Attending Daedalus is the first book-length study of Gene Wolfe's four-volume The Book of the New Sun and its sequel, The Urth of the New Sun, known collectively as ‘The Urth Cycle’. Rejecting the conventional spiritual reading of the text, the book employs evolutionary theory to argue for a controversial secular reception of a narrative in which Wolfe plays an elaborate game with his reader. After exposing the concealed story at the heart of Wolfe's novels, it adopts a variety of approaches to establish Wolfe as the designer of an intricate textual labyrinth intended to extend into the readin ... More

Attending Daedalus is the first book-length study of Gene Wolfe's four-volume The Book of the New Sun and its sequel, The Urth of the New Sun, known collectively as ‘The Urth Cycle’. Rejecting the conventional spiritual reading of the text, the book employs evolutionary theory to argue for a controversial secular reception of a narrative in which Wolfe plays an elaborate game with his reader. After exposing the concealed story at the heart of Wolfe's novels, it adopts a variety of approaches to establish Wolfe as the designer of an intricate textual labyrinth intended to extend into the reading experience his thematic preoccupations with subjectivity, the unreliability of memory, the manipulation of individuals by social and political systems, and the psychological potency of myth, faith and symbolism. Drawing evidence not only from the first thirty years of Wolfe's career but from sources as diverse as reception theory, palaeontology, the Renaissance Hermetic tradition, mythology and science fiction's subgenre of dying sun literature, the book provides a comprehensive and closely argued analysis of one of the key works of twentieth-century science fiction.