In Green's Jungles (Book of the Short Sun Series #2) » (Reprint)

Gene Wolfe has been called "the finest writer the science fiction world has yet produced" by The Washington Post. A former engineer, he has written numerous books and won a variety of awards for his SF writing.

Gene Wolfe's In Green's Jungles is the sequel to On Blue's Waters. It is again narrated by Horn, on a quest from his home on the planet Blue to find theheroic leader Patera Silk. Now Horn's identity has become ambiguous, a complex question embedded in the story, whose telling is itself complex, shifting from place to place, present to past. Horn recalls visiting the Whorl, the enormous spacecraft that brought the settlers from Urth, and going thence to the planet Green, home of the blood-drinking alien inhumi. He remembers a visit to Nessus, on Urth. And people mistake him for Silk, to whom he now bears a remarkable resemblance. In Green's Jungles is a section of Wolfe's major new fiction, The Book of the Short Sun, building through this voluem toward a strange and seductive climax in Return to the Whorl.

Publishers Weekly

In 1980, Wolfe published The Shadow of the Torturer, the first volume in his now classic Book of the New Sun, which was eventually followed by his much-praised Book of the Long Sun sequence. Whereas the former series was set on the decadent planet Urth, the latter took place within the Whorl, a hollowed-out asteroid whose inhabitants knew nothing of the universe outside their failing world. At the end of the second series, the charismatic Cald Silk led his people to the planets called Green and Blue and then disappeared. For years it had been rumored that the two novel sequences were somehow connected--and here the rumor is substantiated. In this second volume in The Book of the Short Sun (after On Blue's Waters), Horn, the narrator of the Long Sun books, is on a quest for the lost Silk. Although he engages in numerous adventures--leading an army, slogging through a monster-inhabited jungle, touring several exotic societies--the specifics of the plot are almost inconsequential. What counts is Wolfe's gorgeous prose, the brilliant dialogue and the dazzling way that reality shifts from one paragraph to the next. Horn soon discovers that he has the seemingly magical power to travel instantaneously between Green and Blue, though his body and those of his compatriots undergo strange changes with each shift. Eventually, they visit a world with a dying red sun that may be long-lost Urth. Oddly, Horn also discovers that he has begun to physically resemble Silk. Like any middle volume in a series, this novel leaves mysteries unsolved and plot threads hanging, but that really doesn't matter. It's the sheer strangeness of this masterful tale that counts, and the glorious sense of unknown wonders to come. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|