Challenging--but as brilliant as it gets: (...)
The Book of the Short Sun will be one of the finest reading experiences of your life... if you can get through the thing. The difficulty in extracting those rewards out of the text is considerable and not to be lightly discounted. Reading these books will require supreme effort. Willing readers will have to be intensely interested with how individuals relate to historical and semi-mythical figures, religion, and their own personality as influenced by these themes. These books are about as far as you can get from the popular concept of "space opera" and thrilling, "page-turning" fiction. An analogy to Moby Dick is probably very appropriate as that work due to the very slow pacing, the introspection, and the great literary symbols stomping through the setting reified and alive. Any scholar of literature should be deeply fascinated by these books.

WHY YOU SHOULD PASS:

There is no shame in not reading these books. They are terribly difficult and an exercise in stamina though we feel most people should at least try once. If you have attempted Shakespeare and been turned back because of the language; if you have attempted Moby Dick or novels by Henry James only to be turned away by the lack of progression in the plot; if you have attempted James Joyce's Ulysses but been baffled by the interior monologue, then Short Sun is probably going to daunt you as well. But we feel the rewards of this book are equal to those giants in literature.

(...)

On Blue's Waters is the first volume of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun trilogy, the concluding part of the 'Solar Cycle' that began with the publication of the Book of the New Sun in 1980. As such, and as a more-or-less direct sequel to the earlier Book of the Long Sun, this really isn't the place for those new to Wolfe to begin. Indeed, it's a rather more difficult work than either the New Sun or Long Sun books - difficult enough that my first attempt to start it a year or two ago was unsuccessful. I'm certainly glad that I tried again, though, as once I got further into it I found I enjoyed it as much as the previous entires in the cycle.

The protagonist and narrator of The Book of the Short Sun is Horn, the former pupil and biographer of Patera Silk from the Long Sun books. Those books were ultimately revealed to be Horn and his wife Nettle's account of their final few months on the generational starship called the Whorl, and the short Sun books tells the story of Horn's life on the alien world they and their fellow colonists later settled and called Blue. Yet while Horn's account of Silk's life was reasonably linear, the narrative of On Blue's Waters is a far more fractured affair.

There are two major plot lines, describing two very different times in Horn's life. The first is an account by Horn of the journey he made to the town of Pajarocu in search of a way to return to the Whorl in an attempt to bring back his mentor Silk to the town of New Viron. This account, written some time after the event, and addressed variously to Nettle, their children or unknown future readers, is - at least at first - the main plot of the novel. The second plot line describes Horn's current circumstances as he pens that account, living as the reluctant ruler of the town of Gaon, far from his old home with Nettle and his family. This latter plot is by no means merely a frame for the previous narrative, though initially it may seem as such. Horn-the-narrator is as much a character of the novel as Horn-the-traveller, and as the novel progresses we learn more and more about his present life, and discover many tantalising hints as to how he reached it. The non-linear aspect of the plot doesn't end there, either: while Horn's account of his journey to Pajarocu is basically chronological, he makes no effort to reveal things to the reader only as he learned them. As a result, major characters are discussed and mourned before ever appearing on screen (indeed, several of the characters Horn mentions in the text have still yet to appear as the book ends) and several plot twists and revelations are foreshadowed or simply stated outright well before they happen. And about a third of the way into the book we learn that we are not in fact, reading the literal text that Horn wrote while in Gaon, but a version that has been read and edited by his children, an unknown length of time after the original was set down.

Unreliable narrators are, of course, nothing new to readers of Gene Wolfe. In this volume, that unreliability manifests itself in a number of ways. While Horn promises to give an honest account of his travels to find Silk, he continually glosses over or skips certain things (unsurprisingly, perhaps, as Horn is an extremely grey character with plenty of reason not to dwell on his past). The later narrative in Gaon is even more prone to this phenomenon - long stretches of time often pass between Horn writing his account, during which pretty monumental events occur that are never really explained or explored. And - perhaps simply because this is a Gene Wolfe book - it was difficult for me to believe some of the claims Horn made about the other characters (his view of how two of the book's major characters feel about him, in particular). Whether or not this is in fact intentional remains to be seen, I suppose.

While The Book of the Short Sun is primarily focused on Horn's literal and spiritual journeys, it would be remiss of me not to at least mention some of the other characters and concepts on display. Several characters return from the previous Book of the Long Sun to make at least cameo appearances (and the text strongly suggests that many more will do so during the next two volumes), chief among them Matera Marble/Rose and her granddaughter Mucor. Curiously, few of the other 'chems' - as the inhabitants of the Whorl knew their robotic shipmates - seem to have travelled to Blue, yet the vampiric inhumi, only minor creatures in that work, play a much more prominent role here, as do the 'Neighbors', the vanished former inhabitants of Blue. And several new characters join Horn on his quest, including the one-armed, water-breathing Seawrack; his eldest son, Sinew, and his adopted 'son' Krait.

As I said at the beginning of this review, this was my second attempt at getting into the book. Now that I have done so, I'm anxious to read the next two volumes: if for no other reason than that there's so much going on here that I'm worried too long a wait could cause me to lose track of it all. Of course, if I do forget too many details, I can always reread this book ... and that, I suspect, would be no bad thing at all.

I definitely recommend this series to anybody who has read the Long Sun books. This is as good as anything I've ever read by Gene Wolfe - and what more praise could you need?

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