A slight collection of hastily-written essays, unnecessary to all but a few true devotees and the (too rare) Wolfe scholar.

Though written decades before the web, it reminds me of nothing so much as a collection of blog posts printed and bound together as a vanity publication: there's even a chapter which functions as a FAQ section.

The most interesting section of the book is the chapter entitled Cavalry in the Age of the Autarch, which have been worth the original cover price alone, but not the current $25 the book goes for at used book stores. ( )

This slight volume (barely 100 pages in my SFBC edition) derives its name form a mistake printed in Locus, the newsmagazine of the SF field, which reported that the fourth volume of Wolfe's Book of the New Sun would be titled The Castle of the Otter (The real name is The Citadel of the Autarch). Wolfe felt this mistaken title was too good to waste, so he used it to publish a collection of essays about TBotNS. Here one finds insights into the creation of Wolfe's masterpiece, his interest in names, the sources of some of the unusual words he used in TBotNS, and a bibliography, which of course is now 25 years out of date. The content is of interest to the devoted Wolfe fan; it is also available in his Castle of Days, which combines Castle of the Otter with Gene Wolfe's Book of Days, a collection of short stories linked with particular holidays. The inclusion of the current title's contents in the larger volume makes The Castle of the Otter more of a curiosity for completists than a necessity. ( )