The Book of the Short Sun
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The Book of the Short Sun is a trilogy by Gene Wolfe, comprising On Blue's Waters, In Green's Jungles, and Return to the Whorl. This trilogy is itself the sequel to Wolfe's tetralogy The Book of the Long Sun.
The trilogy, which is told by a narrator who identifies himself as Horn (a character in The Book of the Long Sun), is an account of a search "on three worlds" for Silk, the hero of the Long Sun cycle. However, the narrator's adventures do not come to a halt during his writing, so that the trilogy is both a memoir of his past and a journal of his present. As the novel progresses the narrator's identity becomes increasingly complex and elusive, and the style changes in each book. In On Blue's Waters the narrator mostly relates past events in first person with occaisonal updates on the circumstances around him as he is writing. It concerns the main character's journey across the oceans of Blue. In Green's Jungles presents more of the narrator's present situation and his ruminations on his journey to the inhumi world of Green. Return to the Whorl eschews first-person past accounts entirely in favour of first-person present accounts and third-person past accounts. Like many of Wolfe's novels, the narrator and the circumstances under which the book is being written are essential to understanding the story; in this instance The Book of the Short Sun has multiple authors, with most of it written by the characters who calls himself Horn with large sections of Return to the Whorl written by Horn's sons Hide and Hoof, who ostensibly acted as editors who compiled the story—not unlike how Gene Wolfe claimed to have compiled the texts that made up The Book of the New Sun.
