Soldier of the Mist

Soldier of the Mist is set in Ancient Greece (479 B.C), about a soldier named “Latro”, who lost his memory and can not retain more than a day’s worth of memory due to a head injury from a major battle, and also for angering Demeter, Greek god and Earth mother, who curses him. We learn in the novel that Latro was a conscripted Latin speaking soldier (Roman) fighting for the Persians against Sparta, and during the events of the Battle of Plataea he did something to anger the Earth Mother. The novel quickly establishes putting Latro on a quest to regain his memories, and on his quest he is accompanied by a few different characters along the way. He also seems to be guided by different Greek gods along the way.

Clearly memory is a big theme in this novel, but Gene Wolfe takes it further to use the lack of memory as a framing device for novel’s structure. Every chapter is us reading an entry in a scroll from Latro relating the day he experienced. In fact, the scroll is what Latro tries to read every morning in order to gain his most recent memories and even know what his quest is, who his friends and companions are, and more. The people around him seem to know that he is dependent on these notes, so we often hear him write that they remind him to write some important event or detail down. There’s various situations and complications that arise due to the nature of his dependence on the scroll, such as when he is prevented from writing notes, there’s just a gap of memory that he’ll never write down for us to read.

Beyond memory, I was impressed with how Gene Wolfe treated language in the novel. Latro has been exposed to many languages and cultures, being Roman himself his first language is Latin, participating in battle with the Persians, and traveling and interacting with Greeks and Spartans, With so many languages and cultures colliding, but no memory of them, he isn’t able to place some words to their proper understanding. For instance, Latro calls the Spartans ‘rope makers’ since in greek the word ‘sparton’ means ‘rope’. Basically, he doesn’t have memory of the Spartans, but since he does retain his language, he takes it literally and his confusion is apparent in his writing. There’s other situations like the island of Salamis which sounds like ‘Salaam’, so Latro understands it as ‘Isle of Peace’ which is likely because of the influence of Persian language on him while he served in their army.

One line of thought that was completely unexpected before reading Soldier of the Mist that really fascinated me is that Latro is a parallel to Large Language Model’s mechanics. As someone who works in AI I couldn’t help but notice that Latro is essentially filled with base training around language, combat, and some culture but his limited context window resets daily. Since he doesn’t have long term memory, and because his ‘session’ ends after a day Latro must read his scroll daily as reminder of who he is in order to perform his quest. Latro even “hallucinates” like an LLM when he hears the word Sparta, since in his base language training he hears it as the literal Greek word ‘sparton’ or ‘rope makers’.

This is my first adventure into Gene Wolfe and was one of my favorite novels to read this year. Lately, we see a lot of novels being written and published that are derivative of epic stories we have read before like Song of Achilles giving us a different perspective of *The Iliad, but Soldier of the Mist genuinely surprised me as more of an ‘original’ that seemed to follow an epic’s journey (minus the poetry), where the ‘hero’ has a mission, encounters Greek gods and beings, and more. Pair that with its interesting structure and framing around memory, this makes a terrific novel.