The Book of the Long Sun was published by Tor Books in four volumes between 1993 and 1996: Nightside the Long Sun (1993), Lake of the Long Sun (1994), Caldé of the Long Sun (1994), and Exodus from the Long Sun (1996). It is Wolfe’s second major science fiction sequence, written after The Book of the New Sun but set in the same far-future universe.
The setting is the Whorl — a generation starship, hundreds of kilometers long, launched from Urth in the distant past. Its inhabitants have lived inside it for so long that they have forgotten they are in space; the “Long Sun” that illuminates their world is an artificial light source running the length of the ship’s interior. Society is organized around the worship of the “gods” — actually digitized personalities stored in the ship’s computer system (Mainframe) — and religious practice involves feeding blood sacrifices into terminals where the gods occasionally manifest.
Patera Silk is a young augur (priest) in the city of Viron who receives an “enlightenment” — a direct communication from the Outsider (who may be God, as distinct from the ship’s digital “gods”). This revelation drives him into a series of increasingly dramatic actions: he becomes involved in political revolution, discovers the truth about the Whorl’s nature, and eventually leads an exodus of colonists to the planet Blue.
The novel’s form is unique in Wolfe’s work: it is written in third person, by narrators within the story who are explicitly constructing a hagiography of Silk. This layer of mediation creates characteristic Wolfean ambiguities — we are reading a saint’s life written by fallible devotees, and the relationship between their Silk and the real Silk is uncertain.
Collecting The Book of the Long Sun
First editions (Tor Books, New York, 1993–1996): Four volumes, cloth bindings with dust jackets.
Market values:
- Complete set of four first editions in jackets: $150–$400
- Individual volumes: $30–$100 each
- Signed copies: significantly higher