Locus Award nominee 2001.
Gene Wolfe's In Green's Jungles is the second volume, after On Blue's Waters, of his ambitious SF trilogy, The Book of the Short Sun.
It is again narrated by Horn, who has embarked on a quest from his home
on the planet Blue in search of the heroic leader Patera Silk. Now
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.
Horn recalls visiting the Whorl, the enormous
spacecraft in orbit that brought the settlers from Urth, and going
thence to the planet Green, home of the blood-drinking alien inhumi.
There, he led a band of mercenary soldiers, answered to the name of
Rajan, and later became the ruler of a city state. He has also
encountered the mysterious aliens, the Neighbors, who once inhabited
both Blue and Green. He remembers a visit to Nessus, on Urth. At some
point, he died. His personality now seemingly inhabits a different
body, so that even his sons do not recognize him. And people mistake
him for Silk, to whom he now bears a remarkable resemblance.
In Green's Jungles is Wolfe's major new fiction, The Book of the Short Sun, building toward a strange and seductive climax.
