RETURN TO THE WHORL - GENE WOLFE

It’s all over now. It took a few years and, I’m going to guess, dozens perhaps hundreds of hours, but I’ve now made my way through the entire Solar Cycle. That’s 12 books divided into three series . The 5 volume Book of the New Sun, the 4 Volume Book of the Long Sun and, finally, this Book of the Short Sun trilogy. And, in many ways, that has really only allowed me to begin this series since, as the adage goes, there is no reading Wolfe, only rereading, which seems most true with this last trilogy. Wolfe was deep in his bag with this one. All of these novels are puzzle boxes to some extent. The fun of Solar Cycle books is reading between the lines and figuring out what’s actually going on. It is a distantly Wolfe-ian joy to figure out the never-stated but hinted at revelations early in New Sun that the characters are actually on Earth in the far-far future and that the “castle” is actually a disused space-ship, to name two obvious examples. But if the earlier books are puzzle boxes, Wolfe goes full Pinhead with these last three and dials up the interlocking mysteries to the highest levels I’m aware of. Because the timelines are screwed up in these three novels, it’s only at the end of this book that events in the other two volumes make any sense. It begs to be re-read with the knowledge you get by finishing, so, in many ways, I can’t really review it properly. That being said, I did find this book satisfying and interesting. Early in this volume we get a farmer explaining how to hybridize corn and the importance of hybridization, which seems boring but actually stuck me as a commentary on the theme of hybridization that runs throughout the novel. Many (most? maybe all?) of the characters are shown to be hybrids of some form or another. The narrator, Horn, is obviously Silk, which is confirmed with the last words of the novel, but dozens of the other characters, including a talking bird, are also revealed to either contain 2 or more entities within them and/or are given to being possessed. We also learn more about the Inhumni which reveals all of them to be something of a hybrid species. All of the Gods are revealed to contain parts of aspects of characters from the original series, even the planets themselves might be newer versions of “our” planets. I was glad to see the inclusion of Abaia, the sea-monster/goddess from New Sun who I always wanted to know more about. She’s actually seen here as a collection of monstrous sea-women (who are perhaps growing out of Abaia’s back? That’s how I read the scene). I felt the inclusion of Severian, from the New Sun series seemed tacked on, especially since there was no reference to this meeting in the original series, this book contains a cop-out line where Severian pointedly says he won’t write about this meeting, but there are some things like the size of Severian’s dog that don’t quite match up with the original so maybe something deeper is going on. Again, I’ll have to reread the whole thing, now that I have a basic outline of the whole story. Overall, I’d say the New Sun series is justifiably considered the best. The overall vibe is strongest and weirdest. The Long Sun series is the easiest to understand and has powerful vibes, but not next-level vibes like New Sun. These 3 books fit in between them. Wolfe is really flexing his writer muscles by folding in all these mysteries and allusions, it’s hard to imagine anyone else could have written this thing. I would say that at a certain point the mysteries and confusion overwhelm the vibe, to the books’ detriment. Hard to complain tho, very cool stuff overall. I look forward to rereading the whole series from the beginning, maybe in a year or so, and seeing what I can get out of it now that I’ve done the background work of reading it for the first time. 3 Whorls