Sometime during my science-fiction-reading youth -- I think when I decided I was not going to read all 27 Dune books -- I vowed that I wouldn't read any series longer than a trilogy. It just wasn't worth it.
I'm telling you now, the 12 books of Gene Wolfe's Solar Series? Worth it.
Gene Wolfe is an amazing writer. He writes science fiction. He is also a Catholic. (And he also helped invent Pringles!) I think the crux of these novels is the question a Christian SF writer must ask: If God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son -- what about other worlds?
In the first four books (collected in two volumes), called the Book of the New Sun, God (called "the Increate") sends to the planet Urth (which may or may not be our Earth far in the future) the apprentice torturer Severian as His unlikely Messiah. Severian, who like Funes the Memorious forgets nothing, falls in love with one of his "clients," and is thus exiled. Wolfe tells of his wanderings, his rise to temporal power and his spiritual journey. In the coda, Urth of the New Sun, Severian is sent before God (or the angels, it's not quite clear) to stand in Urth's stead in judgment, and then back to redeem the dying planet.
The next series, the Book of the Long Sun, is related to the New Sun books (I won't tell you how, because discovering the connection is a joy). The action takes place in a world called The Whorl. Our next Messiah is Patera Silk, a priest who discovers that the gods he serves are false, and his gradual understanding of God ("the Outsider".) Silk is likeable where Severian is not, a man who is continually trying to do the Right Thing while he discovers the truth about the world he lives in.
And, finally, the Book of the Short Sun. A pilgrim from the Whorl to a new planet (Blue), Horn isn't quite a Messiah -- he's more of an Evangelist, having written the Gospel for Silk. As the title of the last book indicates, Horn is sent back to the Whorl to retrieve Silk and bring him to the fallen world of Blue, to rule there in justice etc. It sounds like a simple quest book, but it's not. The narrator tells his story in three times at once -- the past (the story of his journey to the Whorl), the immediate past (the story of what has just happened as he is attempting to return home) and the present (what is happening to him as he writes). More curiously than these shifts in time, the narrator's identity shifts. The idea of identity is recurrent throughout the entire Solar Series, explored through the posessions of gods and demons, ghosts and spirits, aliens (the vicious and tragic inhumi) and monsters (the terrifying alzabo). Even the identity of place is fluid. I spent much of the books convinced that Blue was in fact Urth / Earth, at some point in the distant past or the far future. I'm pretty sure now that this is not the case, but there are many parallels between them.
There are two kinds of science fiction novels. The first I call "Tungsten Novels."
I once attended a lecture by Isaac Asimov, in which he talked about a fundemental problem with science fiction. The characters need to explain things (the "science" of SF) to the reader that they all themselves take for granted. "It's as if I had two characters in the present day, and one stopped and pointed at the light bulbs and said, 'You know, of course, that the light is produced by an electric current heating a tungsten filament,' and the other says, 'Of course, everybody knows that.'" (I paraphrase, but that's how I remember it.)
A Tungsten Novel, therefore, is one where the most interesting part is the tungsten filament, the future technology or society that the author has conceived. The most recent Tungsten Novel I've read is Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. The concept of Whuffie is more interesting than the novel itself, which is unfortunately predictable.
The second kind of SF novel (for which I have No Clever Name) uses the tungsten to illuminate.
Gene Wolfe's work is of the second kind. He uses his imaginary worlds (and he is a World Builder) to explore the nature of good and evil, of morality and identity, of spirituality and religion, of the human and the divine.
This is definitely a set of Books to Buy, since your first impulse upon finishing them may well be to start them all over again at the beginning. It also takes a proud place on the Curious Bookshelf. For further reading on Wolfe, this Washington Post review of Wolfe's work is a good place to start, as is this fansite.
