Ian M

Melmoth says

Glad you're enjoying it. The next two books in the series are Sword of the Lictor and Citadel of the Autarch, which are similarly collected into a volume called "Sword & Citadel". That constitutes the Book of the New Sun. There's a follow-up there of called "Urth of the New Sun" which takes place several years later and wraps up several things.
Besides that, there's The Book of the Long Sun, and The Book of the Short Sun, four and three books more respectively. I haven't read these yet, but they take place in the same story universe as the New Sun books and involved characters other than Severian et al.
Moreover, there are several books of literary criticism that examine the series and Wolfe's other books, attempting to figure out all of the neat linguistic tricks Wolfe plays and finding connections between all his major works, not just these ones, like Robert Borski's "Solar Labyrinth" which poses a lot of interesting ideas, and Michael Andre-Driussi's "Lexicon Urthus" which is a dictionary of the terms used in the series (and has thankfully just been republished, the first edition was getting up to $300 used!).
While you're reading, you can take it as a simple story, but then you might wonder if Severian is always telling the truth. Sometimes he skips over facts saying he can't recall or doesn't think they're important, even though we know he has perfect memory. Also, notice that there's a lot of rules he implies for names, noteably, and this might be a little bit of a spoiler, but the human characters all take their names predominantly from Saints (or variations of the saints' names in the case of siblings), and the not-so-human characters get their names from mythological beasts and figures. Likewise, it's implied, but never spelled out, that you actually get to meet all of Severian's supposed long lost family over the course of the books, but only you can come to that decision yourself since Wolfe only really confirms the identity of his father. From there though, you can start to read further.
Anyway, if you enjoy these, be sure to check out some of his other books like The WizardKnight, and the Soldier series.
Cheers!
-D

posted 3 years ago. ( send a note )