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  • The Divine Irruption in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the Long Sun
  • Christopher Beiting (bio)

Francis, go and rebuild My house which, as you see, is all being destroyed.

Legenda maior of Saint Francis of Assisi, II.1

When humans encounter the divine—when the divine reveals itself directly to humanity—we often make mistakes in how we understand the experience. We can take God on our terms rather than his, and bury him behind a morass of myths and legends, as pagans did. And even understanding who he is correctly will not guarantee that we will understand his message, any more than Francis of Assisi did after the vision of the San Damiano crucifix. This theme of divine self-revelation is masterfully explored in the most unlikely of places: a science fiction tetralogy known as The Book of the Long Sun by noted author Gene Wolfe.1 One does not usually associate the genre of science fiction with Catholic culture—usually it is in opposition to it—but there are the occasional extraordinary works such as Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy in which explicitly Catholic themes are explored, and Wolfe’s The Book of the Long Sun is one such. Wolfe himself is a [End Page 86] convert to Catholicism, who began to study the Catholic faith in order to get married but then became deeply interested in it for his own sake, citing as his main influences Thomistic theology and the writings of G. K. Chesterton in particular, and the Inklings in general.2 Wolfe also composes complex, multilayered prose, often with an extraordinarily rich vocabulary that is influenced by his love of onomastics and interest in Greco-Roman culture.3 His narratives are also often complex, expansive works, full of sharply defined and unusually deep characters, though readers should beware that he is a master of the “unreliable narrator” technique, making his characters not always what they seem at first reading. As such, the work of Gene Wolfe in general—and The Book of the Long Sun in particular—rewards the careful reader and is a fine addition to the corpus of mythopoetic fiction established by the likes of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.4

On one level, The Book of the Long Sun is a sly inversion of a by-now hackneyed trope of science fiction: the generation-ship tale. Absent the miraculous “faster than light” engines so beloved of science fiction, a realistic trip to the stars will be a long and slow process taking years, if not centuries. One method of managing such a trip is to build a vessel large enough to hold an entire population with the expectation that after decades or centuries in flight only the descendants of the original crew will arrive at their destination, a new colony planet. Many stories have been written using the theme of some technological or social catastrophe striking the crew, such that they relapse into techno-barbarism, forgetting they are on a ship at all and mythologizing the original crew or builders of the ship into deities. In such tales, the ship is usually either failing or the long-forgotten colony world is fast approaching, and it is up to the protagonists to undergo some epiphany that causes them to realize the truth: their “world” is nothing more than a vehicle, their gods are nothing more than myths or mere men, and their task is either to force their fellows to realize the truth and save the ship or else to depart for the colony world with those few who believe them.5 [End Page 87] As it stands, the trope is a materialist allegory: the scales fall from the eyes of ignorant, benighted protagonists, who abandon their primitive beliefs for the truth of a glorified Science and a bright, technological future.

Give Gene Wolfe credit, in The Book of the Long Sun, for demolishing this trope utterly. In the first place, unlike most science fiction writers, Wolfe is acutely sensitive to the importance and centrality of religion—even a religion based on myths—to human life and the human order...

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