Stackable Chips Were Really Popular With the Moon People

Who is Gene Wolfe, other than a man whose name rhymes with the 1985 Michael J. Fox film, “Teen Wolf?”

Well, for starters, he’s a Korean War veteran. He has a huge bushy handlebar moustache. He helped engineer the machinery that forms Pringles potato chips. He also happens to write award-winning science fiction novels.

I wonder if he put all that on his cover letter when he first started submitting his manuscript to publishers. “I won the Nebula and World Fantasy Award and invented potato chips in tube form!”

Perhaps it was Wolfe’s diverse career background that allowed him to create his unusual and original science-fiction tetralogy, “The Book of the New Sun.” Or maybe he just has a crazy imagination. The series starts with a dark little novel called “The Shadow of the Torturer.” It’s an appropriate title, considering the main character, Severian, is raised and trained in the The Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, AKA The Guild of Torturers.

Unfortunately, Severian doesn’t get much chance to torture anyone before he’s exiled to a remote village where he is doomed to hack off the heads of petty horse thieves with his badass sword, Terminus Est. He does however, have time to get busy with a trampy shop girl, aid in the theft of a precious, magical religious artifact, join a traveling theatre troupe whose participants are reminiscent of the “Princess Bride,” almost get murdered by a flower, and then hook up with another, not-quite-as-trampy female named Dorcas.

Yup, Dorcas. Possibly the weirdest name for a female character ever. I’ll forgive Wolfe this artistic decision, though, considering the rest of the series was really quite intriguing. It actually reminded me a little of Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels in the sense that it’s set in a version of Earth (or Urth as Severian calls it) far into the future, where we’ve reached the peak of technological advancement and have started the grim slide back towards ruin and darkness. Wolfe weaves together a complex world, complete with its own history and caste system. There are the courtly exultants, the political optimates as well as the soldiers, called armigers. And speaking of crazy words that make no sense unless you’ve read the novel, Wolfe also created a brand new language.

Following in the footsteps of Tolkien, Wolfe explains this “language” in one of five million appendixes. Here Wolfe claims that he actually didn’t write this book, but merely “translated” it from “A tongue that has not yet achieved existence,” and in the places where there was not a good modern day translation, has just kept the original words, like fuligin (super dark black), agathodaemon (afterlife?), and tokoloshe (??????).

Wolfe certainly isn’t the first mustachioed wordsmith to create a brand spanking new language to suit his literary needs. Tolkien did it in “Lord of the Rings,“ to give an authentic quality to his work. It’s often said that he intended for his trilogy to serve as a standard mythology for Britain, just as Grimm’s fairy tales were for Germany. This may explain why so many complain that Tolkien’s books read like history text books.

I admit, while reading “The Book of the New Sun” I could usually guess word meanings from context and description, I often found this use of invented language quite jarring. I’ve only ever had this experience once before, and that was in reading Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange,” where he creates an entire vocabulary of slang for his characters to use. In that case, the slang seemed to emphasize the transience of the teenage mindset, and also helped to mask the intense violence of the novel. It was an integral element to the work that enhanced the overall tone and story. In Wolfe’s case, however, the “translated” language comes off as an unnecessary flourish. The material itself is so fresh and interesting, it didn’t need a fake “I got this book from future moon people!” story to sell it.