Synopses & Reviews
A young man in his teens is transported from our world to a magical realm that contains seven levels of reality. Very quickly transformed by magic into a grown man of heroic proportions, he takes the name Able and sets out on a quest to find the sword that has been promised to him, a sword he will get from a dragon, the one very special blade that will help him fulfill his life ambition to become a knight and a true hero.
Inside, however, Able remains a boy, and he must grow in every sense to survive the dangers and delights that lie ahead in encounters with giants, elves, wizards, and dragons. His adventure will conclude next year in the second volume of The Wizard Knight, The Wizard.
Gene Wolfe is one of the most widely praised masters of SF and fantasy. He is the winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Nebula Award, twice, the World Fantasy Award, twice, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Fantasy Award, and France's Prix Apollo. His popular successes include the four-volume classic The Book of the New Sun.
With this new series, Wolfe not only surpasses all the most popular genre writers of the last three decades, he takes on the legends of the past century, in a work that will be favorably compared with the best of J. R. R. Tolkien, E. R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake, and
T. H. White. This is a book---and a series---for the ages, from perhaps the greatest living writer in (or outside) the fantasy genre.
Review
"[B]eautifully told....[T]his is a compelling, breathtaking achievement." Publshers Weekly
Review
"[Wolfe is a] national treasure....[R]eaders may occasionally wonder...where the story is going. But they will forgive Wolfe, for his wit, erudition, narrative technique, and consummate mastery of the language sweep all before them." Roland Green, Booklist
Review
"Wolfe not only entertains, he invests his work with a complexity and trickiness that place him among the most important American novelists of our time....[A] novel that blends, imaginatively and briskly, Arthurian ideals, Celtic legends and Norse mythology." Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World
Review
"[O]ne of sf's most elegant stylists and literary philosophers....Here he presents an artless and perceptive hero whose adventures are rites of passage. Highly recommended." Library Journal
Synopsis
This is Wolfe's first book in a two-volume epic fantasy, written in the Tolkien tradition; an original and morally complex heroic fantasy.
About the Author
Gene Wolfe has been called "the finest writer the science fiction world has yet produced" by
The Washington Post. A former engineer, he has become one of the most widely praised masters of SF and fantasy. He is the winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Nebula Award, twice, the World Fantasy Award, twice, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Fantasy Award, and France's Prix Apollo. His popular successes include the four-volume classic
The Book of the New Sun. He and his wife, Rosemary, make their home in Barrington, IL.