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Sir Able returns to Mythgathr on his steed Cloud, a great mare the color of her name. Able is filled with new knowledge of the ways of the seven-fold world and possessed of great magical secrets. His knighthood now beyond question, Able works to fulfill his vows to his king, his lover, his friends, his gods, and even his enemies. Able must set his world right, restoring the proper order among the denizens of all the seven worlds. The Wizard is a charming, riveting, emotionally charged tale of wonders, written with all the beauty one would expect from a writer whom Damon Knight called "a national treasure."

This, as well as the first two books and theoretically the last in the series, is rapidly becoming the most difficult work of SF I've ever read. Why? It's not particularly difficult to follow; the Hero's Quest is rather straightforward throughout. Nor is the main character Severian particularly uninteresting or difficult to like.My main concern, as well as my questionable joy, is in the author's requirement that we take not just an active role in the reconstruction of this tale, but that even a deconstruction, a literary analysis, a creative interpretation, a fuck-you-sideways until you bleed from your eyeballs reinterpretation, might not quite be enough for us to reconcile story elements from action elements from reflective elements from literary elements.I'm assuming, just from my own idiocy, that this is a 4-d topographical map and I must rip out the pages according to odd-numbered reoccurring themes, plaster them together in the shape of the Claw of the Conciliator, and then read the text while standing on my head. And I can't do it while inebriated. This isn't, after all, noir fiction.This is, supposedly, the most brilliant literary mindfuck of a SF novel ever written, only it's so far beyond bizarro fiction that it has usurped James Joyce's throne. Take your pick if you want to liken it to SF Ulysses or SF Finnegans Wake. I mention the last just because this has darkened depths to it where deep literary beasties roam, unseen, and not because it's batshit crazy like the author.I'm not saying that Gene Wolfe is crazy. Not at all. But for all the ways that this *appears* to be sword and sorcery on the surface, and decent sword and sorcery that happens to take place a million years in the future on Earth where the sun is dying and aliens mess with us and tech indistinguishable to magic roams the earth, events, plot elements, and narrative elements will sometimes hit is from out of nowhere and they will make absolutely no sense at all if you are reading on the simple surface.Truly, just the little hints are enough to drive me crazy. Yes, I pick up quite a few, like Severian's little discussion with little Severian about men who decide that living like men is too much for them so they get a special lobotomy so they don't have to reflect or worry about what it means to be a man, that they can live happily like beasts. Little Severian says, "Is that why you go without a shirt? Because you are like the beast men?" "No, I haven't undergone the procedure, but yeah, perhaps I do go without reflection like them." Of course, in the story context, he's saved the kid with his name, vows to be his papa, and proceeds to watch him die, moving on to the next quest without much reflection. Right. (Btw, I'm not checking my review for precise quotations, I'm paraphrasing from memory.)This isn't even the biggest bit of crazy. There's resurrected love interests, either pure memory from an alien juice and another from a time-reversal trick, both of which he loses, aliens with masks as many roles, with the real one being as smooth as unworked clay, as like unformed from conception or story, a mirror for everything else that goes on, and giants who resemble the witches whom Perseus steals the eye and the tooth. Don't get me wrong. It's pretty cool. But when the fiction turns metafiction, when plots get thrown right into some heavy meta-soup and we're left wondering what the hell we just stepped into, we still have the sense that we *ought* to be knowing what the hell is going on. It doesn't let us drop, exactly. It just tries to entice us into rereading the books 5-10 times to try to figure out just what the hell is going on. I have to question myself: Do I care enough to become a devoted scholar of Wolfe and write at least a dissertation on his work? Do I care at least enough to finish through the 4th book?The answer is No, and Yes. It's frustrating to see all those little fishes in the dark water below my feet, see them scurrying away, but I'm not quite hungry enough to get down on my hands and knees and beg Poseidon to make them jump right into my mouth.Maybe someday, when I've burned all my other books and am exiled to a desert island where I have nothing else to read than these four admittedly interesting books will I sit down and devote the rest of life to figuring out just what the hell is going on here. :) I don't quite think I'm alone in this feeling, either.Shouldn't there be a whole cottage industry devoted to figuring this thing out? Where are the scores of scholars? Is this going to go down into history as "The series everyone wants to say is genius but no one has the guts to say they have no idea what's going on"? I'll at least say it. I don't know what's going on. Surface? Sure. Pretty damn straightforward. It's everything else. Gahh!

A young man in his teens is transported from our world to a magical realm that contains seven levels of reality. Very quickly transformed by magic into a grown man of heroic proportions, he takes the name Able and sets out on a quest to find the sword that has been promised to him, a sword he will get from a dragon, the one very special blade that will help him fulfill his life ambition to become a knight and a true hero.Inside, however, Able remains a boy, and he must grow in every sense to survive the dangers and delights that lie ahead in encounters with giants, elves, wizards, and dragons. His adventure will conclude in the second volume of The Wizard Knight, The Wizard.With this new series, Wolfe not only surpasses all the most popular genre writers of the last three decades, he takes on the legends of the past century, in a work that will be favorably compared with the best of J. R. R. Tolkien, E. R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake, and T. H. White. This is a book---and a series---for the ages, from perhaps the greatest living writer in (or outside) the fantasy genre.

Gene Wolfe’s In Green’s Jungles is the second volume, after On Blue’s Waters, of his new fiction, The Book of the Short Sun. It is again narrated by Horn, who has embarked on a quest from his home on the planet Blue in search of the heroic leader Patera Silk. By the end of On Blue’s Waters, the question of Horn’s identity has been raised by references to changes in his physique. 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 in orbit that brought the settlers from Urth, and going thence to the planet Green, home of the blood-drinking alien inhumi. There, he led a band of mercenary soldiers, answered to the name of Rajan, and later became the ruler of a city state. He has also encountered the mysterious aliens, the Neighbors, who once inhabited both Blue and Green. At some point, he died.His personality now seemingly inhabits a different body, so that even his sons do not recognize him. And people mistake him for Silk, to whom he now bears a remarkable resemblance.

Litany of the Long Sun contains the full texts of Nightside the Long Sun and Lake of the Long Sun, that together make up the first half of The Book of the Long Sun. This great work is set on a huge generation starship in the same future as the classic Book of the New Sun (also available in two volumes from Orb).Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun tetralogy ranks as one of the greatest literary achievements of 20th-century science fiction. Litany of the Long Sun, comprising the first two books in the series, is suffused with looming transcendence and theophany. Wolfe takes familiar speculative fiction tropes and embeds them in a tale so complex and wonderful that readers may find themselves wondering whether what they're reading is science fiction, fantasy, or something different altogether. Or whether it matters.The story of Patera Silk, a devout priest whose destiny is wrapped up with the gods he serves, takes place within the Whorl, a vast, cylindrical starship that has traveled for generations and is crumbling into disrepair. Through a strange and amazing series of events, Silk finds himself descending to base thievery, running afoul of a notorious crime lord, befriending a cyborg soldier, and encountering at least one of the gods of Mainframe.But when Silk encounters the Outsider, who may be a God of a very different sort, all his beliefs are shaken to the core, and his life swiftly takes a messianic turn. In a rousing climax, Silk becomes the reluctant leader of a political rebellion against the corrupt Ayuntamiento, who rule the city-state of Viron.It is not necessary to have read Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series, which takes place many centuries earlier, to enjoy the Long Sun novels, but keen-eyed readers will find many clues as to the origin of the Whorl and its gods in those stories. Further, although Wolfe's reputation for literary precision and trickery is well deserved, the Long Sun series (which continues in Epiphany of the Long Sun) is one of the more accessible places to start appreciating the author's treasures. --Therese Littleton

3.5 starsWell, I definitely enjoyed the Long Sun series much more this time around and was surprised to find that I didn’t even mind _Calde of the Long Sun_ which was the point at which I abandoned ship on my previous re-read attempt of the series. I was probably most surpised by the number of times that things I thought of as opaque mysteries in the series were actually either pretty clearly telegraphed or even explicitly stated in the text (albeit perhaps in passing) which led me to two obvious conclusions about Gene Wolfe: it pays to re-read his work if you hope to get anything substantial out of it, and if you don’t read the text closely (with particular emphasis to recalling what has come before) then you will miss a lot. Of course I must also acknowledge that many of these ‘mysteries’ were no longer mysteries to me from external reading I’ve done so I can’t say that it was simply the result of my closer (re)reading of the text. Nonetheless I was startled at the number of things that weren’t as obscure as I used to think when I heard about all of the Gene Wolfe theories for this book out there. That’s not to say that I think the text is in any way straightforward, but I’m starting to appreciate that Wolfe isn’t as sadistic in regards to the reader (specifically in his creation of story-puzzles) as I had previously thought (he’s still a little bit sadistic of course). My next surprise was that I didn’t hate Patera Silk nearly as much this time around. I think the character Hyacinth sums up my main issues with Silk as follows: “He’s forever blaming himself for the wrong things.” Well, he still does, and while Silk still comes across as something of a well-meaning naif stumbling through his adventures, not to mention someone who is perhaps a little too good to be true (though there is significant in-story justification for this as we will see) he definitely displays layers that went beyond his moralizing and over indulgent self-doubt and, while perhaps not my favourite character in the books, he didn’t drive me away screaming either. Kind of faint praise so far, huh? Well I’d say I’m still torn on this series. On the one hand it’s got a lot of awesome stuff going on, to quote myself: “a generation starship story with digitized people turned into gods, robotic armies, political revolution, bodysnatching psychotic teenage clones, and vampiric, shapeshifting aliens.” On the other hand I’d still say that while some of these elements might not be as invisible as I had previously felt, they’re not always front and centre either and, quite frankly, Wolfe really makes you work for it. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, literature doesn’t have to be (maybe *shouldn’t* be) easy, but I’m often chagrined by Wolfe’s penchant for hiding all of the ‘cool stuff’. Conversely (and perversely) I actually seem to be starting to enjoy it…have I finally fully imbibed the Wolfe kool-aid? Well, not totally perhaps. I think in the end I’d have to say that I ‘appreciate’ this book more than I ‘like’ it. There’s lot of elements in it that I *do* like, but so many of them are sub-text, or implied elements that only seem apparent (to me at least) upon multiple readings, that I can wholly sympathize with the first time reader that comes away from this scratching his or her head (as I did). As the story continues from where we last left our hero, Patera Silk has now become Caldé of Viron (at least in name) and is directly opposed by the Ayuntamiento (the group of councilors that previously led the city and is entirely populated by (view spoiler)[immortal cyborg politicians *shudder* (hide spoiler)]

On Blue's Waters is the start of a major new work by Gene Wolfe, the first of three volumes that comprise The Book of the Short Sun, which takes place in the years after Wolfe's four-volume Book of the Long Sun. Horn, the narrator of the earlier work, now tells his own story. Though life is hard on the newly settled planet of Blue, Horn and his family have made a decent life for themselves. But Horn is the only one who can locate the great leader Silk, and convince him to return to Blue and lead them all to prosperity. So Horn sets sail in a small boat, on a long and difficult quest across the planet Blue in search of the now legendary Patera Silk. The story continues in In Green's Jungles and Return to the Whorl.

Volume Four of the Book of the New Sun. Severian the Torturer continues his epic journey across the lands of Urth, a journey as fraught with peril as it is with wonder. Exiled from his guild he is an outcast, but his travels are woven with strange portents. The Claw of the Conciliator, relic of a prophet and promise of a new age, flames to life in his hands. He carries the great sword Terminus Est, the Line of Division. The dwellers in the deep waters offer him a kingdom under the seas. And he is hunted and driven by terrors from beyond Urth. Now all his travels move him inexorably toward a grander fate, a destiny that he dare not refuse. For a devouring blackness gnaws at the heart of the Old Sun, and the fate of Urth rests in the return of the Conciliator, the New Sun long foretold.

With Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock brings a superior fantasy series to a to formally effective and emotionally satisfying conclusion.I love the Elric series, and sometimes wonder if I rate the books too highly. After all, the prose, ranging from workmanlike to vigorous, is often evocative but rarely poetic, and the tales themselves run to cliche, with too many love-besotted sorcerers, too many queens with hidden agendas, and too many marvelous towers—chock full of monsters and demons—appearing at the conflux of the time streams.Here, however, Moorcock is at the top of his game. His prose is unusually concentrated and disciplined, and many of the plot elements he introduces are both surprising and pleasing. (My favorites? The quest for Roland’s horn, and—even better--the Sad Giant and his shield.)But the best thing about this book is the seriousness with which Moorcock treats his hero, his hero’s destiny, and the startlingly original universe—a world torn between Chaos and Law—in which his hero lives. For it is the brooding Byronic character of Elric himself, fated to kill those whom he loves, and the unique philosophical realm which determines the nature of that character, that together are the twin source of the Elric fans’ delight, making it easy to excuse the patches of mundane prose, the occasional narrative cliche. In fashioning Stormbringer, Moorcock has shown great courage, not flinching from the demands of fate or the requirements of his chosen universe. He brings the Elric series to its inevitable conclusion, and, in doing so, has crafted a thing of harsh beauty, as heartbreaking and bleak as Arthur’s battle at the plain of Camlann.

Of all mortals, Latro was the least favoured - or the most.The wound that had destroyed his memory had given him the ability to see the unseen: the world of the gods, the demi-gods and the fabulous.Each day events were entered on a scroll so that the next morning he could know his friends, his rivals and have some understanding of what had gone before.He had fought with Xerxes at Thermopylae and been driven from Athenian Greece. Now with his companions, Io the slave girl and Seven Lions the African warrior, he was travelling among the Thracians and the Amazons, seeking both his future and his past.

If Nightside The Long Sun was about the protagonist’s self discovery, this second book in the series is about Patera Silk slowly discovering the true nature of his world.The 4 volumes of The Book Of The Long Sun are set on a multigenerational starship – a fact that Tor reveals on the back cover, but one that is only revealed to the reader in this second book. It’s understandable that Tor did so, as The Long Sun is extremely hard to market: it’s an odd book: a lot more accessible than Wolfe’s magnum opus The Book Of The New Sun, but less lush, and a lot less compelling – at first sight maybe even boring. Tor might have increased its sales, spaceships sell, but the spoiler doesn’t do the reader any service: it takes away part of the joy of discovery, and it sets wrong expectations. Multigenerational starship yes, but no space opera or high tech scifi of whatever ilk.(...)Please continue reading this review on Weighing A Pig

The long awaited sequel to Gene Wolfe’s four-volume classic, The Book of the New Sun. We return to the world of Severian, now the Autarch of Urth, as he leaves the planet on one of the huge spaceships of the alien Hierodules to travel across time and space to face his greatest test, to become the legendary New Sun or die. The strange, rich, original spaceship scenes give way to travels in time, wherein Severian revisits times and places which fill in parts of the background of the four-volume work, that will thrill and intrigue particularly all readers of the earlier books. But The Urth of the New Sun is an independent structure all of a piece, an integral masterpiece to shelve beside the classics, one itself.

Rhialto the Marvellous takes up the personal and political conflicts among a conclave of two dozen magicians of Ascolais and Almery in the 21st Aeon. The shocking appearance of the Llorio the Murtha, a powerful female force from an earlier aeon threatens to unbalance nature by “ensqualming” or feminizing the magicians. This triggers a tremendous struggle for power and the other mages turn against Rhialto.Hoping to reestablish his rightful place, Rhialto travels to other aeons to restore the missing Perciplex which projects the Mostrament, the constitution of the association. In his final adventure, Rhialto must, ultimately, travel to the very ends of time and space to confront an old adversary whom he had wronged and must commit further misdeeds to restore order.Out of this welter of exotic politics, values systems, personal eccentricity, and magic, the figure of Rhialto slowly comes into focus and takes on dimension. He is a vain, apparently superficial man, not ashamed to demonstrate his melancholy to enhance his reputation. But he is courteous, patient, and subtle, even kind. He is self-aware and introspective as Cugel never could be—the wisest and most sympathetic of all of Vance’s wizards.

In the second instalment of this rousing series, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser journey from the ancient city of Lankhmar, searching for a little adventure and debauchery to ease their broken hearts. When a stranger challenges them to find and fight Death on the Bleak Shore, they battle demonic birds, living mountains, and evil monks on the way to their heroic fate. Fritz Leiber’s witty prose, lively plots, and superb characterizations stand the test of time.Contents:2] • Author's Foreword (Swords Against Death) • essay9 • The Circle Curse (1970) • ss20 • The Jewels in the Forest (1970) • novelette (variant of "Two Sought Adventure" 1939)63 • Thieves' House (1943) • novelette100 • The Bleak Shore (1940) • ss112 • The Howling Tower (1941) • ss129 • The Sunken Land (1942) • ss149 • The Seven Black Priests (1953) • novelette178 • Claws from the Night (1951) • novelette208 • The Price of Pain-Ease (1970) • ss222 • Bazaar of the Bizarre (1963) • novelette

I don't think I'll ever be able to read another sci-fi/fantasy book without comparing them to Wolfe. He's one of those authors that you think, "Yes, he is obviously talented" without attaching much emotion to the thought and then comes around your back door with a line or a concept that catapults him into your favorite author bin. After finishing the book of the New Sun, I decided to check out his other books and I hesitated on this series for a while. A world on a giant starship? Do I have time for such things? I should not have read about the starship thing and I wouldn't include it here if it weren't on the blurb on the back of the book because I would have enjoyed this series much sooner. I read on wiki that he should be read with a dictionary because of the many meanings he attributes to certain words that he plays with in his books. You have to have respect for an author like that, especially since it isn't necessary to have a dictionary on hand in order to enjoy. He's called a modern day Homer on the back of Lake of the Long Sun, for crying out loud. Read.

Librarian note: Alternate cover edition of 9780765356154.Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred pages leave readers longing for more.English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory.But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten books from England's magical past and regained some of the powers of England's magicians. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. Soon he is lending his help to the government in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, creating ghostly fleets of rain-ships to confuse and alarm the French.All goes well until a rival magician appears. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative-the very opposite of Mr Norrell. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington's army and doing magic on battlefields. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different. For Mr Norrell, their power is something to be cautiously controlled, while Jonathan Strange will always be attracted to the wildest, most perilous forms of magic. He becomes fascinated by the ancient, shadowy figure of the Raven King, a child taken by fairies who became king of both England and Faerie, and the most legendary magician of all. Eventually Strange's heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens to destroy not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds dear.

Underneath the fading sun, Cugel--a hero--emerges. Well, sort of a hero, but more of a trickster. Less Hector, more Ulysses; less Samson, more Jacob; less Tom, and a lot more Huck. Cugel, however, is less likable than any of the these. Selfish, exploitative, and filled with unlimited self-regard, he continually overestimates his own considerable intelligence and fails where a lesser man might have succeeded.Paradoxically, it is Cugel's flaws and failures that keep us on his side during his picaresque journey, and his personality helps organize what might otherwise seem a disconnect series of tales. Vance's prose is still eccentric but more fluid than in the previous "Dying Earth" collection, and his imagination continues to astound: his descriptions of landscapes, individual flora and fauna are mesmerizing, and his plot inventions--particular the "eyes" mentioned in the title--are a source of continual delight.

Earth is a decadent world older than memory, the bloated red sun soon to wink out forever. Iucounu the Laughing Magician has for the second time magicked Cugel the Clever across the Ocean of Sighs, to faraway Shanglestone Strand. Beset by thieves and schemers, whose cunning almost equals his own, Cugel must fight the long way back to Iucounu's manse where he means to exact a comprehensive and memorable revenge, before the old red sun goes out forever. In his unique, sardonic prose, SF grandmaster Jack Vance weaves a full brimming measure of humor through a picaresque tale of treachery and adventure, where clashes of philosophy and moments of poignant irony will make you wince, even as you laugh. - Matt HughesCugel: the Skybreak Spatterlight, originally published as Cugel's Saga, is Volume 28 of the Spatterlight Press Signature Series. Released in the centenary of the author's birth, this handsome new collection is based upon the prestigious Vance Integral Edition. Select volumes enjoy up-to-date maps, and many are graced with freshly-written forewords contributed by a distinguished group of authors. Each book bears a facsimile of the author's signature and a previously-unpublished photograph, chosen from family archives for the period the book was written. These unique features will be appreciated by all, from seasoned Vance collector to new reader sampling the spectrum of this author's influential work for the first time. - John Vance II