/The Sword of the Lictor/ by Gene Wolfe is, so far, the most concrete and coherent book in the series. Or it might be that I am starting to adjusting to Wolfe's narrative style.
This interesting thing about this book is that, like previous volumes, retains the episodic nature of a pulp sci-fi story. But it’s not really clear to me how each individual episode relates to the overall story.
In this book we get the following episodes: “Thrax”, “The Cabin in the Mountains”, “The Village of the Magicians”, “Typhon”, and finally “Lake Diuturna”. The first episode seems to discard all that has been built up in the previous book. The following three episodes introduce additional complications, but by the time we get to the last episode, it seems like everything has been reset.
I would almost be tempted to think that the author was just making up random stuff as he goes, but his prose is so careful and each story seems to be so fraught with meaning that I can’t help but think it’s more than just a sequence of engaging, and often tragic, but loosely related short stories. That each step is an important piece of a larger puzzle.
While the first book in the series ended randomly and the second just kind of trailed off, /The Sword of the Lictor/ does culminate in a fantastic confluence of events and a rousing conclusion.
Overall I’m starting to warm to the series and the series itself seems to finally be finding what it wants to say.
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