Gene Wolfe takes us to a future North America at once familiar and utterly strange. A young man and woman, Skip and Chelle, fall in love in college and marry, but she is enlisted in the military, there is a war on, and she must serve her tour of duty before they can settle down. But the military is fighting a war with aliens in distant solar systems, and her months in the service will be years in relative time on Earth. Chelle returns to recuperate from severe injuries, after months of service, still a young woman but not necessarily the same person while Skip is in his forties and a wealthy businessman, but eager for her return. Still in love (somewhat to his surprise and delight), they go on a Caribbean cruise to resume their marriage. Their vacation rapidly becomes a complex series of challenges, not the least of which are spies, aliens, and battles with pirates who capture the ship for ransom. There is no writer in science fiction like Gene Wolfe and no science fiction novel like HOME FIRES.
Home Fires
and over 1.5 million other books are available for Amazon Kindle . Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Trade in Home Fires for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Special Offer until June 30, 2013: Receive an additional £5 promotional Gift Card, when you trade-in at least £10 worth of books. Learn more
|
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Product Description
Review
Praise for Gene Wolfe:
"Wolfe stands out as a major figure in contemporary science fiction and fantasy."
"--Vector"
"A whole that transcends its incongruous parts. Wolfe is one of the very few writers who could bring off such a tour de force."
"--Asimov's Science Fiction "on "An Evil Guest"
About the Author
Gene Wolfe is winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and many other awards. In 2007, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He lives in Barrington, Illinois.
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This has all the hallmarks of Gene Wolfe - the typical, unreliable narrator and confusion about everybody's identity. People are not necessarily who they seem to be! Eventually we disentangle all the characters and Wolfe helpfully provides us with a list of them at the end - although there is still doubt about who might be a double-agent or not?
Also typical for Wolfe is the fantasy world that the characters inhabit. In this case, we are ostensibly in a near-future earth of space travel, war against an alien enemy (who are never described in any way) and a post-oil economy. However, nothing is straightforward and the poetic writing style doesn't help the plot progress quickly or clearly. You have to be patient with Wolfe - you can't hurry him.
Despite the feeling this is our future - the main action of the novel is closer to an Agatha Christie novel featuring Hercule Poirot on a cruise ship. The dialogue is anachronistic - so while we have mobile phones and spaceships, the men dress in formal suits with bow ties and smoke cigars. The language is closer to the 1930s than anything futuristic, with manners drawn from a less casual age.
As mentioned before, for the majority of this novel, we are on a vast cruise ship that is powered through sustainable energy sources only - wind,solar - even manpower. It is in essence a detective novel, where Skip our protagonist has to save his lover and sort out the various plots to blow her up or kidnap here. That's once he has got past the complication of a hijack - possibly a topical reference to things like the Pirates in Somalia holding ships for ransom.... Read more ›
Also typical for Wolfe is the fantasy world that the characters inhabit. In this case, we are ostensibly in a near-future earth of space travel, war against an alien enemy (who are never described in any way) and a post-oil economy. However, nothing is straightforward and the poetic writing style doesn't help the plot progress quickly or clearly. You have to be patient with Wolfe - you can't hurry him.
Despite the feeling this is our future - the main action of the novel is closer to an Agatha Christie novel featuring Hercule Poirot on a cruise ship. The dialogue is anachronistic - so while we have mobile phones and spaceships, the men dress in formal suits with bow ties and smoke cigars. The language is closer to the 1930s than anything futuristic, with manners drawn from a less casual age.
As mentioned before, for the majority of this novel, we are on a vast cruise ship that is powered through sustainable energy sources only - wind,solar - even manpower. It is in essence a detective novel, where Skip our protagonist has to save his lover and sort out the various plots to blow her up or kidnap here. That's once he has got past the complication of a hijack - possibly a topical reference to things like the Pirates in Somalia holding ships for ransom.... Read more ›
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
By M. Jenkins
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I do like Gene Wolf and have been an avid reader of his for many many years now. There are book's that I'm not particularly fond of, although I've enjoyed (Knight Series). I've enjoyed many others - New Sun / Soldier series. This book is a stand alone novel, with no links to other stories.
It starts off with the home-coming of Chelle (just back from a distant war fighting faceless aliens on a distant world). Skip (the main narrator) resurrects her 'dead' mother as a surprise and then meets her as they're coming off the mothership. After this it really kicks off, with a cruise, pirates, gunfights, explosions, spy's.. I could say more but don't want to spoil any surprises that may appear!
It's a great novel, it's not a sci-fi or fantasy novel, though at a push it would tend to more sci-fi as the tech that is mentioned could be possible at some stage (saying that there is a distinct lack of technology - what with the Earth seemingly being in an energy crisis - the Bullet trains reach the heady speed of 70 kilometers per hour (twice as fast as a car). And the ships all use wind power to move around. I found it very easy to read - each chapter broken up with a smaller chapter there Skip's almost pondering his thoughts, and usually answering questions that you may have had from the previous chapter.
All in all - a very refreshing read. Only took me a few days to get through it and it was complex enough to keep my brain going. Hopefully we'll have a new book out from Gene Wolfe soon.
It starts off with the home-coming of Chelle (just back from a distant war fighting faceless aliens on a distant world). Skip (the main narrator) resurrects her 'dead' mother as a surprise and then meets her as they're coming off the mothership. After this it really kicks off, with a cruise, pirates, gunfights, explosions, spy's.. I could say more but don't want to spoil any surprises that may appear!
It's a great novel, it's not a sci-fi or fantasy novel, though at a push it would tend to more sci-fi as the tech that is mentioned could be possible at some stage (saying that there is a distinct lack of technology - what with the Earth seemingly being in an energy crisis - the Bullet trains reach the heady speed of 70 kilometers per hour (twice as fast as a car). And the ships all use wind power to move around. I found it very easy to read - each chapter broken up with a smaller chapter there Skip's almost pondering his thoughts, and usually answering questions that you may have had from the previous chapter.
All in all - a very refreshing read. Only took me a few days to get through it and it was complex enough to keep my brain going. Hopefully we'll have a new book out from Gene Wolfe soon.
By JMA
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I have been an admirer of Gene Wolfe's books for many years, going back to first reading his 'New Sun' work as a teenager. Unfortunately this book, whilst unmistakeably Wolfe, does not sit as one of my favourites. The plot is presented in a confusing and dream-like manner--even by Mr. Wolfe's standards. Typical dystopian SF tropes are covered but details are never fleshed-out to the extent that you can enter the world that he presumably had in his mind when writing this novel. The action is interspersed with very long sections of seemingly mundane and often frankly boring dialogue. However, this is the mode that Gene Wolfe has elected to convey most of the numerous twists and turns of the complex plot and this didn't work for me. I didn't find myself sympathising with any of the characters and had lost interest in their stories before the end of the book. The experience of reading Gene Wolfe's works nearly always improves with re-reading. However in this case it might be too much of an ask.
By John Kwok
Format:Hardcover
A new novel from Gene Wolfe is always a cause for celebration, simply because he is one of science fiction and fantasy's best prose stylists and storytellers. In his latest novel, "Home Fires", Gene Wolfe echoes 1930s to 1950s pulp magazine science fiction in creating scenes and characters reminiscent of it, relying on old tropes pertaining to interstellar war, bringing the dead back to life, and robotics, and still striving to create high literary art (Though those accustomed to modern science fiction, stretching from the New Wave to cyberpunk and beyond, may find his characters and scenes far too quaint and nostalgic for their own tastes.). Wolfe offers a captivating cast of characters, starting with successful attorney Skip Grison, who has almost literally waited a lifetime for the return of his young bride, Army Mastergunner Chelle Sea Blue from the bitterly fought interstellar war between humanity and their alien enemy, the "Os". Chelle Sea Blue has aged only a few months, due to the relativistic effects of interstellar travel; her relatively few months of conflict, on the distant worlds contested between humanity and the Os, have been more than a score of years experienced by Skip back on Earth. Separated now by age as well as by distance, Skip and Chelle try rekindling their romantic ardor via a Caribbean cruise on a wind-powered sailing cruise ship, but Chelle isn't psychologically the same person she was decades ago, leading to unforeseen romantic consequences for both. A voyage marred by spies, terrorists and cyborg killers, with ample, often unexpected, disruptions from Chelle's mother Vanessa Hennessy, who has joined the cruise ship's crew as Virginia Healy, its new social director.... Read more ›
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
›
Go to Amazon.com to see all 19 reviews
3.5 out of 5 stars
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
