The Wizard begins with Able's return to Mythgathr on his steed Cloud, a great mare the color of her name. Able is filled with new knowledge of the ways of the seven-fold world and possessed of great magical secrets. His knighthood now beyond question, Able works to fulfill his vows to his king, his lover, his friends, his gods, and even his enemies. Able must set his world right, restoring the proper order among the denizens of all the seven worlds.
A young man in his teens is transported from our world to a magical realm that contains seven levels of reality. Very quickly transformed by magic into a grown man of heroic proportions, he takes the name Abel and sets out on a quest to find the sword that has been promised to him, a sword he will get from a dragon, the one very special blade that will help him fulfill his life ambition to become a knight and a true hero.
Gene Wolfe has stymied and delighted smart science fiction readers for years. His complex, multilayered narratives, untrustworthy narrators, and puzzle-box characters send those of us who like that sort of thing into paroxysms of thrilling speculation, re-reading, and just plain guessing what it all means. In Green's Jungles is the middle book of Wolfe's opus trilogy, The Book of the Short Sun (the first is On Blue's Waters).
Launching a three-book series, Wolfe's latest takes place several decades after the close of his acclaimed four-volume the Book of the Long Sun. There, it was revealed that the great artifact called the Whorl, unbeknownst to its millions of inhabitants, was in fact a failing spaceship and that the AI "Gods" that ruled the Whorl wanted its inhabitants to leave and colonize two nearby terrestrial planets, Blue and Green.
Patera Silk, a young priest aboard the generation ship known as the Whorl, finds himself both the unwitting leader of a band of revolutionaries and the pawn of godlike forces trying to reshape a stagnant society. The latest installment in Wolfe's "Book of the Long Sun" series offers tantalizing hints of an ancient history lost to the Whorl's inhabitants. The author continues to prove himself one of the genre's most literate writers and luminescent thinkers. A familiarity with earlier series books is helpful but not absolutely necessary. Most libraries should own this title.
