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Summary: A Slow but Promising Start
Review: A young priest named Silk is enlightened by a god known only as the Outsider, who burdens him with the task of saving his church from demolition.Nightside takes place over a mere two days, which inflicts on it a snail's pace and the feeling of floundering in too many details. The act of breaking into someone's mansion took more than half the book. Rituals were described in full, beginning to end. Yes, this book is a set-up for greater things to come, but still suffers from its pace, and probably could have been condensed to half its size. It was also filled with great characters, enigmatic events, bizarre creatures, and "gods" that might not be all they're cracked up to be. I look forward to the remainder of the series.
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Summary: A Modern Masterpiece
Review: Equally as rich as, but far more accesable than, Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.
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Summary: A refreshing, new book
Review: Gene Wolfe is an excellent writer, who captures the imagination. I have found most science fiction to be short of good writing or well constructed characters. Wolfe's characters feel and act real, not as the lab rats most sci-fi authors release in their novels to show how well constructed their tech. is. All the books in this series are excellent, one of the few sci-fi books I would give to a friend.
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Summary: Sorry to have the first so-so review, but....
Review: I write this review after reading the whole series. Perhaps I would have written a more favorable review if I had written it after just reading this volume. The story here plods along very slowly, and may not appeal to anyone who is not used to Gene Wolfe's complex writing. If you want a really good Wolfe series, pick up his "New Sun" books. This one seems as if it hold a lot of promise, but ultimately disappoints.
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Summary: Sorry to have the first so-so review, but....
Review: I write this review after reading the whole series. Perhaps I would have written a more favorable review if I had written it after just reading this volume. The story here plods along very slowly, and may not appeal to anyone who is not used to Gene Wolfe's complex writing. If you want a really good Wolfe series, pick up his "New Sun" books. This one seems as if it hold a lot of promise, but ultimately disappoints.
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Summary: The first volume of the Book of the Long Sun slowly unravels
Review: NIGHTSIDE THE LONG SUN is the first volume of Gene Wolfe's four-volume work The Book of the Long Sun, which is a story of political intrigue, revolution, and Christian allegory set in a starship sent from Earth to colonize a distant planet.Gene Wolfe rose to fame with his magisterial work The Book of the New Sun, which is one of my most cherished books. The Book of the Long Sun takes place, in fact, in the same universe as Wolfe's masterpiece. However, differences abound. The Book of the New Sun is a first-person narrative in which the narrator stands between the reader and a clear view of his world. The Book of the Long Sun, on the other hand, is told in third-person and the setting is richly illustrated by Wolfe's prose. That is not to say that there are no mysteries in the Book of the Long Sun, it is of course a Gene Wolfe novel, but the plot is much more straightforward and clear than in Wolfe's earlier triumph.NIGHTSIDE THE LONG SUN slowly introduces the plot that will later rage through the city of its setting and by the end of the four-volume work utterly change the world in which the characters live. NIGHTSIDE opens with the enlightenment of Patera Silk, an augur (i.e. priest), in Viron, one of the cities within the Whorl, the gigantic starship sent from Urth. The rather pagan inhabitants of the Whorl worship a pantheon of deities based upon the ruler who sent out the starship and his family. Silk's enlightener, however, is an obscure god called the Outsider, because he abides even outside the Whorl, who is quite possibly in fact the Christian God. The Outsider has called upon Silk to save the local church and school, which have been sold for back taxes to a criminal named Blood. Silk, in a bit of bravado, proceeds to break into Blood's mansion in hopes of getting his property back. This attempt at breaking in, along with an exorcism of a bordello, are the sum of NIGHTSIDE THE LONG SUN. It's a slow and simple start, the action of this book takes place over merely two days, but in the following books the pace builds exponentially.The Book of the Long Sun may not be as poetic and full of sophistry as The Book of the New Sun, but it's immensely good reading. Wolfe's use of Christian allegory (much stricter here than in the earlier work), and a plot full of revolution, war, and political mystery is a fine work. After NIGHTSIDE THE LONG SUN, the reader should be voraciously desiring the next book in the series, LAKE OF THE LONG SUN.
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Summary: The beginning of a long and wondrous ride!
Review: The very beginning of this book is a struggle because Mr. Wolfe plunges the reader into an almost (but not quite) alien world with a culture, lingo, religion, and social structure that has to be learned before the story makes sense. Through the process of learning this world, which parallels the main character's growing re-understanding of his own world, Mr. Wolfe starts the reader on a roller-coaster ride that doesn't stop but keeps accelerating through three more books. Warning: Buy all four before you start the first one! You won't to wait for number two. For all related books, search under Gene Wolfe's name for all titles with the word "sun" in them.
Rating: 
Summary: What an unusual SF book...!
Review: This was my first encounter with Gene Wolfe, and indeed it was all I'd been told to expect. While not a whole lot of action takes place in the course of the story (indeed, another, lesser writer might have told the same tale in less than 50 pages), the writing and characterization are such that you simply cannot put the book down. Silk is a remarkably multi-faceted character, exhibiting at turns confidence, doubt, fear, compassion, and naivety. Most enjoyable of all, he's more clever than he tends to let on; on several occasions, the reader wants to shout the answer to a puzzle to Silk, only to find out later that he knew it all along. Masterful writing by Wolfe. Now if only these books weren't so hard to find-- I've gotta read #2!
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Summary: What an unusual SF book...!
Review: This was my first encounter with Gene Wolfe, and indeed it was all I'd been told to expect. While not a whole lot of action takes place in the course of the story (indeed, another, lesser writer might have told the same tale in less than 50 pages), the writing and characterization are such that you simply cannot put the book down. Silk is a remarkably multi-faceted character, exhibiting at turns confidence, doubt, fear, compassion, and naivety. Most enjoyable of all, he's more clever than he tends to let on; on several occasions, the reader wants to shout the answer to a puzzle to Silk, only to find out later that he knew it all along. Masterful writing by Wolfe. Now if only these books weren't so hard to find-- I've gotta read #2!
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