EXODUS FROM THE LONG SUN - GENE WOLFE

When I was 18, in a basement in Chicago where I got as high as I ever had been at that point in my life, my buddy Nate and I came up with the idea of a spaceship you lived on your whole life, so large that it wouldn’t be clear to the non-original generation that they were on a spaceship at all. Great idea we both thought. The next morning I looked around Wikipedia and discovered the “generational ship” or “space ark” trope was and is quite established in SciFi. Fast forward over a decade and I’ve now finished the final volume in the premiere tetralogy that centers around this sort of hypothetical ship. Also, Ave Atque Vale Nate. One can’t help but compare these 4 books to the New Sun cycle, the other tetralogy that Wolfe is famous for. Overall, I’d say that I enjoyed Long Sun more but New Sun is better. More specifically, the thing you come to Wolfe for, the thing he does best, is overlaying a plot with lofty cosmic forces and mind-bending twists and expansions of the scale. And he pulls off all of this without spelling it out for you in the text at all. For instance, you have to read New Sun pretty closely at the beginning to grok that Severian is on distant-future Earth. And the degree to which New Sun keeps pulling of this trick really does make it untouchable, in my experience, among the epic genre fiction. That being said, it is so dense and confusing I’m sure I missed a lot and will need a few rereads across my life to really get. Re-reading I’m happy to do, though I think I’ll finish URTH OF THE NEW SUN, and the BOOK OF THE SHORT SUN trilogy to round out a primary reading of the greater Solar cycle, which is all of these series taken together. Severian is also such a cold, inhuman character. On the other hand, I found the mind-bending parts of Long Sun less mind-bending, overall, but the low-level plot more enjoyable and easier to follow. The last 100 or so pages of this book really does get much grander in scope very quickly. Throughout the previous 3 volumes, and half of the 4th, the plot moves very quickly. Book 1 takes place over a day. But, after we slowly put together that they're on a ship, and their gods are a brutal tyrant and his family who have been transformed into computer programs, the plot shifts to how to get people off the ship and onto a new world. It does end up hitting some of the familiar Wolfe beats. For instance, who is writing the book and under what conditions becomes important, just like in New Sun. Wolfe’s obsession with space-prison evolves into the whole whorl itself being a sort of enormous space prison. It of course, features an evil (or, in this case, a set of evil) gnostic god(s). I still have some questions about what exactly happened at the end, questions I’m sure a second reading would help with. It’s especially tricky in this book since characters can become possessed by gods or other supernatural forces at any moment, which makes it tricky to tell who’s speaking despite knowing who’s physically talking. Irregardless, I’m very sympathetic to the idea of the world being a prison or an evil god ruling so I was very entertained over the course of the series. Like I said, there’s another trilogy and another standalone novel in the Solar Cycle that I have yet to read. I’m hoping to finish them in the next year or so then plan a grand reread. 1 Evil Whorl