Review: The Sword of the Lictor (The Book of the New Sun Book 3 of 5)

8:48 pm 27 August 2017
The Sword of the Lictor - Gene Wolfe

This is the third book in the series The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.  I don’t have too much to say about it, but I enjoyed it at the same level as the previous two. 

 

The previous book had a couple things that drove me nuts, and this book did not.  Even Severian’s constant harping about his perfect memory is toned down to a more tolerable level.  The story also held my interest pretty consistently all the way through.  On the other hand, there really weren’t any secondary characters in this book that I felt attached to like I had in the previous book. 

 

I have one very spoiler-ish thing to talk about in spoiler tags:

I did really like Little Severian and the brief period in which our Severian takes on the role of his father.  The boy’s death really caught me by surprise.  I guess it was supposed to be ironic that at one point Severian muses that he isn’t sure which he was more worried about losing, the boy or his sword, when he’s climbing up mountains with both on his back.  By the end of the book, he’s lost both.

(show spoiler)

 

This book continues to create more questions, but it also answered or hinted at answers to quite a few things.  On to the fourth book!

 

Next Book

The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe, the fourth book in this series.

science fiction completed series