Increate and Outsider: Religion in Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle

Gene Wolfe (1931-2019) remains one of speculative fiction's most theologically sophisticated—and critically under-discussed—voices. His magnum opus, the "Solar Cycle," draws upon Jewish angelology, Christianity, Greco-Roman polytheism, Western hermeticism, and Neoplatonism to project what future faiths might look like in a far-future dying earth. Whether in the Book of the New Sun's figures of the Increate and Conciliator, which refract Christian theology through a temporally complex loop, or in the computerized pantheon of the Book of the Long Sun, Wolfe uses science fiction's imaginative power to explore how religions emerge, mutate, and persist across vast stretches of time. These future faiths, this paper contends, are central to Wolfe's sustained meditation on time, technology, and transcendence—one that invites meaningful conversation with two fellow mid-century Catholic visionaries: the poet-artist David Jones and the priest-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.