" points out the difficulty of interstellar colonization. "Ringworld" blew my mind. Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Syn" taught me to pay attention; "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" by Douglas Adams reinforced the lesson. There are a lot of good ones; I could go on for ages...

Non-developer specific good sci-fi books: -Dune -Hyperion + The Fall of Hyperion -The Book Of The New Sun -Ilium + Olympos -Takeshi Kovacs trilogy -The Culture Series (meh..) -The Demolished Man More dev-oriented: -Reamde (which I hated, but I seem to be in a minority) -Neuromancer I'll always have a special place in my heart for Calculating God (not science fiction), because its the book that got me into reading seriously.

As others have said, with just foundation and hhgg as guiding points, it is not that easy to give good recommendations. Stephenson has fun ideas, geek themes, and interesting scope. Pratchett is enormously entertaining, and very easy to read. One book series that I really love is The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It is a speculative fiction in a (hopefully alternative) far future. They are not too long, but incredibly packed with interesting stuff which makes them a bit of a slow (but rewarding) read. The first time I read the books I was blown away, and my immediate reaction was "Wow, that was cool. I have to read them again right now". Once I was hooked, I had to read all of Gene Wolfe's other stuff as well :)

I got myself a Sony Reader mid-2009 and started reading about twice more than I had been before. 2009 was also the first year in which I wasn't too lazy to document which books I read (I'm really glad I wasn't). Here're some of the favourites this year: Classics: Kafka's The Process and America - both stunning novels that deserve to be read as much as his most famous, The Castle. Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - a trippy collection of tales organised in multiple nested frames. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Still as breathtaking as I'd remembered it from the previous reading five years ago. Science Fiction: Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe, whom I hadn't read before, turns out to be in a class of his own. It's literary SF, overwhelmingly masterful and beautiful in its prose and characters, yet it could give any hardcore SF novel a run in terms of its ideas. It demands and richly rewards a close reading. I'll be reading more Wolfe in 2010.…

The Great Gatsby and The Book of the New Sun

V. by Thomas Pynchon The Life of Pi by Yann Martel the McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (Not a book per se, but very enjoyable) Shakespeare (Everything, I'm surprised he's only been mentioned once so far) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe Shogun by James Clavell Then, of course, the regular hodgepodge of Card, Asimov, Adams, Gaiman, Pratchet, Stephenson, Feynman, and that LOTR guy, Tolkey or sommat. (In all seriousness, though, all of these authors are phenomenal, if well-known for being such)