NIGHTSIDE OF THE LONG SUN - GENE WOLFE

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I suppose I could go look it up, but I don’t think I reviewed the Book of the New Sun cycle, which must mean I read it over 2 years ago. Anyway, if you’re familiar with the contours and fashions of the Sci-Fi world, which I mostly am not, you’re certainly familiar with Gene Wolfe. My brother is much more into this genre than I and he insisted that BotNS slaps hard so I picked it up and it did indeed go hard. It’s quite a flex to write a tetralogy as a sequel to a tetralogy and the sheer length and commitment involved scared me off for a while. Wolfe books aren’t always the easiest to read. Wolfe’s whole thing, as I judge from BotNS, revolves around really well-crafted sentences and a really parsimonious stance w/r/t giving out information. It took a really long time to figure out how the world in BotNS works, even a little, you always have to infer because Wolfe never explain exactly what’s happening, and every time you figure something out (their school is an old spaceship, their on Earth but in the distant future, some of these people are robots, etc.) something much weirder happens. It’s a great vibe, but it takes a specific mindset. Given the fact that I’m just now, today, ending my quarantine, I had more than enough time to get into any mindset at all. The reward was the same. The world of NIGHTSIDE is called the Whorl which, I gather from both the book itself and it’s spoiler-ass back-cover, is a massive spaceship. Wolfe is god-level at slowly revealing how this world is set up and where, physically, things are from each other. Even by the end of this book, there’s a lot of things about this world I don’t understand, but I certainly get the sense that Wolfe understands them and isn’t rushing to get everything on the table. I liked the main character in this one Petera Silk, more than Severian, BotNS protagonist. Severian is the narrator in BotNS and goes to great lengths to obscure his motivations and feelings, which make him sort of empty and cipher to me. Silk isn’t the narrator so we see him more objectively and it’s easier to understand why he’s doing what he’s doing. The BotLS world, so far, is straddling a world of space-religion, since Silk is a sort of priest/sacrificer, and space-crime since the main plot of this book involves an underworld boss named Blood and takes place in slums and whorehouses and whatnot. Maybe because I’ve already made it through one tetralogy, I found this much easier going than early BotNS, though the BotNS world is even more fantastical and gothic and strange. Maybe the Whorl will get there. I look forward to learning more about their space gods. 10,000 Long Suns.