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Return to the Whorl (Book of the Short Sun) (Hardcover)

by Gene Wolfe (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 416 pages
  • Publisher: Saint Martin's Press Inc.; First edition (29 May 2001)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 031287314X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0312873141
  • Product Dimensions: 21.3 x 14.2 x 3.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 92,425 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #9 in  Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > W > Wolfe, Gene

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Product Description

Review

"Astonishing literary brilliance."-"Interzone"
"Sentence by sentence, Wolfe is as fine a writer as science fiction has produced. He demands a lot from his readers. It is worth meeting him more than halfway."-"The New York Times Book Review "


Product Description

Horn has travelled from his home on the planet Blue, reached the planet Green and visited the starship, the Whorl and walked on the planet Urth. But Horn's identity has become ambiguous, a question embedded in the story, whose telling is itself complex.

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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Superb completion of the Short Sun series, 1 Feb 2001
By A Customer
Gene Wolfe is a very difficult author to classify - describing his work as SF or fantasy (with all the genre implications of those terms) does it a disservice. Return to the Whorl lives up to all the expectations generated by his excellent series The Book of the Long Sun. This is set in a 'generation starship' travelling from the far-future Earth of Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. The Book of the Short Sun, of which RTTW is the third and final section, can be read alone but is best understood in the context set by the previous series.

This is a mature work from a highly sophisticated and devious writer - large themes such as identity, religion, authorship and the futility (or otherwise) of human existence are considered within an intricate maze of intertwined plots. If that sounds complicated and hard-to-read then don't be put off, this is good read as well! Many questions that have been hinted at in Wolfe's previous works are finally answered here. I won't reveal any plot details, as I think they are best discovered and pieced together by the reader. Highly recommended - start from Nightside the Long Sun (Long Sun book 1) - you won't regret it!

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Proust of Science Fiction, 19 Jul 2002
By F. Roberts (London England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Return to the Whorl (Book of the Short Sun) (Paperback)
It might seem an absurd claim but the only writer to whom Wolfe can seriously be compared is Marcel Proust. I know of no other writer who can combine massive architectural brilliance with the capacity to transform one`s reading of an entire sequence of novels with a single phrase or sentence. This extraordinary series of books, from the New Sun to this, the final part of the Book of the Long Sun, can only be compared to A La Recherche. In this final volume we have to deal with moral seriousness of the highest order, the paradoxes of memory, identity and the reconstruction of the past, the nature of love . . . . this is simply a wonderful and inexhaustable writer.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars More questions than answers, 19 Sep 2002
This review is from: Return to the Whorl (Book of the Short Sun) (Paperback)
Can there be any better writer currenly working in this genre? Apparently simple narration which covers the fact that we have an unrerliable narrator who understands as little about what is happening as we do!

All the clues are there to the real "underlying" true story, but it remains tantalisingly out-of-reach - much like real-life!

Is this fantasy or science fiction - much like Clarke's view that any technology sufficently advanced could be mistaken for magic - you are never quite sure whether the character's in Wolfe's universe are simply bewildered by what they see and just explaining an ancient forgotten technology as best they can or are truly experiencing inexplicable phenomena?

The book sometime seem to be more about writing itself and how you tell a story than what is actually occurring - so Horn always makes us aware that we are reading sheets of paper which may run out at any time and that he has written this for his beloved wife - but if she is so much in his feelings why has he left her and been unfaithful numerous times, why does he never return to her?

Seen as a truly good man and more like a god by most, Horn is presumably only writing this whole account out of guilt for his own shortcomings with regard to his wife and out of a sense of inadequcy in the face of a baffling universe that he never really makes sense of.

But this is just an example of the many open questions left for you to answer - as others have said : this and it's 5 predecessors repay constant re-reading to yeild up all their secrets - if they ever will?

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5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary work
I can think of two other authors with the same uneasy relationship to fantasy fiction -- Michael Moorcock and M.John Harrison. Read more
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