Well, I’ve done it. I’ve finished The Book of the Short Sun and, with it, Gene Wolfe’s “Solar Cycle”. It was worth it. The rest of this post will assume that you have read or are at least familiar with The Book of the New Sun. The Book of the Short Sun tells the story of a man who strives to fulfill a great vow, perhaps taken too lightly, and changes greatly because of it.
Assuming one has read The Book of the New Sun, I hope to convince you to read the rest of the Solar Cycle.
Jack Vance published Araminta Station in 1988, 38 years after his first major work, the massively influential Dying Earth. Araminta Station, the first part of the Cadwal Chronicles trilogy, narrates the adventures of Glawen Clattuc, a young man of the local gentry on a wilderness-preserve planet — Cadwal — in a distant future where mankind has settled most of the galaxy in a loosely-governed “Gaean Reach”. Vance writes in his characteristic style with the assurance and deliberation of a well-earned maturity. Do I recommend it? Absolutely, although it’s not a good place to start with the author and doesn’t quite rise to the level of Vance’s immediately preceding work, Lyonesse.
Why do Millennials like Harry Potter? Maybe because if you give J.K. Rowling the boy, she will give you the man. Whatever the higher merits of the books, they initially got popular because middle-schoolers liked The Sorcerer’s Stone. In what any fantasy aficionado recognizes as a considerable feat, Rowling then managed to maintain a steady, coherent output throughout our formative years. And then the movies. If the well has gone a bit dry since The Deathly Hallows Part II — things could be a lot worse.
This line of thought has some allure, and no small amount of explanatory power. But it’s also survivorship bias. Why not The Edge Chronicles, or His Dark Materials?
Because Harry Potter has Relevance — it reflects the actual world seen in a way that other fantasy works did not. Specifically, Harry Potter presents an idealization of an inward-looking, academically-focused technocratic bureaucracy. This reflected the world of middle-class Millennial children, and continues to describe the ideal world of older fans.
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