Review: The Book of the Long Sun: Nightside the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe

This is my first time re-reading The Long Sun, and I think it must be said that these books definitely benefit from multiple readings. Now, I must note here that Gene Wolfe passed away on April 14th, 2019 and, while I've been reading and rereading his novels and short stories since I first encountered Shadow & Claw at 14 years old, I have rarely been called to a book the way The Long Sun beckoned to me on the nights following the news of his passing. I must have read this tetralogy when I was about 16 years old and even then I knew I was missing a lot of what was ultimately a very simple story: in some far-flung future, in some unknown place in the universe (Maybe our own? Likely not?), mankind clings to life in an O'Neill Cylinder (space colony) alongside androids, and one priest becomes the unlikely crusader in the quest to bring the population of that space colony to the planet(s) they are orbiting. I remember a fair bit about women being forced to conceive and give birth to livestock and pet creatures, nuns with robotic parts breaking down, a chaste hero that happened to know how to talk his way through even the worst of hostile and baffling situations, and something about space vampire-bodysnatchers. I know I was thrilled by it all as I thrashed feebly in the deep end of a dark pool of water. These books taught me to swim the waters of Gene Wolfe's particular brand of speculative fiction. (And particular does not begin to describe one of the finest writers in this or any other genre. Wolfe's massive body of works continues to baffle and impress readers the world over with his trademark flourishes of suspense, understatement, symbolism, and uncanny ability to tell stories within stories within stories.) So, what do we have here? How do we go from treading water to doing laps?

O'Neill Cylinder Rendering [Credit: NASA Ames Research Center, Artwork: Rick Guidice]

My initial read of Nightside was a bit of a head-scratch: there’s intrigue here, but it does read like a book that demands that you get to the sequel. With that said, having read this tetralogy and the Short Sun, Nightside is a novel loaded with world-building and it introduces the themes of these books with a masterful sense of pacing and deliberation. As with most of Wolfe’s works, nothing is handed to you for free. Reading Gene Wolfe is much like having multiple brain teasers set up in front of you and you’re going to figure them out as you go but you have to pick a couple of them to juggle as you do so. Wolfe wrote for readers that love to read, and Nightside is no exception. If you're looking for a simple science fiction story, go elsewhere.

Wolfe has a brilliant time establishing pace with this entry novel: the bulk of the action and story here takes place within the span of a few days! Rather than relying solely on exposition, Wolfe does a lot of world-building with the characters in this novel. Where many fiction writers would resort to allowing action to carry the plot forward, much of the narrative is actually hindered by violence and excitement. I've read many a complaint that Wolfe gets repetitive with introductions to certain plot devices like characters getting lost, but I have less patience for people who don't enjoy reading than maybe those readers that aren't reading so much as skimming.

Thematically, this novel isn't one thing or another. Rather, Nightside is many themes interwoven and doing battle and unwittingly intermingling. For example, Wolfe can very abruptly and heavy-handedly meditate upon the notion of how unreliable our narratives are in that what we read or interact with in the world or even how we tell our own stories can never really be the truth of it all even though our own perspectives are valid. With that said, Wolfe deliberately tells us, the reader, that while we as people may dispute truths, there is always the constant of morality that dictates what is right versus everything else (of which each is its own thing, rendering black and white arguments farcical, cynical and anti-human: that which is not right is not necessarily evil or corrupt, even if it is not right.) Wolfe takes specific care to give us this lesson as it pertains to the notion of parsing memory for truth. He tells us very bluntly that in telling a story, we may lose a detail, or misattribute a memory, and that makes the story incorrect but is not the same thing as telling a lie.

Please try to understand that it is difficult to explain what this book is about by giving you a synopsis. Gene Wolfe demands that his readers really dive in and explore this novel, and it would be unfair to say that Nightside is anything less than a science fiction story that offers a portrait of a possible future in which humans have forgotten what makes them human, as they have forgotten that they were once planet-bound and can not thrive enclosed in space in a massive enclosure of technologies they can no longer maintain, let alone replicate. Nightside the Long Sun is worth the word count, and you'll be right to want to start on the immediate sequel Lake of the Long Sun.

- Frank

More But I'd Rather Be Reading! here.