Genematria · Gene Wolfe · Book of the New Sun
Code is Language;
Language is Code
A computational analysis of an engineer's novel. 136 chapters. 20 tracked terms. One structural argument.
Severian vs The Sun — per-chapter mention density across all four volumes. The red fills in as the sun exceeds the narrator in Citadel. This is the thesis in one image.
Gene Wolfe was a mechanical engineer before he was a novelist. He patented a machine for stacking curved potato chips — a hyperbolic paraboloid whose geometry distributes compressive force so no single point bears what the whole structure can hold. He applied the same principle to a four-volume literary tetralogy. The vocabulary of The Book of the New Sun migrates directionally from personal/institutional to cosmic/transcendent across 136 chapters. Three large language models — shown only four numbers per term, no author, no title, no text — recovered this arc independently. The structural encoding is in the text, not in the analysis.
Paper
When Engineers Design the Logos
Full argument, method, blind test results, the solar correlation, and the engineer's signature. Target: Science Fiction Studies.
Narrative Atlas
Cross-Series Analysis — All 19 Charts
Complete visualization suite. Character presence heatmaps, structural divergence, skew spectrum, migration gradients, and the unlabeled blind-test dataset.