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The Book of the Short Sun #1-3 omnibus
The Book of the Short Sun
When The Book of the Long Sun, Gene Wolfe’s science fantasy masterpiece, concluded, the Whorl – a giant generational starship sent out from Urth 300 years before – had arrived at its destination, a solar system with two habitable planets, Blue and Green. At the urging of Whorl’s religious leader, Patera Silk, the people left the ship for an uncertain future on Blue – a world already inhabited by the inhumi, blood-drinking aliens who take human form.
Now The Book of the Short Sun carries the story forward to the years after the great exodus, to let Horn, narrator of the earlier work, tell his own story.
Horn and his family have made a decent life for themselves on Blue, though crime, pollution and poverty have become so rampant in the city of New Viron that he is called upon to find Patera Silk. Horn must go to the still-orbiting Whorl and convince his old friend and mentor to return to Blue, for the legendary hero is the only one who can restore order and lead them to prosperity. But Horn isn’t even sure Silk still lives.
Setting sail in a small boat, the aging Horn embarks on a long and difficult journey across the planet, trying to get to the Whorl. With the undine Seawrack, his adopted inhumi son, Krait, and his eldest son, Sinew, Horn makes it to the last working lander – only to be highjacked to the jungles of Green, where the inhumi imprison the passengers as slaves. There, he encounters the mysterious alien Neighbors who were once native to Blue, but whom the inhumi have all but exterminated. Horn joins their fight for freedom, is fatally wounded… and finds himself on another world, wearing a different body.
As his inability to find Silk weighs heavily on his mind, Horn is further tormented by the fact that his new body bears a striking resemblance to the lost Caldé. In the end, he will have to answer a troubling question: has he truly failed in his sworn task, or has he become the very man he sought?
Includes:
On Blue's Waters
In Green's Jungles
Return To The Whorl
Now The Book of the Short Sun carries the story forward to the years after the great exodus, to let Horn, narrator of the earlier work, tell his own story.
Horn and his family have made a decent life for themselves on Blue, though crime, pollution and poverty have become so rampant in the city of New Viron that he is called upon to find Patera Silk. Horn must go to the still-orbiting Whorl and convince his old friend and mentor to return to Blue, for the legendary hero is the only one who can restore order and lead them to prosperity. But Horn isn’t even sure Silk still lives.
Setting sail in a small boat, the aging Horn embarks on a long and difficult journey across the planet, trying to get to the Whorl. With the undine Seawrack, his adopted inhumi son, Krait, and his eldest son, Sinew, Horn makes it to the last working lander – only to be highjacked to the jungles of Green, where the inhumi imprison the passengers as slaves. There, he encounters the mysterious alien Neighbors who were once native to Blue, but whom the inhumi have all but exterminated. Horn joins their fight for freedom, is fatally wounded… and finds himself on another world, wearing a different body.
As his inability to find Silk weighs heavily on his mind, Horn is further tormented by the fact that his new body bears a striking resemblance to the lost Caldé. In the end, he will have to answer a troubling question: has he truly failed in his sworn task, or has he become the very man he sought?
Includes:
On Blue's Waters
In Green's Jungles
Return To The Whorl
754 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2001
About the author
Gene Wolfe
514 books3,648 followersGene Wolfe was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He was noted for his dense, allusive prose as well as the strong influence of his Catholic faith, to which he converted after marrying a Catholic. He was a prolific short story writer and a novelist, and has won many awards in the field.
While attending Texas A&M University Wolfe published his first speculative fiction in The Commentator, a student literary journal. Wolfe dropped out during his junior year, and was drafted to fight in the Korean War. After returning to the United States he earned a degree from the University of Houston and became an industrial engineer. He edited the journal Plant Engineering for many years before retiring to write full-time, but his most famous professional engineering achievement was a contribution to the machine used to make Pringles potato crisps. He lived in Barrington, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.
A frequent Hugo nominee without a win, Wolfe nevertheless picked up several Nebula and Locus Awards, among others, including the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the 2012 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. He was also a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/genewolfe
While attending Texas A&M University Wolfe published his first speculative fiction in The Commentator, a student literary journal. Wolfe dropped out during his junior year, and was drafted to fight in the Korean War. After returning to the United States he earned a degree from the University of Houston and became an industrial engineer. He edited the journal Plant Engineering for many years before retiring to write full-time, but his most famous professional engineering achievement was a contribution to the machine used to make Pringles potato crisps. He lived in Barrington, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.
A frequent Hugo nominee without a win, Wolfe nevertheless picked up several Nebula and Locus Awards, among others, including the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the 2012 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. He was also a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/genewolfe
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
September 13, 2024
There must be a word for the time when we see something we have seen before turn out to be something else.Sublime, subliminal, monumental
Though these three books are remote, beginning 9 volumes deep in the Solar Cycle, they are exquisite. They work backwards on the books that precede them, reaching into Severian's Urth and Silk's Whorl, rearranging and illuminating them.
All four of Borges’s fantastical implements are present: the work within the work, the twin, traveling through time, and the contamination of reality by the dream.
If you wish to be cast into the inky dark of grappling with selfhood, generations, reality, myth, and morality, look no further.
April 16, 2025
6/5. Stunned. Just stunned.
The Book of the Short Sun is the three-book conclusion to Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle, and is, in my opinion, the best three books in the whole series—a magnum opus, and probably the best cap to a series I could ever ask for. I loved New Sun a lot, and had a slightly more complicated yet loving relationship with Long Sun, but Short Sun was by far the most impactful to me on an emotional level. Wolfe cranked up the heart without ever compromising on the narrative complexities that made his earlier books so alluring. It is a return to form in terms of writing perspective, combining the strengths of Wolfe’s first person narration with some of his most cogent storytelling and consistent pacing into a soul-searching journey that is all things vibrant, violent, and deeply, deeply humbling.
Short Sun takes place 20 years after the events of Long Sun began driving humanity out of the Whorl, and it becomes apparent that life outside the crew-maintained cylindrical world-ship was not easy. The planet Blue quickly descended into violence and war as the lack of technological, government or religious framework failed to hold people together as a race of blood-sucking inhumi from the neighboring planet Green weakened them even further from within. Desperate for a real leader to unite them, the colonists start sending people from different towns back to the Whorl to search for their old Caldé Silk. Horn, who wrote about Silk's life in the Book of the Long Sun—a book whose physical manifestation has taken on a life of its own, turning Silk into something of a legend and a Godhead figure—is among those chosen for the task of bringing Silk down from the stars and back to Blue. What begins as a somewhat pulpy seafaring adventure between a writer, a siren, and a vampire, quickly turns into a psychedelic dream journey where the bonds of reality and identity begin to dissolve, and the question of what it really means to be a person becomes the central focus. Like in Long Sun, empathy is a huge theme here, as Horn befriends devils and saints alike and exposes the humanity that ties us all together. There is love and betrayal, but Wolfe is constantly subverting the reader, and Horn ends up accomplishing (and failing) his goals in ways you would never expect.
Because Horn starts this account after returning from his search for Silk, the author will kind of supplant information from the present and then go back and explain how things happened from the past, and the constant switching between present and past causes the narrative threads to overlap in a sort of mesh that the reader will have to sift through with caution. These threads kind of move in opposite directions, with the past narrative ending where the present narrative began, and despite the story connecting back around to the very beginning of The Book of the New Sun, Short Sun could almost act as its own closed-circuit loop that demands a full reassessment as soon as you close the final page.
Wolfe, despite his Catholic faith, was a skeptic at heart, and was obviously obsessed with how Gods end up representing different things to different people (there are many allusions to multi-headed gods), and religious texts become untrustworthy—warped over time as they pass through the hands of different authors, revisionists, interpretations and translations. That is something he tries to imbue in all of the Solar Cycle books, but he brings this concept to its absolute peak as The Book of the Long Sun in itself becomes a pseudo-representation for the Bible that has a direct influence on the happenings of Short Sun through the mythology it created. It's in this way that Wolfe manages to break the fourth wall and turn the actual, physical Long Sun books—the ones sitting on your shelf right now—into an artifact of the world he created. It's truly genius, and I'm not aware of any other author that could be bothered to have as much ambition as Wolfe did. Like with New Sun and Long Sun, there is a trove of religious symbolism and literary references to unpack here. I'm definitely not well-read or Bible-smart enough to pick up on them all, but the symbolism is usually obvious and easy to appreciate even if you don't know the direct reference. Wolfe often employs small microcosms to represent and remind the reader of the larger themes.
It's hard to go into much more detail without spoiling the best parts of the book, so I'll just express once again how amazing Short Sun is—how intelligent, compassionate, and adventurous. It's a story that will stick with me for a long, long time, and I already can't wait to read it again. It's a master stroke from the first page to the last, one of the best books I've ever read, and I really wish more New Sun readers would make it as far, they are seriously missing out on some peak science-fantasy literature. Long Sun was definitely a bit tough to get through at times, but my god, Short Sun makes the whole journey worthwhile.
The Book of the Short Sun is the three-book conclusion to Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle, and is, in my opinion, the best three books in the whole series—a magnum opus, and probably the best cap to a series I could ever ask for. I loved New Sun a lot, and had a slightly more complicated yet loving relationship with Long Sun, but Short Sun was by far the most impactful to me on an emotional level. Wolfe cranked up the heart without ever compromising on the narrative complexities that made his earlier books so alluring. It is a return to form in terms of writing perspective, combining the strengths of Wolfe’s first person narration with some of his most cogent storytelling and consistent pacing into a soul-searching journey that is all things vibrant, violent, and deeply, deeply humbling.
Short Sun takes place 20 years after the events of Long Sun began driving humanity out of the Whorl, and it becomes apparent that life outside the crew-maintained cylindrical world-ship was not easy. The planet Blue quickly descended into violence and war as the lack of technological, government or religious framework failed to hold people together as a race of blood-sucking inhumi from the neighboring planet Green weakened them even further from within. Desperate for a real leader to unite them, the colonists start sending people from different towns back to the Whorl to search for their old Caldé Silk. Horn, who wrote about Silk's life in the Book of the Long Sun—a book whose physical manifestation has taken on a life of its own, turning Silk into something of a legend and a Godhead figure—is among those chosen for the task of bringing Silk down from the stars and back to Blue. What begins as a somewhat pulpy seafaring adventure between a writer, a siren, and a vampire, quickly turns into a psychedelic dream journey where the bonds of reality and identity begin to dissolve, and the question of what it really means to be a person becomes the central focus. Like in Long Sun, empathy is a huge theme here, as Horn befriends devils and saints alike and exposes the humanity that ties us all together. There is love and betrayal, but Wolfe is constantly subverting the reader, and Horn ends up accomplishing (and failing) his goals in ways you would never expect.
Because Horn starts this account after returning from his search for Silk, the author will kind of supplant information from the present and then go back and explain how things happened from the past, and the constant switching between present and past causes the narrative threads to overlap in a sort of mesh that the reader will have to sift through with caution. These threads kind of move in opposite directions, with the past narrative ending where the present narrative began, and despite the story connecting back around to the very beginning of The Book of the New Sun, Short Sun could almost act as its own closed-circuit loop that demands a full reassessment as soon as you close the final page.
Wolfe, despite his Catholic faith, was a skeptic at heart, and was obviously obsessed with how Gods end up representing different things to different people (there are many allusions to multi-headed gods), and religious texts become untrustworthy—warped over time as they pass through the hands of different authors, revisionists, interpretations and translations. That is something he tries to imbue in all of the Solar Cycle books, but he brings this concept to its absolute peak as The Book of the Long Sun in itself becomes a pseudo-representation for the Bible that has a direct influence on the happenings of Short Sun through the mythology it created. It's in this way that Wolfe manages to break the fourth wall and turn the actual, physical Long Sun books—the ones sitting on your shelf right now—into an artifact of the world he created. It's truly genius, and I'm not aware of any other author that could be bothered to have as much ambition as Wolfe did. Like with New Sun and Long Sun, there is a trove of religious symbolism and literary references to unpack here. I'm definitely not well-read or Bible-smart enough to pick up on them all, but the symbolism is usually obvious and easy to appreciate even if you don't know the direct reference. Wolfe often employs small microcosms to represent and remind the reader of the larger themes.
It's hard to go into much more detail without spoiling the best parts of the book, so I'll just express once again how amazing Short Sun is—how intelligent, compassionate, and adventurous. It's a story that will stick with me for a long, long time, and I already can't wait to read it again. It's a master stroke from the first page to the last, one of the best books I've ever read, and I really wish more New Sun readers would make it as far, they are seriously missing out on some peak science-fantasy literature. Long Sun was definitely a bit tough to get through at times, but my god, Short Sun makes the whole journey worthwhile.
October 29, 2024
Seriously concerned that I'll never read another book of this caliber
November 13, 2025
Inhumu & Alzabo - Mimicry (also 5th head of cebrerus Sainte Anne aboriginals)
Shadow Children & The Neighbors, Inhumu and the Sainte Anne aboriginals
Marsch is Silk, on a doomed quest to find something, only to become that thing (revealed narratively at the very end of the story)
The Cat is Oreb
and the boy Guide is an inhumu who steals Marsch's identity
"Marsch"-boy hybrid becoming an impersonation or mimicry, recontextualizing the story
Jolenta's Glamour + Jahlee's Glamour - their despair at "losing" their glamour/ body dysphoria. Both become suicidal.
Both Horn and Severian rape, in both cases with "Extenuating circumstances" - a siren's song in one case, and an incapacitated glamoured enchantress in the other. Both contrast sharply with Silk's encountering of Hyacinthe, a whore throwing herself at Silk, who leaps out a window to his great injury to escape temptation and protect his chastity (only to, shortly therafter, renounce his vow of abstinence and become Hyacinthe's ultimate simp)...
The alzabo "ritual" (including both Thecla via Vodalus as well as the Autarch's vial) seems to be analogous to the "possession" of the Mainframe Gods *as well as* the spirit transference of the Neighbors. In the case of mainframe possession, the transference can be imperfect or constrained, as in the case of Oreb (and possibly Babbie), and always leaves behind permenant psychic residue, transforming the possessed into a hybrid being.
Severian makes a truce with the Alzabo - just like Horn and the Inhumu
Shadow Children & The Neighbors, Inhumu and the Sainte Anne aboriginals
Marsch is Silk, on a doomed quest to find something, only to become that thing (revealed narratively at the very end of the story)
The Cat is Oreb
and the boy Guide is an inhumu who steals Marsch's identity
"Marsch"-boy hybrid becoming an impersonation or mimicry, recontextualizing the story
Jolenta's Glamour + Jahlee's Glamour - their despair at "losing" their glamour/ body dysphoria. Both become suicidal.
Both Horn and Severian rape, in both cases with "Extenuating circumstances" - a siren's song in one case, and an incapacitated glamoured enchantress in the other. Both contrast sharply with Silk's encountering of Hyacinthe, a whore throwing herself at Silk, who leaps out a window to his great injury to escape temptation and protect his chastity (only to, shortly therafter, renounce his vow of abstinence and become Hyacinthe's ultimate simp)...
The alzabo "ritual" (including both Thecla via Vodalus as well as the Autarch's vial) seems to be analogous to the "possession" of the Mainframe Gods *as well as* the spirit transference of the Neighbors. In the case of mainframe possession, the transference can be imperfect or constrained, as in the case of Oreb (and possibly Babbie), and always leaves behind permenant psychic residue, transforming the possessed into a hybrid being.
Severian makes a truce with the Alzabo - just like Horn and the Inhumu
August 18, 2020
Long Sun gets a bit slow. Short Sun picks it back up a bit. Better read. Though the Horn/Silk seemed a bit drawn out. Very enjoyable. Has really stuck with me.
August 24, 2013
Gene Wolfe has earned a reputation for writing novels that benefit from being read twice. His works are often complex and they do tend to reward careful reading, so much so that it’s not uncommon to hear prospective readers asking which of his Solar Cycle works is the easiest to read. Wolfe’s Book of the Short Sun trilogy is certainly not the place to start, but it is an otherwise fine finish to this distinguished cycle of stories that bridge the gap between fantasy and science fiction, and for some readers, between literary and genre fiction.
In The Book of the New Sun, Severian is tasked with saving Earth and its dying sun. In The Book of the Long Sun, Wolfe tells the story of a generation ship that was launched to a nearby star... Read More:
http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...
In The Book of the New Sun, Severian is tasked with saving Earth and its dying sun. In The Book of the Long Sun, Wolfe tells the story of a generation ship that was launched to a nearby star... Read More:
http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...
April 21, 2013
Really liked this book, another hit for Gene Wolfe. Wolfe is quickly becoming my favorite author. This is a direct sequel to the Book of The Long Sun, and I would say it's necessary to read that first. That said, I liked Long Sun a little more, probably because it stands alone, and this book fills in some of the mysteries from that series. I get the feeling that, similar to Urth of The New Sun, Wolfe was worried that his reader's didn't "get" all of the Long Sun, and put some clarification in these books. It is an amazing read by itself, however, part SciFi, part Fantasy, part Epic Drama. A sort of post-scifi Odyssey.
January 29, 2013
I'm quite sure this is the first maximum score I give a book in more than two years, but it's completely deserved. Pity I was quite rushed to finish it...
Don't ask exactly why I think it's so good. It's nothing specific and everything combined, that's all I'll say.
Don't ask exactly why I think it's so good. It's nothing specific and everything combined, that's all I'll say.
Want to Read
September 9, 2008Omnibus volume of the series.
December 11, 2016
Fantastic ending of a long wonderful journey that started with the 'Shadow of the Torturer"
October 20, 2023
Une des meilleures choses que l'auteur a écrites. Le seul défaut: il faut avoir lu Long Sun avant celui-ci.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews