Well, by saying you don't like Wolfe you are just stating a personal preference. The fact that you have found a very specific reason for your dislike doesn't any in way invalidate Wolfe's authorship or his readers as much as it further illuminates your own way of thinking.
In fact, in one sense your explanation is painfully ironic, as you seem to consider yourself morally superior to those readers who -- you claim -- read Wolfe for entirely superficial reasons. Are we really stooping so low now as to criticize people for their reading tastes or to second-guess their reasons for reading what they do?
Personally I derive as much pleasure from reading Wolfe as I do from Lem, although I would never compare them. And the key word is "pleasure": I, like I suppose most people, read books to enjoy them. I enjoy Wolfe for many reasons, but "moreal superiority" is not one of them. And I am wary of terms such as "literary significance" to guide my tastes; that's a term for scholars and academics to worry about, as a reader I am concerned with books and stories that affect me emotionally and stimulate me intellectually.
I see your point about Wolfe's complexity being more of a device and less about genuine depth. Despite this, I do enjoy the richness it imparts on the narrative. Wolfe's template is Borges, who uses similar devices and whose stories often have a sort of insular quality where the narrative only exists to create a clever gadget whose cleverness can be admired, but cannot be applied to anything outside itself. For example, Borges has a neat story, The House of Asterion, about a lonely person who roams a large house with many corridors; at the end of the story is killed, and we realize that he's the minotaur in the myth about Theseus.
As for The New Sun, I think that Severian's unreliability is more a ruse (or at best evidence of a flawed character) than an important plot point -- compare this to his Latro trilogy, set in ancient Greece, where the main character, having suffered brain damage, is unable to form new memories, and is therefore genuinely unreliable. The Short Sun also has a character who loses his sense of identity when his mind is merged with another's, and his lack of reliability comes from an inability or refusal to recognize who he actually is.
(Incidentally, while I admire The New Sun greatly, I found its two loose sequels, The Long Sun and The Short Sun, to be much more emotionally stimulating. It helps that the main characters are not borderline sociopaths. They are also less prone to the kind of cryptic connections that are evident in the first book.)
In fact, in one sense your explanation is painfully ironic, as you seem to consider yourself morally superior to those readers who -- you claim -- read Wolfe for entirely superficial reasons. Are we really stooping so low now as to criticize people for their reading tastes or to second-guess their reasons for reading what they do?
Personally I derive as much pleasure from reading Wolfe as I do from Lem, although I would never compare them. And the key word is "pleasure": I, like I suppose most people, read books to enjoy them. I enjoy Wolfe for many reasons, but "moreal superiority" is not one of them. And I am wary of terms such as "literary significance" to guide my tastes; that's a term for scholars and academics to worry about, as a reader I am concerned with books and stories that affect me emotionally and stimulate me intellectually.
I see your point about Wolfe's complexity being more of a device and less about genuine depth. Despite this, I do enjoy the richness it imparts on the narrative. Wolfe's template is Borges, who uses similar devices and whose stories often have a sort of insular quality where the narrative only exists to create a clever gadget whose cleverness can be admired, but cannot be applied to anything outside itself. For example, Borges has a neat story, The House of Asterion, about a lonely person who roams a large house with many corridors; at the end of the story is killed, and we realize that he's the minotaur in the myth about Theseus.
As for The New Sun, I think that Severian's unreliability is more a ruse (or at best evidence of a flawed character) than an important plot point -- compare this to his Latro trilogy, set in ancient Greece, where the main character, having suffered brain damage, is unable to form new memories, and is therefore genuinely unreliable. The Short Sun also has a character who loses his sense of identity when his mind is merged with another's, and his lack of reliability comes from an inability or refusal to recognize who he actually is.
(Incidentally, while I admire The New Sun greatly, I found its two loose sequels, The Long Sun and The Short Sun, to be much more emotionally stimulating. It helps that the main characters are not borderline sociopaths. They are also less prone to the kind of cryptic connections that are evident in the first book.)