Science fiction is a genre of vectors. Its stories are arrows tipped with science, fletched with “what-if” and shot out of the present into the future. Some are warning shots, exposing the weak spots in our politics or social architecture. Many provide the kind of escapist fun I’d inhale as a kid — under the covers, by flashlight. And then there are the rare few that pierce the future square in the chest, a note dangling from the shaft that reads, “I told you so.”
For me, it is the science fiction cloaked in myth that carries the most power. Lest your mind careen toward elves on spaceships, let me clarify: I’m not talking about a subgenre here, or about cross-pollination with fantasy. For me, myth is a tone, imbued with the gravity of fate and eternal truth. Whether a lullaby of mankind’s ancient cradle or a requiem for the collapse of stellar empires, these tales sing out from the mist to remind us of our nature.
For the most part, the heroes of these novels inhabit dark, decaying worlds. Their epic journeys through that darkness have often helped me find the light. Here are a few of my favorites.
The Book of the New Sun
by Gene Wolfe
Wolfe’s four-part saga feels like a relic of another epoch — scribbled in the midnight hollows of an abbey by a mad theologian, or summoned into being by the high priest of some fallen empire and beamed back to us across the millenniums. Set on a distant, dying Earth, the book (which was actually written by a Korean War vet living in Illinois in the 1980s) follows Severian, a torturer’s apprentice exiled for the crime of mercy, as he wanders a world so far in the future that it has relapsed into medievalism. Science has become sorcery. Spaceports crumble to ruins.
I have read this book at least five times and still struggle to succinctly sum it up. It is dense, archaic, feverish and beautiful — a meditation on the tragedy of mortals on an immortal stage that will haunt you long after its final page.
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