Severian, an apprentice in the torturers' guild, barely survives a swim in the River Gyoll. In a 1998 poll of its subscribers, Locus magazine ranked the tetralogy number three among 36 all-time best fantasy novels before 1990. It is at war with Ascia, its totalitarian northern neighbor.
Severian lives in a nation called the Commonwealth, ruled by the Autarch, in the Southern Hemisphere. It is a first-person narrative, ostensibly translated by Wolfe into contemporary English, set in a distant future when the Sun has dimmed and Earth is cooler (a " Dying Earth" story). The tetralogy chronicles the journey of Severian, a journeyman torturer who is disgraced and forced to wander. Despite being published with a year between each book, all four books were written and completed during his free time without anyone's knowledge when he was still an editor of Plant Engineering, allowing him to write at his own pace and take his time.
Gene Wolfe had originally intended the story to be a 40,000-word novella called "The Feast of Saint Catherine", meant to be published in one of the Orbit anthologies, but during the writing, it continued to grow. It inaugurated the "Solar Cycle" that Wolfe continued by setting other works in the same universe ( The Urth of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun series, and The Book of the Short Sun series). The Book of the New Sun (1980–1983) is a four volume, science fantasy novel written by the American author Gene Wolfe.
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