Return to the Whorl: The Final Volume of 'The Book of the Short Sun'

Gene Wolfe

Tom Doherty Associates, Mar 6, 2002 - Fiction - 416 pages

Gene Wolfe's Return to the Whorl is the third volume, after On Blue's Waters and In Green's Jungles, of his ambitious SF trilogy The Book of the Short Sun . . . It is again narrated by Horn, who has embarked on a quest in search of the heroic leader Patera Silk. Horn has traveled from his home on the planet Blue, reached the mysterious planet Green, and visited the great starship, the Whorl and even, somehow, the distant planet Urth. But 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. Perhaps Horn and Silk are now one being. Return to the Whorl brings Wolfe's major new fiction, The Book of the Short Sun, to a strange and seductive climax.

About the author

Gene Wolfe (1931-2019) was the Nebula Award-winning author of The Book of the New Sun tetralogy in the Solar Cycle, as well as the World Fantasy Award winners The Shadow of the Torturer and Soldier of Sidon. He was also a prolific writer of distinguished short fiction, which has been collected in such award-winning volumes as Storeys from the Old Hotel and The Best of Gene Wolfe.



A recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award, and six Locus Awards, among many other honors, Wolfe was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2007, and named Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2012.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Return to the Whorl: The Final Volume of 'The Book of the Short Sun'; Volume 3 of Book of the Short Sun
• Author: Gene Wolfe
• Edition: reprint, revised
• Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates, 2002
• ISBN: 0312873646, 9780312873646
• Length: 416 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Science Fiction / Action & Adventure