How far in the future can a science fiction push? It turns out, science fiction can push so far it turns into fantasy. Here’s more from Approaching Pavonis Mons:
Before we touch on these newcomers, though, we need to say a word or two about the science fiction writer who did more than any other to shape science fiction’s shared fever dream of the deep future, especially as it stood in the final decades of the twentieth century. That writer, of course, is Gene Wolfe – arguably one of the most significant figures to enter the field in the nineteen seventies. Wolfe had planted a flag in the far future with The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1975), but it was the Urth sequence that truly cemented his reputation, beginning with the Shadow of the Torturer (1980), continuing across the four books of the The Book of the New Sun, and then developed further in other linked series.
Wolfe’s work is interesting in numerous respects, but few texts have achieved such a deeply felt evocation of immense futurity as the The Book of the New Sun. Exactly how far in the future we are is never made entirely clear (in Wolfe things seldom are), but some sense of that span of time is conveyed in the final volume, The Citadel of the Autarch (1983), when the narrator Severian is compelled to make a perilous descent down a great cliff, the revealed strata of which turn out to be the compressed remnants of numerous earlier human cultures, all of which postdate our own. Wolfe’s creation is full of such resonant images, none more beautiful than Urth’s green-faced Moon, blanketed with forests so long ago that no one remembers it otherwise.
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