The Urth of the New Sun

Hugo Award nominee 1988, Nebula Award nominee 1988.

Gene Wolfe has produced a sequel to The Book of the New Sun, perhaps the most eagerly awaited event since The Silmarillion, The Urth of the New Sun, a single book comparable only to the finest works of all time in SF and in contemporary American literature. The prior work won the World Fantasy Award for best novel, the Nebula Award, the John W. Campbell Award, both the British SF and British fantasy awards, and the French Prix Apollo.

The many fans of that work have been intensely excited by the news that Wolfe planned to write The Urth of the New Sun. Damon Knight said, "Gene Wolfe is a national treasure." No other writer to emerge from the SF field in decades has garnered such enthusiasm and praise.

We return to the world of Severian, now the Autarch of Urth, as he leaves the planet on one of the huge spaceships of the alien Hierodules to travel across time and space to face his greatest test, to become the legendary New Sun or die. The strange, rich, original spaceship scenes give way to travels in time, wherein Severian revisits times and places which fill in parts of the background of the four-volume work, that will thrill and intrigue particulary all readers of the earlier books.

But The Urth of the New Sun is an independent structure all of a piece, an integral masterpiece to shelve beside the classics, one itself.