The Book of the New Sun
Wolfe's tetralogy is set in a dying-sun future so far forward it looks like fantasy. Severian the torturer narrates unreliably through a language drawn from obscure Greek and Latin. It is the most demanding and rewarding SF/Fantasy hybrid ever written.
Women draw the complaint raised independently across separate low reviews: the physical descriptions read as fixated, “familiar to anyone who’s seen a harem anime,” and every woman he meets is drawn to him with little motivation given. The archaic register divides hard, one reader likening it to “Benny Hill beating you to death with a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus” and another watching “metaphors fly like a hoard of mosquitoes.” The vocabulary sends people to a glossary or a fan companion constantly. Book one meanders picaresque, characters appearing and being dropped, “a disjointed 900 page book” to detractors. And readers resent being told their confusion is the intended experience.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
