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Loading... Nightside the Long Sunby Gene Wolfe
   No current Talk conversations about this book. 1   RobertDay | Jun 27, 2022 |    ) adamhindman | Jun 2, 2022 | While many of the same themes that Mr. Wolfe explores in The Book of the New Sun are present here - transformation, religion, government - yet are given new twists. The author's trademarked unreliable narrator is here more self-deluding than a liar. Silk nearly always tells the truth, but it's tinted by his desire for happy endings. While he is a priest of sorts, he has a remarkable loss of remorse at descending into criminal acts, even to save his parish. Religion is here portrayed as both noble and worthy or ridicule, depending on the point of view. Or perhaps both. The gods of the Whorl, the miles-long generation ship the story is set in, are kind, or perhaps cruel. To summarize the plot is to do it a disservice. But here goes: To save his manteion, as a god has instructed him to do, Patera Silk must accomplish the impossible task or convincing a criminal to show charity. That's pretty trite, actually, and it leaves out the grand society that's grown up (or perhaps not) in the Whorl. It leaves out the characters of Auk, professional thief and Silk's mentor; the semi-respectable criminal Blood; Maytera Marble, 300 year old sibyl of the manteion. Not to be missed. Nightside the Long Sun is a continuation to the New Sun books. But you can start here, I think, since the characters and events are very different. However, having read the earlier books will enrich the experience. (  ) neilneil | Dec 7, 2020 |  ) maxtrek | Jan 30, 2019 | (...) That doesn’t mean Nightside is a very good book. As with all Wolfe I’ve read, the same list of adjectives – bizarre, strange, baffling, different, mythical, mysterious and oddball – springs to mind. And harsh, and deadpan. Nightside is set in a giant generational space ship, of the spinning cylinder Rendezvous With Rama-type. It was sent from a far, far future Earth (or Urth, or the Whorl) to some distant planet. Yet Nightside doesn’t register as SF at first – as in The New Sun, the inhabitants of its world don’t understand their surroundings, aren’t even aware they are on a spaceship, and are not able to repair or even understand the technology – AI entities in the Mainframe that sometimes appear on screens are worshipped as gods. The ship has been flying for ages, and its origins are mostly lost to the book’s characters. Nightside takes a long time to set things up, (...) ( )1 bormgans | Mar 22, 2016 | no reviews | add a review
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"It has been nearly a decade since the completion of Gene Wolfe's four-volume epic The Book of the New Sun, "one of the modern masterpieces of imaginative literature - an evocation of a world so far in the future that magic and technology, poetry and science, are indistinguishable, a world heavy with time but not yet bereft of hope, a world brought to life by Mr. Wolfe's unique blend of slightly archaic diction and ever-surprising vocabulary" (The New York Times Book Review). In the intervening years his award-winning novels and stories have solidified his reputation both in fantasy and science fiction with a cascade of stunning achievements. No sf writer has been more highly and continually praised." "Now Wolfe returns to science fiction with a mighty multi-volume mega-novel of mystery, war, and revolution, The Book of the Long Sun, set on a world, the Whorl, existing inside a giant starship sent from Urth to colonize a distant planet. Wolfe's previous work in this future universe has been hailed as a "major landmark of contemporary American literature" by Booklist, and "a masterpiece of science fantasy comparable in importance to the major works of Tolkien and Lewis" by Publishers Weekly." "Enormous in breadth and scope, Wolfe's ambitious new work opens out into a world of wonders, of gods and humans, aliens and machines, and mysterious adventures far out in space and deep inside the human spirit. It is set on a ship-world whose origins are shrouded in legend, ruled by strange gods who appear infrequently to their worshippers on large screens, and peopled by a human race changed by eons of time, yet familiar." "Nightside the Long Sun is the beginning of a masterpiece of science fiction for this decade. Life on the Whorl, and the struggles and triumphs of Patera Silk to satisfy the demands of the gods, will captivate readers yearning for something new and different in science fiction, for the magic of the future. The Book of the Long Sun is launched with success."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.95)
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My initial reactions are very favourable. The setting is nowhere near as baroque, the language is less erudite but no less a pleasure, and there are interesting characters. The protagonist, Patera Silk, is a far more reliable narrator than New Sun's Severian, though strange stuff happens to him just as much. He lives in a multi-generation starship (no spoiler, this: the book's blurb gives it away), though he hasn't realised it yet; it is a while before we get that confirmed with a description of the "skylands", a landscape in the sky that appears each night after the long sun dims. It is also set in the same universe as New Sun, but as yet I have not seen any clues to that.
The action of the book - and there is plenty of action - takes place over a period of little more than a couple of days. Patera Silk is an augur - a priest - who gets into a fraught relationship with a local crime boss over the sale of his manteion, or temple, from under his feet in lieu of taxes. Silk is a young man with considerable vigour and ingenuity, despite his calling, and proves useful to the crime boss in a number of ways. And there are other characters, equally well-drawn, but some of whom are not what they seem to be.
The setting - a city where society seems in decline, harvests have not done well and things generally are falling apart - is well drawn. The technology here is not so disguised as in New Sun; people recognise technology as such, and some have an idea about how to fix it - or how it ought to be fixed - when it goes wrong. It is a very different setting to the previous series.
I enjoyed this a lot and am keen to move on to the next instalment. (