The Book of the Short Sun was published by Tor Books in three volumes: On Blue’s Waters (1999), In Green’s Jungles (2000), and Return to the Whorl (2001). It is the concluding sequence of Wolfe’s Solar Cycle — the vast narrative arc that encompasses The Book of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun, and this final trilogy.
The narrator is Horn — or rather, he claims to be Horn, one of the colonists who left the Whorl for the planet Blue at the end of The Book of the Long Sun. The colony on Blue is struggling, and Horn is sent back to the Whorl to find Patera Silk, who might be able to unite and lead the settlers. But the journey goes wrong: Horn dies (or seems to die) and wakes in a body that is not his — possibly Silk’s body, possibly an amalgam of several identities.
The narrative is Wolfe at his most demanding. Horn’s account is non-linear, fragmentary, and unreliable; he writes from multiple time periods, on multiple worlds (Blue, the jungle planet Green, and the Whorl itself), and his identity shifts continuously. The reader must determine who is speaking at any given moment, which events are memories and which are present, and whether the narrator’s claims about his own identity can be trusted.
The trilogy also introduces the inhumi — vampiric shapeshifters from the planet Green who can perfectly mimic human beings after consuming human blood. The “secret of the inhumi” (which the narrator promises to reveal and never quite does) may be that they have no nature of their own — they become what they consume, which means that their evil is actually human evil reflected back.
Collecting The Book of the Short Sun
First editions (Tor Books, New York, 1999–2001): Three volumes, cloth bindings with dust jackets.
Market values:
- Complete set of three first editions in jackets: $100–$300
- Individual volumes: $25–$80 each