Who wrote the 'Book of the New Sun' series?

Gene Wolfe wrote The Book of the New Sun, a four-volume science-fantasy series about Severian, an apprentice torturer in a distant, dying future.

The main sequence was published from 1980 to 1983: The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch. Wolfe later published The Urth of the New Sun in 1987, a related coda that explores consequences and mysteries left by the original tetralogy.

The story follows Severian after he is exiled from the torturers’ guild for showing compassion to a condemned woman. His journey through the Commonwealth combines political conflict, ancient technology, religion, memory, and deliberately difficult language. Wolfe’s use of an unreliable first-person narrator makes readers question what Severian understands and reports.

The series is sometimes labelled fantasy, but it is also a landmark of science fiction and the Dying Earth tradition. China Miéville, Mervyn Peake, and Jack Vance are important speculative-fiction authors, yet none wrote this series.