I’ve been reading entire oeuvres lately, preferably in order of publication, and am currently taking a break from the incredibly prolific (and just hospitalized) Michael Moorcock by rereading Gene Wolfe‘s work. I first read Wolfe in the mid-eighties as his masterwork, the four-volume “Book of the New Sun” was coming out.

The tetralogy is highly influenced by the work of Jorge Luis Borges, the magisterial Argentinian fantasist. It also draws from a little-noted SF trend of the mid-to-late seventies. Many literarily ambitious SF authors wrote pastiches of pre-industrial novels, borrowing the language and rhetorical devices of late-eighteenth century European literature.

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