Epiphany of the Long Sun

The Book of the Long Sun #3-4

by Gene Wolfe

The two novels combined in this omnibus (Caldé of the Long Sun and Exodus from the Long Sun) comprise the second half of Gene Wolfe's long novel, The Book of the Long Sun.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Novels, Literature, Speculative Fiction

718 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Gene 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.

The Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award is given by SFWA for ‘lifetime achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy.’ Wolfe joins the Grand Master ranks alongside such legends as Connie Willis, Michael Moorcock, Anne McCaffrey, Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Joe Haldeman. The award will be presented at the 48th Annual Nebula Awards Weekend in San Jose, CA, May 16-19, 2013.

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 is 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 has 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 is also a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/genewolfe

Reviews

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

2023 re-read: upped to 4 stars

It looks like third time’s the charm for me with the Long Sun. I have never really much enjoyed this series apart from specific elements/moments previously, but on this re-read I really found myself invested in it. I think I was most successful on this foray since I wasn’t approaching the series with traditional expectations of what I thought I *should* find in its pages, but instead let myself be immersed in what I actually found there. No great feat, perhaps, given that I’ve read it twice (to my recollection at least) before and yet somehow still wasn’t able to let go of my preconceptions, so it appears to have been a necessary precondition for me at least.

I can’t say Patera Silk has become my favourite of Wolfe’s protagonists, but I can say that I’ve definitely warmed to him and there certainly is a lot more to his character than meets the eye. I also think I need to keep in mind that this story’s whole conceit is that it was written as a hagiography of ‘the great man’ and thus many elements of the too -good-to-be-true semi-saint Silk probably were just that.

If I were to complain about anything this time around it would be the sometimes clunky-seeming dialogue of certain characters when they explain things to each other, or try to explain their thoughts on the motivations and actions of others. It often comes across as stilted unnatural and I’m not sure if this is a flaw in Wolfe’s writing or just a quirk of the characters that he is expressing naturally.

This series sets up so much that is merely implied, and also requires the subsequent Short Sun series to more fully appreciate, that I am sympathetic to my younger self’s inability to fully grok it and general disappointment in it. On this re-read, though, enough of the layers were apparent to me that couldn’t help but be impressed by Wolfe’s technique and attention to detail…even if he often didn’t show me the details I wanted to see. Definitely a ‘required’ work in the opus of Wolfe, though it may require several reads before its place amongst his works becomes apparent. Such was my experience at least. I’m definitely glad I gave it another chance though.


***


2019 reread: 3.5 stars

Well, I definitely enjoyed the Long Sun series much more this time around and was surprised to find that I didn’t even mind _Calde of the Long Sun_ which was the point at which I abandoned ship on my previous re-read attempt of the series. I was probably most surpised by the number of times that things I thought of as opaque mysteries in the series were actually either pretty clearly telegraphed or even explicitly stated in the text (albeit perhaps in passing) which led me to two obvious conclusions about Gene Wolfe: it pays to re-read his work if you hope to get anything substantial out of it, and if you don’t read the text closely (with particular emphasis to recalling what has come before) then you will miss a lot. Of course I must also acknowledge that many of these ‘mysteries’ were no longer mysteries to me from external reading I’ve done so I can’t say that it was simply the result of my closer (re)reading of the text. Nonetheless I was startled at the number of things that weren’t as obscure as I used to think when I heard about all of the Gene Wolfe theories for this book out there. That’s not to say that I think the text is in any way straightforward, but I’m starting to appreciate that Wolfe isn’t as sadistic in regards to the reader (specifically in his creation of story-puzzles) as I had previously thought (he’s still a little bit sadistic of course). My next surprise was that I didn’t hate Patera Silk nearly as much this time around. I think the character Hyacinth sums up my main issues with Silk as follows: “He’s forever blaming himself for the wrong things.” Well, he still does, and while Silk still comes across as something of a well-meaning naif stumbling through his adventures, not to mention someone who is perhaps a little too good to be true (though there is significant in-story justification for this as we will see) he definitely displays layers that went beyond his moralizing and over indulgent self-doubt and, while perhaps not my favourite character in the books, he didn’t drive me away screaming either.

Kind of faint praise so far, huh? Well I’d say I’m still torn on this series. On the one hand it’s got a lot of awesome stuff going on, to quote myself: “a generation starship story with digitized people turned into gods, robotic armies, political revolution, bodysnatching psychotic teenage clones, and vampiric, shapeshifting aliens.” On the other hand I’d still say that while some of these elements might not be as invisible as I had previously felt, they’re not always front and centre either and, quite frankly, Wolfe really makes you work for it. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, literature doesn’t have to be (maybe *shouldn’t* be) easy, but I’m often chagrined by Wolfe’s penchant for hiding all of the ‘cool stuff’. Conversely (and perversely) I actually seem to be starting to enjoy it…have I finally fully imbibed the Wolfe kool-aid? Well, not totally perhaps. I think in the end I’d have to say that I ‘appreciate’ this book more than I ‘like’ it. There’s lot of elements in it that I *do* like, but so many of them are sub-text, or implied elements that only seem apparent (to me at least) upon multiple readings, that I can wholly sympathize with the first time reader that comes away from this scratching his or her head (as I did).

As the story continues from where we last left our hero, Patera Silk has now become Caldé of Viron (at least in name) and is directly opposed by the Ayuntamiento (the group of councilors that previously led the city and is entirely populated by immortal cyborg politicians *shudder*). Not only does Silk, a poor augur who only wanted to save his manteion from being sold out from under him by a crime lord, have to contend with this cabal of political power players and their robot army, but there is also a vast host from a neighbouring city of amazons on his doorstep who want to ‘help’ during this time of transition of power. Yikes. While Silk attempts to navigate these political currents, and revolution against the Ayuntamiento heats up to full blown war, some voices are advising that everyone must leave the whorl altogether at the behest of the digital gods that have only now returned to the scene (and who seem to be having a war of their own in computerized heaven), causing even more disturbance and confusion. So…there’s a lot going on and the précis above barely scratches the surface.

Ultimately I’d say that the Long Sun series is an interesting investigation into the nature of storytelling itself (as are perhaps all of Wolfe’s works to a greater or lesser extent). Also, to return to the complaints of Silk being too good to be true, it’s important to acknowledge that the books of the Long Sun, as artifacts from an in-story context, are ultimately hagiographic biography. They recount a flash point in the political and existential lives of the people of Viron, and the ‘Long Sun Whorl’ at large, but very much with Silk-as-saviour imprinted on every page. Not only are the fictional authors perhaps somewhat blinded by their hero worship of the patera-caldé, but they also only had second-hand access (at best) to many of the events they portray. It’s therefore natural, from an ‘in-story’ perspective at least, that many of the ‘cool’ elements are only implied, or told of off-page. It also helps explain the blatant adoration that informs Silk’s character: he is a Jesus and Moses rolled into one - a saviour who will lead his people from their failing whorl to the promised land foreseen by their digital gods.

One might be wondering exactly how this story of an unwilling saviour’s rise to power in a generation starship ties into that of Severian in the New Sun. Aside from the obvious thematic links between the two Christ-figures that are at the centre of each tale it isn’t immediately obvious. That is until we discover part way through that the digital god Pas is actually a copy of the tyrant Typhon, who made only a brief albeit memorable appearance in the story of Severian. Indeed his entire dysfunctional family have been digitized and ported into the Long Sun whorl’s mainframe to become the literal gods in the machine. As we continue on into the final sequence in the ‘Solar Cycle’, the Books of the Short Sun, we will see a much more explicit (though still often obscure) dovetailing of the New and Long Sun worlds. As I recall we also have even more confusion and obscurity than we have already experienced in the previous two series combined…I can’t wait!

[Palmyrah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Be warned: this is a negative review. However, my disappointment is more in the author than in the book itself. It would have rated higher had it come from any other pen but that of Gene Wolfe.

I read this second volume of the Long Sun Cycle immediately after finishing the first. I found it confusing - more so than is usually the case with Wolfe. This is an author who likes to challenge his readers, and confusion, followed by cogitation and re-reading, is an essential part of the Gene Wolfe experience. However, much of the confusion in this instance seems to be the result of the author having too many subplots to juggle, making his performance unappealingly frantic. The disparate plot threads are woven together in a great hurry at the end of the book, resulting in a fabric coarser and less attractive than we have come to expect from Wolfe, or any writer who aspires to the highest standards.

Speaking both as a reader and as a writer, I must say I found the Book of the Long Sun disappointing. Although the religious and mythological aspects of the tale being told are as central to it as those in Wolfe's masterpiece, the Book of the New Sun, the layered depth of ideas and philosophical maturity evident in that book are not, to my mind, to be found here. Rather, the subtext is an allegorical reprise of Christian doctrine complete with original sin, a Fall and a world damaged by it, the manifestation of God to humanity and the coming of a saviour who redeems mankind. Yes, much or all of this was in the Book of the New Sun too, but in that cycle these ideas are critically examined and re-examined, and we are left to draw our own conclusions about them; the writer does not force his own on us. Sadly, this cannot be said of the Long Sun cycle. It is a much more superficial work that imposes its religious subtext on the reader willy-nilly.

In other ways, too, the Long Sun books disappoint. People like to use the word 'Dickensian' in a complimentary way; I, who am no fan of Dickens, would agree that Wolfe's characterization is, in these books, Dickensian: idiosyncratic and exaggerated to the point where disbelief can no longer be suspended and the character becomes a capering painted clown on the stage of the page. Other reviewers have made much of the different 'voices' in which the characters in the Book of the Long Sun speak - but many of these voices are artificial and annoying, just as Dickens's characters' often are. Examples include Pateras Incus and Remora, the various talking animals (including one named Catachrest whose dialogue is sloppily rendered in catachreses - this kind of thing has been done far better by writers like Will Self and the Amises père et fils) and a mad swordfighter whose! speech! is! lousy! with! exclamation! marks. The fact is that Wolfe is not really very good at characterization by dialogue; you hear the same voices, with minor variations, in book after book.

More generally, Wolfe is a writer with a naturally formal style that lapses too easily into ponderousness. This is by no means a fatal flaw - in the mouth of Severian the Autarch, for example, or Latro the proto-Roman mercenary, it works very well indeed. It also fits well into the science-fiction/fantasy milieu in which Gene Wolfe operates. But it does limit his auctorial options, because it makes giving believable voices to all his characters difficult (as we have seen). Wolfe's young people are always either old people in disguise or else caricatures of the young as their elders see them; similarly, his women tend to talk and act not as real women, but as women are imagined by men. Clearly Wolfe pays less attention than he should to how real people speak - which is to say his characters are not drawn from life. Given the science-fiction/fantasy milieu in which he operates, is this such a grave flaw? I believe it is. Together with the unedifying attitude to women and sex I mentioned in my review of Litany of the Long Sun, this is Wolfe's greatest fault as a writer.

Overall, my verdict on this book, and on the Long Sun Cycle as a whole, is that Gene Wolfe, who has proved himself capable of far better work, here falls disappointingly short of the standard we expect of him.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

It can feel long, torturously uneventful, filled with stale dialogue and the underlying plot is a story told many times. But the prying you have to do to get down to the bones of Wolfe's work is something I absolutely love. Underneath the tidy exterior lies a dirty apocalyptic cyberpunk tale filled with cyborgs, hackers, long dead dictators fighting each other for control of a space colony, plenty of ritual sacrifice and reading of entrails.

[Lorne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow. Not good. Not good at all. The writing decisions that Gene Wolfe makes in this book are baffling. He commits the sin of telling instead of showing, with I'd guess roughly 80% of this thing being taken up by dialogue. And pretty bad dialogue at that. Rather than writing about events that happen, most of the time he just has his characters tell other characters about something that just occurred, an event that we the reader rarely get to actually witness. I guess maybe because it's way easier to have one character nonchalantly mention a gun fight to another character instead of actually going through the effort of writing a compelling gun fight? Not only is this boring and uninvolving, it's hella confusing. I felt like my book must have been missing pages or something, because surely the things that characters were talking about were things that actually occurred somewhere in this book, no?

At some point, I just started hate reading this. Hate reading sucks. I don't recommend it. Somewhere in book 3 I started wondering if I actually liked reading anymore. I started asking myself questions like "How could this piece of shit and War & Peace both be considered books when one is a masterpiece and the other is a flaming trash pile?" Or "Will I also become an incoherent shadow of my former self just like Gene Wolfe did?"

I got very little out of all 722 pages of this monstrosity. But having read the first two books in this series (and not particularly caring for them either) I felt I was too far along to just stop. I had to see this trainwreck through. It's unbelievable that these were by the same author who wrote the goddamn perfect Book of the New Sun series. Did a parasite attach itself to Gene Wolfe's brain in the mid-90s? Who is this person that wrote these mostly awful books? Shit was painful. Shame on me for finishing them when I could have been reading something good. If you are considering reading this series because you also loved BotNS, I'd advise you to huff a can of paint thinner instead. It's much quicker and achieves the same result.

[Ben Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s difficult to overstate how intricate and unpredictable this series is, with Wolfe’s penchant for tricky details and half hinted at truths on full display here. What I love particularly about his style is that he presumes that his reader will be intelligent enough to keep up - despite his missing out big chunks of plot, that would have been exciting but not necessary, despite his very measured misdirections and deceptions, and despite his characters that can be very purposefully inconsistent.

His lack of explaining every detail makes me think he was somewhat confident in precisely how clever a writer he was. And here we see his writing delve deeper into being character driven than I had expected, in ways that feels almost Discworld-like at times. His Book of the New Sun had plenty of characters that were fun to meet, but this shines just a little brighter by having characters that I genuinely liked, despite (or perhaps partially due to) their failings. What a good book.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whereas Litany of the Long Sun began slowly, with Silk's every move detailed in rich (and, I must admit, occasionally plodding), Wolfean prose, Epiphany of the Long Sun wrapped things up by skipping so much action that it was a bit of a disappointment. Gene Wolfe is not a writer who strives to connect all the dots for his readers, and this is part of what makes his books so good, and well worth rereading. But in this case Wolfe wasn't so much leaving questions unanswered as he was leaving gaps in the story. More than once he'd end a section in a chapter on an abrupt cliffhanger, only to pick back up with the characters involved in that cliffhanger a few sections later, at which point the cliffhanger had passed and they were left to exposit what had happened, sometimes through extended question-and-answer sessions with other characters who, like us readers, hadn't witnessed the events in question. I would have much rather experienced the events as they occurred, rather than reading what amounted to Socratic dialogues that reported on the events in the past tense.

All this jumping forward was, perhaps, a symptom of Epiphany of the Long Sun covering a greater collection of characters and events than did Litany of the Long Sun. LLS followed Silk nearly exclusively, with the third person narrator straying into the lives of other characters only briefly. But ELS had a more Dickensian cast to track, from Auk, Chenille, Patera Incus, and Hammerstone, to General Mint, Patera Remora, and Bison, etc., as well as a far more global (or should I say cylindrical) whorl-view. I suppose maintaining the same intimate pace used in LLS would have made ELS twice as long, if not longer. I for one would've welcomed that (Wolfe writes the kinds of books I wouldn't mind inhabiting for months and months), but I can understand how it might not be practical--after all, he's no George R. R. Martin (and thank goodness for that!).

Otherwise, I enjoyed Epiphany of the Long Sun immensely. Though I was optimistic after having read LLS, I'd no longer say The Book of the Long Sun rivals The Book of the New Sun as Wolfe's greatest work (BNS is, in the end, superior as far as I'm concerned), but BLS is still a stunning work. I'm eagerly looking forward to reading The Book of the Short Sun next, which apparently answers some of the questions left unanswered in The Book of the Long Sun, and also ties the three Books together.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dear future Matt,

You finished this book September 9th, 2021. This book was a very difficult read for you. This collection of the second half of The Book of the Long Sun didn't carry the same weight or fascination as the first half. It quickly became muddled despite you loving this setting Wolfe has constructed.

Many of the characters spoke in odd ways, and in the second half of this book there were so many of them, you couldn't grasp what was happening at any given time. You understood the big narrative arc (mostly) but the small moments (like in The Book of the New Sun) just didn't stick in your mind.

Here's hoping The Book of the Short Sun returns to what you loved previously from Wolfe.

[Richard S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ursula LeGuin: "Our Melville".
Neil Gaiman: "he was the best of us"

Wolfe is a true great and I'm adding him to (early) Pynchon and (most) Gaddis as one of the great American literary writers of the 20th, and possibly the best. His style is unique, impressionistic, subtle, brilliant. I relished every word of these books. He has possibly the largest imagination of any writer I've ever read. Every sentence is a complex mystery of meaning operating on multiple levels. These books are so rich they really dwarf all other writers of the sci-fi genre, if you want him bucketed with that, but really this is great literary art of a unique and uniquely interesting kind.

It's difficult to convey this in a review, and oddly I can barely recommend this to my friends who solely read sci fi. If you really like great literature, and can handle themes that include those that touch on scifi and fantasy, you might see what I saw in here. Long Sun is miles beyond anything any of the sci-fi greats wrote but the style is so unique it's hard to bucket him with modern writers. I'm kind of speechless.

The complexity of the style is hard to convey in excerpts because it is so heavily layered. Every sentence is a daub of paint that eventually adds up to a picture, a specific vision of his world. Meaningless scenes go on overly long, it seems, and yet then don't seem too long, nothing seems rushed or forced. He doesn't preach, his message is obscure. He conveys incredible beauty and emotional depth. Characters are flawed, the plot is choppy and unpredictable, which makes it seem oddly real. The themes are massively deep, like truly great literature, and touch on the big questions. Nothing is fake or contrived.

He invents words and manners of speaking, jargons, but the subtlety of the presentation, not subtlety for its own sake, but that's the style. Chapters are worth a close rereading to truly appreciate the wealth of detail.

There is nothing I dislike about the book, not a single character or scene, even the bird. While very long, I read it hoping it would never end. In my review of the first two books I had a quibble with the way he would drop things, but that is just part of the style, and I ended up liking it.

Maybe I'm an intellectual, but the book is very stirring. Objectively one might be troubled by some of the content, and some scenes are disturbing, but they are not gratuitous and they make sense. Great lit is often disturbing, because it is never afraid of its topic.

Anyway I've rambled on a bit but if you read this series I think you will understand what I'm getting at in this review. If you're interested in Wolfe I would start with The Fifth Head of Cerberus, then try this and finally New Sun. Take it slow though.

I intend to digest and then plan a re-read at some point to confirm my thoughts. I will share those then.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first update (posted after completing the first book in this collection) described the writing as "oblique", which might be the defining characteristic of this series as it progresses. Characters show up as multiple versions of themselves; events begin to unfold without our witnessing them, only to be recounted in conversation pages later (very Faulknerian); and then the narration shifts perspective, demanding a reexamination of countless earlier scenes. This is not easy reading, and its hard to say if its entirely worthwhile unless you happen to enjoy Wolfe's proclivities as much as I do.

I'm curious where the following series, the Book of the Short Sun, will go -- but I think my mind needs some quality decompression time after finishing this most perplexing of books.

[Kerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I honestly don't know how to feel about this book. In some ways it was so compelling and wonderful and in others it is SO BORING. And not, like, at different times. At the same time. I don't even know.

So much of it is pure dialogue, and he is SO TERRIBLE at writing dialogue, so how come I still like it?

I would not recommend this to anyone who has never read any Gene Wolfe. But if you have, and you know you like him, then maybe you can handle it. And think that it's great?

It was seriously either a two or a five so I gave it a three. I don't even know!

[Lady · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read the whole series now, and it's surprisingly entertaining - page-turning and a nice exercise in world-building. It is more than a little disappointing, however, that every major female character is (literally) either a nun or a whore. Wolfe actually devotes some time to developing at least a few of them into fully-rounded people, but still: nuns and whores. Sigh.

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

a complete reread of the Long Sun which is even more satisfying than on first read; while I have read (again and again) parts of these four books on and off across the years, I never reread the Short Sun books so far and I have only vague reminiscences

[Toby · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disappointing beyond belief

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars ain't enough. Wolfe is the most brilliant mind in literature.

[Drew Rhine · Rating 5 out of 5]

above all else this felt like Gene Wolfe was truly having the time of his life creating and writing this. It feels like there is so much I could mention that I don’t even know where to start. Annoyingly I must admit that even my main criticism of this series, that is the needless objectification of women throughout this series, and even other general complaints I felt about the writing, once again had its own in-universe explanation that somehow not only works but deepens the effect and joy of this book.

Uhhhh yeah. Space catholicism heist-spy-war-political thriller that is written as if it is a space bible, because it essentially is. Wolfe isn’t yet in his middle/late period of extreme understatement and mystery, but little teases of that style are starting to peer through. It’s as technical and scientific as it is poetic and spiritual. I am as in love with this series as I was the New Sun.

Ultimately it just comes down to the fact that the only thing you can truly expect from Gene Wolfe is to have the wool pulled over your eyes as you are jumped and beaten senseless by the finest minds of our generations.

[Parker Mullins · Rating 4 out of 5]

The pacing dips in the third for a while, then roars back.

The fourth is masterful. Maybe the most similar thing to "That Hideous Strength" I've ever picked up. There's a lot here (and GW is a much more subtle weaver than Lewis) about how we avoid true reckonings with good and evil, attending instead to the flimsy substitutes of nationalism, expedience, or personal pleasure.

Silk for Caldé. Long live Oreb.

[Laure · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was awful. It took me so long to finish reading this book because I hated it. I kept putting it down, and then it was that much harder to pick back up. I really wanted to finish it because I (mostly) enjoyed The Book of the New Sun. I was committed to finishing, in part because I thought the end would have some degree of satisfying conclusion. It didn't. ("So that was that, go buy the next volume.") Ugh.

There is way too much plodding exposition and explanation of boring details that add nothing. Too much terribly written dialogue. Often the dialogue was written such that it was hard to follow who was talking, or what the point of their conversation even was. Many conversations were just some foil or other asking boring, pointless questions, so that Silk could explain why he did what he did, in boring, pointless detail. There is a lot of telling, and a lack of showing.

It probably didn't help that I would put the book down for months at a time, but I found it impossible to remember which character was which. Schist, Shale, Sand? Droid soldier mineral name starting with S, no personality? Shrug.

There are so many badly written, annoying characters, identified only by their annoying awful dialogue styles, e.g. Incus, Remora, Xiphias (I think? I forget his name,) Auk's thieves' cant, Tick's... whatever that was.

The way Wolfe writes women is just depressing. I don't even know where to start. They're flat, they're just pretty objects for the men to admire, and then when they do have personality it's a bad personality. Hyacinth is a bad character. Every instance of Hyacinth is bad writing.

In New Sun, Wolfe used obscure words in a way that felt like a fun and interesting collection. Here it just felt like some jerk with a thesaurus showing off.

The way he handled the religious allegory also just seemed shallow and tired, unless I'm missing some subtle layers.

Ugh. It was work to finish this awful book, and I feel cheated out of a payoff/satisfying conclusion, but I will not be reading Blue or Green, or whatever else there is.

[Sir He-Man · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Book of the Long Sun is an amazing series. I feel the author left the door open to resolve several issues that may or may not be resolved in the next series. For my part, I will try and see if I can understand why he wrote it as he did. Gene Wolfe is difficult to read sometimes. His dialogue can overexplain. I get the sense that in real life, Wolfe might explain things the way his characters do because he's an engineer. The way the characters think and talk is to constantly explain how things work, even when this information is not always necessary or realistic. It often results in a world where I don't understand why everyone is merely nodding as things are explained without taking the conversation into another direction.

That aside, I think most of this series is an amazing journey of the self for many characters, but especially Silk, Auk, and Mint. Mint goes from a nun to a general, and that calling brings to mind allusions of Joan of Arc, but with animal sacrifices. As we get more exposure to the gods, we learn that they aren't very nice, but often barbaric in their demands. Are they corrupted AI programs? Are they selfish and horrible humans who ruled the Earth aeons ago and are now merely omnipotent over the poor humans trapped with them? We don't really get final answers on these questions. We learn a little of their history, and out of all of them, the only "good" member of the family appears to be the blind god, Tartaros. He chooses Auk to be his holy prophet, which results in a sort of heightened consciousness. Auk is given all of a sudden the ability to repair robots and fly spaceships. Okay. That part was rather skimped over, I must say.

Much of these novels revolves around the Trivigaunti, a militaristic feminist and matriarchical society that has fallen prey to just as many stupid mistakes as patriarchal military dictatorships of the past. I did like several of them in terms of character, particularly Siyuf and Saba. In the complex issue of leadership arising out of the chaos of the war with the Ayuntamiento government, now seen to be operated by robotic clone versions of their now dead counselors, the shifts in power and trust are constantly and unfortunately shaky. The main question is are the Trivigaunti doing what they think is best for Viron or themselves? Are they out for survival of their troops or do they really care about the people? These questions are complicated by the fact that they make strategic mistakes and Silk is the Prince Ashitaka of the whole thing, trying to align everyone with each other and prevent all out war, all while desperately trying to reach Mainframe.

I felt many things about the Trivigaunti. They were arrogant, often unlikable, obtuse, and displayed little understanding that their actions could be construed as an attack. I'm not sure if Wolfe is saying women are equally capable of making the exact same mistakes as men in this sense, but his equal opportunity look at a female and male led society at odds with each other never appears to be sexist, but rather a sadness comes out of the knowledge that neither society seems to be any better or worse...in that they both commit torture. Potto uses Spider to torture innocent victims and he himself takes glee at the thought of pouring boiling water into women's eyes. Siyuf and her female leaders make the garish mistake of killing and torturing the fliers that make their way from Mainframe. These acts are all deplorable and it is clear that Gene Wolfe has a very low opinion of torture, and he has ample reason to hate it. I myself am very much still in shock years after reading the Book of the New Sun. Both serve as shocking allegories for faults in human leadership and the corruption of government by people who should never see power. So if anything, Book of the New Sun is a depressing mediation on human's inability to form governments that don't reduce themselves to barbarism. Yet, there is hope for humanity, as we eventually see.

Much of the last two novels of the series is a meditation on war, on the necessity of protecting territory, of the devastation that comes out of it, and of the intense difficulty encountered by leaders at war with each other, and the equally hard talks towards peace that happen when the battle reaches the negotiation table. The concessions Mint makes are not easy ones, they are made because she truly loves her people and would do anything for them. Her loss of faith echoes that of Silk and it is heartbreaking.

I will be honest. The ending was aggravatingly short on everything I wanted to see. A snowstorm envelops Viron and a few hundred survivors make their way to the tunnels below, members of Silk's congregation that go on their Exodus. This is of course a direct allegory for Moses leading his people away from Egypt. But it's an allegory that totally works. The ending is abrupt. Silk disappears into the snow because his new wife, Hyacinth, a ravishingly beautiful woman with Hispanic features who he is madly in love with but who he barely understands (and who barely understands him) panics and doesn't want to leave the Whorl. This tragic bit of madness confounded me. Was she supposed to be Lot's wife in this scenario? Do we find out in the subsequent books?

The most disappointing thing about this entire series was I was very much hoping to see an organized Viron and other cities preparing for leaving the Whorl together but in typical Wolfe fashion we are left with only hints. Horn tells us at the end that he made it to Blue, a world of intense beauty and plenty. He and his wife have compiled the story of Silk they know of, and can only speculate as to the fates of Silk and Hyacinth. We are told people from several cities made it to Blue, but was it only the people that Auk was able to gather together or did anyone else make it? Did everyone left on the Whorl spaceship die in the midst of the Long Sun dying and the Trivigaunti bombings?

It is somewhat infuriating that I read through all of these books to get this ending. But I do not begrudge Wolfe all that much for it. Instead, I'm seeing this as a myth, and in myth sometimes you don't always know what's happening behind the scenes. The gods visit and then flit away somewhere and you are left with the hero and sometimes you have incomplete scenarios. Sometimes heroes vanish into the wind and you don't know their fates.

The description of Mainframe was also all-too-brief. We are told they get to talk to the dead, so everyone that ever died on the Whorl was somehow copied to an AI base, but the details are very much missing here. Their version of heaven as far as their religion goes is quite real. Pas comes to Silk in a window and shows one of his two heads (he is like Janus but father of the gods) has Silk's on it. Is this prophetic? Is Silk destined to become a god and transfer his consciousness to the Whorl mainframe or will he make it down to one of the two planets?

Ultimately, I do love the series for its characters but whereas Silk, Mint, and Auk all grow considerably, I was exasperated at times by Chenille, who doesn't seem to learn anything. The scene where she was vaguely threatening Orpine by telling her she had fallen into the echelons of power was incongruous with the rest of the storyline. Hyacinth seems to hover in the category of both innocent and corrupt, she goes between bouts of selfishness which are totally diametrical with Silk's personality and an intense devotion to him. Sciathan the flier gives away almost nothing about the culture of the people who maintain the ship and you don't really get to see them do anything.

Wolfe's endings tend to fall apart to most people but to me I see a pattern in his work. I think as he gets closer to the conclusion of each epic (Book of the New Sun, Latro) the less clear he wants to be. I think the lack of clarity is purposeful, because he is essentially saying that stories, all stories, all epics will eventually be at the mercy of time, and sometimes pieces of them will be lost. This is a sad truth but one that I can admit is true. I will read the next series only because I didn't really get the ending I wanted, and that made me want to read what comes next all the more. What can I say other than Wolfe is never boring and he is an expert at piquing my curiosity, in spite of his faults regarding some tedious dialogues that could use some trimming. 4 stars.

[John Lawson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gene Wolfe is a consistently good writer, but this series is oddly rambling. The narrative is constantly being broken by pointless tangents and conversations, as characters get together to dissect/discuss/debate the previous action in minute detail, nearly to a Socratic degree. In a junior author, this is usually evidence that they feel the storyline is too complex and need these interludes to help the reader "catch up," but Wolfe is sufficiently seasoned that I assume this exposition was intentional. Why, I have no clue, as any past action that needed explanation was sufficiently clarified by future results.

Other sections of lengthly exposition were purely self-indulgent, such as the entire chapter that described the haggling involved with the purchase of a squad of robotic tanks and the detailed discourse on their design and manufacture. Interesting, perhaps, but since these robots never made an appearance subsequently in the book, I have to wonder what the point of the chapter was.

And then there's the odd fact that all of the principle female characters were either nuns or prostitutes, and all four of them abandoned their occupations to devote themselves to their men.

The ending was odd in its abruptness. To have the hero of the story charge off into the fog of war and then tack on an epilogue explaining that the entirety of the four books was a semi-speculative biography written by a third party seemed like a cop-out to me. It felt like Wolfe was running out of steam and wanted to end the story quickly, whereas I think a more satisfying resolution could have been devised. I dunno, maybe Wolfe was thinking of lining up another series of sequels.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

This tetralogy didn't grab me nearly as much as Book of the New Sun did. I noticed partway through that nothing in the book actually happened during the narrative - it was composed entirely of people sitting around after the fact and discussing it. But not in a narratively interestingly way; just a whole lot of scenes of people sitting in parlors and on benches, talking about the exciting things that had just happened. Also, fewer of the mysteries were left to mystery, and more of them were hamfistedly explained later on; the book cemented the idea that Wolfe only succeeds as a writer where he leaves his books shrouded in vagueness, but he doesn't do that by actually writing a vague work, just writing his normal overbearing insulting explanations and then excising them later. Same goes for Urth of the New Sun. If Wolfe isn't in his needlessly-obfuscatory-for-its-own-sake mode, he ultimately lacks subtlety and finesse in his prose. It would be nice to see a balance struck, instead of relying on a gimmick author to deliver a puzzle book (however intriguing the puzzle is).

[Fantasy Literature · Rating 5 out of 5]

EPIPHANY OF THE LONG SUN is an omnibus that combines Caldé of the Long Sun and Exodus from the Long Sun.

A smooth speaker, naturally athletic, and an intuitive and inventive tactician, Silk may well prove to be the greatest Caldé that Viron has ever had. He even has impeccable manners. Even authors of fantasy, a genre that has created many near-perfect savior figures, run a risk when they make their heroes too good. Fortunately, Gene Wolfe’s defense against this charge is more in-depth than the throwaway “he’s a savior figure, so he’s supposed to be nearly perfect.”

In Epiphany of the Long Sun, Gene Wolfe compensates for Silk’s flawlessness by imposing an impressive set of handicaps and obstacles upon him. Even though he has the support of the people... Read More:
http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...

[Nate Gonzales-Hess · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cool ideas, inconsistent execution.

After getting super excited about the first half of Book of the Long Sun, this was a pretty bad letdown. I got through it willingly so it must not have been that bad, but the pace felt plodding, the dialogue was incessant and not particularly artful, and the ending did very little to pay off what seemed to be an incredibly intricate plot.

I'll probably read Book of the Short Sun in hope that it will tie up some of the many loose threads. If it does resolve things I could imagine revising my assessment, but right now I'm pissed because I read 1300 pages and didn't get an ending.

2.7/5 for the second half.
3.6/5 for BotLS as a whole.

PS: There's decent a chance I'd like it better on a second read, as there is some interesting unreliable narrator stuff. But I ain't got time for that.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd hoped for something of the scale of The Urth of the New Sun, but this wasn't it. It happens in the same place, the inside of an interstellar craft whose inhabitants have forgotten their history and purpose. Wolfe continues with unremarkable individuals who do remarkable things and grow while maintaining their distinct personality characteristics. But the story itself is unremarkable, and the ending side steps the ultimate event the entire thrust of the tale was leading to. I'd planned on reading The Book of the Short Sun next, but I'm not going to do so now.

[Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a very interesting setting and complex characters here, with a short core story obfuscated by natural language writing and re-explaining the same minor events over and over. I can see why some consider it a phenomenal work, but for me it just became hard to read and without enough depth to really enjoy. There are all these really interesting pieces that just never get explored!

[Sebastian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Caldé of the Long Sun 06/02 -> 16/02 ★✰✰✰✰

Exodus from the Long Sun 17/02 -> 27/02 ★✰✰✰✰

Una historia sencilla donde hay bandos que buscan objetivos contrarios, personajes metidos en medio de esa lucha formando sus propios bandos con objetivos contrarios pero a menor escala, como un cuadro dentro de un cuadro.

Hay muchas cosas que decir de este Libro del Sol Largo, pero voy a destacar solo la que me parece que puede servir a quien quiera leerlo, después a cada quien le gustará o no el resultado de lo que escribió Wolfe en estás páginas.
Obviamente quien quiera leer esta historia antes leyó El libro del Sol Nuevo y La Urth del Sol Nuevo , de no ser así, deberían. No porque sea imprescindible hacerlo, si no porque es una obra muy superior y lo que dio la posibilidad que muchos se adentren en esta continuación, y también que la alaben inmerecidamente.
Por eso, aunque no quiera, tengo que comparar ambas obras.

A grandes rasgos veo a esta obra inferior en todo sentido al Libro del Sol Nuevo : ambientación, eventos, narrativa, estructura, longitud, personajes y trama, sobre todo trama.
Todos los puntos anteriores me parecen peor desarrollados y ejecutados en este libro. Pero aún así podría ser una buena lectura, no lo es, Wolfe se asegura de eso.
Parece hundirse demasiado en un estilo que carece de atractivo para otro que no sea un intelectual dispuesto a analizar la obra. ¿Puede alguien disfrutar leyendo a personajes hablar sobre lo que el autor decidió no mostrar? Casi todo sucede siempre en tiempo pasado, Wolfe esquiva los hechos y la acción como un político esquiva responsabilidades.
Todo se explica después, Wolfe en este libro explica lo que pasa después de que haya sucedido y cortando de forma abrupta en el momento en que esta por suceder algo. Muchas veces las cosas de valor no se muestran mientras suceden, todo viene después en una explicación hablada y alargada.

Es como si pensara que su obra fuera un articulo, un libro de sagrado valor dejado para que las generaciones posteriores lo analicen y estudien. ¿Les suena?
Y que sorpresa me llevé cuando llegué al final y vi que así lo enmascaraba el propio Wolfe en un capitulo que tiene muy merecido su titulo: My Defense.
La defensa no vale, el libro es malo aunque una mano maestra lo haya escrito con ese propósito, y pese a que muchos van a buscar excusas y justificaciones en el estilo, prosa, técnicas y demás maestrías usadas, un hecho es indiscutible: la historia contada de la manera que fue contada es defectuosa e incompleta sin que esto aporte en sí mismo algo a la propia historia.
Una mano dispuesta contaría esta historia de manera concisa sin perder el misterio, con enigmas bien desarrollados y resueltos para ser entendibles sin sobre analizarla.
Hay un mayor genio que ese que puede comprender o crear algo sumamente complejo como Wolfe en este libro: aquel que puede llevarlo a ser entendible y medianamente accesible sin complicarlo de forma innecesaria, aquel que sabe y consigue expresarse de forma clara y concisa cuando se requiere y puede mantener, en este caso, a su lector entretenido o interesado en el relato.
En esta ocasión Gene Wolfe falla rotundamente en ese aspecto.

Lo veo similar a la película Memento, donde seguimos la historia del protagonista de forma no lineal, haciendo que la audiencia comparta la confusión del protagonista, quien tiene amnesia anterógrada.
La película logra su objetivo sin dejar de ser interesante: es un rompecabezas que se disfruta mientras se esta armando y cuando la imagen se completa.
Wolfe no lo logra, el rompecabezas no se disfruta y carece de un enganche que atraiga al lector a continuar armándolo, la imagen final queda totalmente desdibujada y sin colores.

Tal vez lo que siga sea spoiler pero no tanto:
Horn es un pésimo escritor y Gene Wolfe logra con maestría replicar ese hecho, logra que sea una basura su escritura y por ende una basura todo el Libro del Sol Largo.
Una basura intencionada pero basura en fin.

[Mandel]

As I'd heard from many people, the second half of The Book of the Long Sun (BotLS) is, while ultimately rewarding and fascinating, uneven in comparison to the first. The issues here, to my mind, are structural.

Many of the literary techniques Wolfe mastered in The Book of the New Sun (BotNS) show up here in abundance. For example, the text will often skip key events of the sort that other writers would mine for moments of climactic dramatic tension and catharsis, only for them to be recounted later in the midst of these events' consequences, which are thereby for a time rendered somewhat opaque. Or, just as in BotNS, the main protagonist of BotLS, Patera Silk, is a hero and prophet of a sort, but one whose unusually passive, clueless and mercurial nature effectively serves to belie the near deification of heroes and prophets in which stories often indulge.

However, while these techniques make perfect sense to me in BotNS, I find their use in BotLS fundamentally puzzling. Whereas much of BotLS' text has the same beautifully ethereal obliqueness that is part of what makes BotNS the masterpiece it is, BotLS often seems in the moment to be a much more plot-oriented narrative than BotLS' meandering picaresque, which makes this obliqueness come off much more like ineffective plotting. Further, BotLS also contains long expository passages that seem to grind not just the plot but the story to a halt. The best example is perhaps a long chapter in which an engineer describes in meticulous (and to me, drearily boring) detail the process of constructing taluses (AIs housed in robotic, tank-like bodies who serve as elite soldiers in the city of Viron). This passage struck me as Wolfe indulging his engineer's mind in narratively irrelevant worldbuilding.

Most of all, all of the narrative obliqueness in BotLS seems perfectly justified: it's crucial to understanding the character of the book's narrator and protagonist, Severian. By the end of BotLS, though, we learn that the text we're reading has been written by one of the minor characters, Horn, as an encomium to Silk, whom Horn regards as the greatest man he has ever known and views as a genuine hero and prophet. In light of this, it seems incomprehensible that Horn would have written the book in this way. Instead, then, the reveal that the narrator has been Horn all along along with Horn's Afterward revealing that Prolocutor Quetzal is a vampire-like inhumi come off as ill-advised and artificial contrivances designed to set up the stakes of The Book of the Short Sun (BotSS).

Most confusingly, this second half of BotLS is quite different from the first, which I found incredibly engaging and satisfying - as if Wolfe had been losing steam during the process of writing BotLS and so fell back on those techniques that worked so well in BotNS.

All of this makes it sound as if I didn't enjoy BotLS' back half. Ultimately, I'm very glad to have read it - there is still so much here that made the journey worthwhile. However, I would have to agree with the folks who say that while the first half is excellent, the second half is more something you need to push through for its good elements, and so that you can be ready to read its direct sequel, BotSS, which is, I've been told, excellent.

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always feel like I'll never be able to quite put my finger on whatever it is that makes Gene Wolfe so wonderful. There's a whole host of things that are obviously good about this series, but, like his better known Book of the New Sun series, there simply a vast and pulsing sense of significance which reverberates through it, something that seems to transcend plot, style, technique, characterization, and so on. Wolfe fans will know what I mean. The Book of the New Sun may be a better exemplar, but the Book of the Long Sun isn't far off the mark.

Now that that's out of the way, I can point to a few concrete things that make this series a unique and worthwhile read. What you have here is the story of a revolution, told with the detail of slice of life memoir. Earth shattering events are enlivened with the mundane details of life: political figures muse about when their next meal will come as they meet with their generals, then later reflect on how their hunger might have affected their decision making. Generals are full of doubt, not only about themselves, but even about the causes they fight for. For all their capability, they appear to be muddling through like the rest of us, and when their greatness or brilliance shines, they might be completely unaware of it, because to them, it was simply another moment of making do. If there is a take home from these books, it is to suggest that greatness is just as much a matter of circumstance as it is of character. All the same, the books unwaveringly assert that greatness is a thing. Ostensibly a reconstruction of pivotal events by someone who knew the major players, but wasn't present at many critical moments, the series seems to suggest that though there is such a thing as inherent greatness, even great people can appear so ordinary much of the time it can be hard to pin down where their greatness lies. OK, without even intending to, I have come full circle, as that reflection on human greatness comes remarkably close to my own feelings about the greatness of Gene Wolfe more generally.

Probably a good time to wrap things up, but I want to squeeze in one more detail: I didn't give these books five stars because they do drag a bit, which probably wouldn't be an issue for a more patient reader. However, the dragginess is not without reward. It is part and parcel of the narrative style, one which favors actual occurrences over their interpretation. It is up to the reader to notice what is happening, and piece together why. The reward comes when a critical piece falls into place, often near the end of a chapter, and sense is made of the seemingly fastidious and irrelevant detail that came before. If you weren't paying attention, the narrative flow might seem arbitrary, and what should have been 'aha' moments are robbed of their power. I'm tempted to say this was necessitated by the device of positing a fictional compiler of the books, someone who did not want to impose his own interpretation on the historical events he took part in, allowing later readers an unfiltered, unvarnished, view of key historical figures. However, the books also appear to violate this premise at times, filling in certain psychological details that the compiler wouldn't likely have had access to. Whatever the reason, this series tried my patience at times, but also forced the realization that most contemporary writing probably does way too much hand-holding.

[Clay Kallam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gene Wolfe's extended allegory of the appearance of Jesus Christ in the ancient world -- set on a generational spaceship carrying a huge population to a pair of new planets -- is disappointing on whatever level you choose to examine.

Silk, his protagonist, is the stand-in for Jesus, seeking peace, love and redemption in a brutal world with nine gods whose identities are preserved in the master computer (the Mainframe) that runs the huge spaceship. The ship, called the Whorl, has angels (Fliers), who are representatives of Mainframe, and devils that live in the tunnels below the farms, cities and lakes that make up the ship.

Silk begins the first book with a visit from the Outsider, a god that transcends the nine gods that inhabit Mainframe, and over the span of many hundreds of pages, abandons his faith in those nine gods, as well as marrying Hyacinth, a stand-in for Mary Magdalene. Silk's supporters are the poor, the criminals and the outcasts, and they battle secular powers for control of Viron, one of the many cities in the Whorl.

The top-level adventures of Silk, the narrative driver, are hamstrung by Wolfe's strange tactic of skipping over major actions, and then returning to characters after those plot points have occurred. The characters then explain what happened -- a battle, a capture, whatever -- as if the reader already knew it had occurred. Perhaps this state of constant confusion was Wolfe's goal, but it is not necessarily successful to the reader.

Wolfe also keeps bringing characters back to life, and again with not much explanation. They do, however, tend to re-emerge from the tunnels below the surface of the Whorl, sometimes traveling through narrow tubes, clearly a reference to being re-born spiritually in the same body.

Such allegorical exercises continue throughout, and when the exodus from the Whorl finally begins, there are two worlds to go to -- one green and one blue. One, as it turns out, is inhabited by evil, shapeshifting creatures, while the other is a beautiful haven.

But when all is finally said, and it must be noted that too much in these books is said and not shown, the conclusion of the long voyage, and the long slog through the final book, is simply not worth the time and energy required to read it. All four volumes in The Book of the Long Sun are heavy, dense meals that require concentration and focus to keep up with Wolfe's narrative tricks and religious intent. In the end, there is too much sauce and not enough substance, and despite my admiration for some of Wolfe's work, this series is simply a long, arduous disappointment.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me, the most dense and challenging of the Solar Cycle so far.

If Litany of the Long Sun could be reduced to a more widely-understood book, it might fall nearby Tolkien’s Hobbit—a journey from sheltered home, over hill (and under lake) dotted with colorful characters in semi-fantastical settings. In contrast, Epiphany’s many tendrils feel more difficult to boil down to anything less impressionistic than an explosion under a microscope in slow motion. Perhaps more akin to a series of interconnected side stories based on the Art of War than any knowable science fantasy romp.

Epiphany of the Long Sun’s 700+ page duration offers a controlled drip of new faces; pilots, warriors and politicians playing a whorl-spanning game of 4D chess, wherein our protagonist Silk seems to be undulating between strategic genius, and detached romantic. At times, I had the empty feeling that it might not actually matter what decisions Silk made, that he would inevitably reach his prognosticated fate regardless of any intervention on his part. There are scenes and sub-plots that affect the larger story ostensibly to almost no degree, and they sometimes feel like a formality or break for a military stage-play. Perhaps as a red herring, or to force some inward contemplation safe from implication to the larger plot. Certainly there are, woven throughout, many meditations on the nature of free will.

As always with Wolfe, there are worlds within worlds here, and myriad questions and concepts to excavate: morality, identity, existence of the soul, divine intervention, gender, the role of God in a world where faith’s veneer has begun to crack, and the crushing human dilemmas on the path to abandon it—all are co-mingling in Epiphany’s metaphysical soup.

If you’re looking for neatly folded answers to the overflowing basket of nuanced plot threads, you will likely not find them here. Instead, you might be given glimpses of the threads themselves frayed down to their molecular components, laid bare, and rearranged into some other geometry than you originally imagined. At worst, this might leave you with an emptiness that suggests the answers weren’t relevant to begin with—at best, you, like Silk and the others, might be changed by the journey, gazing outward (or inward) towards some ever greater truth. That, or it will generate excitement for cracking open the books of the Short Sun.

All in all, a dizzyingly brilliant piece of Wolfe that might ask a bit too much of those simply invested in Silk’s fate. Epiphany traverses a wide variety of set pieces and nuances but may leave you feeling mired in the vacuum of its own conceit.

[Damon Reyes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a review for all four books.

The Book of the Long Sun is the second quadrilogy in Gene Wolfe's twelve-book Solar Cycle, and while it exists within the same general universe as New Sun, and can be connected directly—and sometimes loosely—via the larger powers and technologies at play, Long Sun is a very different book on multiple fronts. The most obvious of which is the third person perspective. Wolfe takes a different spin on the unreliable narrator approach here, and once again you will find yourself going back and reevaluating how much of the story was fantasy, embellishment, or even projection—none of which is really that crucial to enjoying the plot, by the way, but it adds an extra layer of appreciation for whose who like to dig. While I find Wolfe's third person narration a little less engaging on a philosophical level, he makes up for it by leaning heavily (sometimes too far) into dialogue. Instead of Severian musing to himself over every action he takes, we have long conversations between a plethora of characters that often span tens of pages. These scenes can drag on, but Wolfe's character work is incredibly nuanced and rewards your attention (or should I say punishes your lack of...?). I mean I would probably kill myself if I was locked in a room with Patera Remora for even five minutes; the way Wolfe painstakingly writes out his awkward speech pattern is infuriating to follow at times, but at least there is usually a more coherent character in attendance to provide clarity.

The pacing of Long Sun is also noticeably slower than New Sun, at least at first. I actually found the first two books (Nightside and Lake) to be the most enjoyable for their slower pace. The writing may surely be too slow for some, but following Silk through the minute-by-minute play of his humble beginnings had a sort of meditative quality that I really enjoyed. However, Long Sun accelerates in speed and scope as the story goes on, and hits a few consistency speed bumps along the way. The third book was especially rough in this regard, as Wolfe started rapidly incorporating different threads and perspective switches into the plot, but it ultimately works as a symbolic representation of the ripple effect of Silk's enlightenment. One theme that does stay consistent throughout is one of delayering, where the stakes just keep getting bigger as the curtains are pulled back to reveal the puppet masters and their various strings. Some of the largest threats in the beginning of the story become absolutely miniscule, even disposed of in purposefully unfashionable manners just to drive home the point that the grand scheme of events is way larger than any one person could ever be.

Despite the books various flaws and pacing issues, Silk and his bird Oreb remain a consistent and reliable heartbeat at the center of the storm. I just love Silk as a character; his shrewdness, his empathy, his faith and blind sense of duty that puts him between a rock and a hard place more often than he would like to admit. Just as with Severian, it would not be wrong to interpret Silk as another "christike" figure—something that becomes even more apparent as we advance into the Short Sun trilogy. Silk walks hand-in-hand with society's pariahs, often placing his friendship and trust in the most unsavory of characters. It is just really inspiring the way he moves throughout the world and interacts with people, yet he is not without fault, and is prone to the temptations of lust, greed, and anger like any man. Oreb on the other hand is perfect, and provides a constant source of comedic relief and joy. Who would ever think that a bird who can only speak in a small amount of two or three word phrases could be one of the most beloved characters in a book, but damn, I always felt such a deep sense of relief any time Oreb would return to pull at Silk's hair and demand fish heads.

The ending left me a little dumbstruck and conflicted, not because it was written poorly, but because it was ambiguous, sudden, and not exactly happy either. Some of the reveals near the end were earth-shattering, but I couldn't help but feel a little upset at the way things ended up, especially after 1,200 pages, but hey, The Book of the Long Sun isn't here to give you warm fuzzy feelings. No, Gene Wolfe is too realistic for that, and is sure to remind you as often as possible that sometimes people—even the Gods—are actually just horrible, and things don't always turn out the way you want them to. C'est la vie. Long Sun was still an incredible experience that I'll never forget, and one that has become even more elevated in my mind after reading through the Short Sun trilogy and some of the resolutions it provides. If you've made it this far, don't stop now.