Some Thoughts on The Short Sun

In my review/exhortation to read of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Short Sun, I avoided spoilers.  I will not do so here, regarding my thoughts on certain details of these books.

SilkHorn and Babbie the Hus

Horn dies on Green and the Neighbors — aboriginal alien inhabitants of Green & Blue — place him into the body of Silk aboard the Whorl, where he was in the process of killing himself over his wife Hyacinth’s death.  Although the narrator mentions that he has changed physically by the time he has returned to Blue, and makes a few slips suggesting he’s not all himself mentally in Blue’s Waters, this is not made explicit until Green’s Jungles.  Horn may also have “died” somehow after falling into a pit in Blue’s Waters, but there may be a more mundane explanation.

The most confusing part of the series during my initial read was the end of On Blue’s Waters.  Horn is fleeing from a pack of inhumi out to kill him, clearly near panic, and then…some stuff happens, it’s not clear…and the book ends, with him basically safe.  The narrator’s voice changes substantially in Green’s Jungles, although it took me a few chapters to notice (it’s Silk now).  On re-read, the change occurs quite clearly on the last page of Blue’s Waters.

After some consultation with urth.net archives and a re-read, it’s clear that Horn left “his” body and passed into the hus named Babbie (an animal similar to a boar) with the aid of the Neighbors.  Presumably he hoped to throw the inhumi off his trail, and/or to force Silk to “take over”.  This causes the confused narration at the end of Blue’s Waters to make sense, fulfills an earlier prophecy that he would ride a beast with three horns (Babbie has two horns/tusks, the third horn being Horn himself), and explains some unusual behavior shown by Babbie in Return to the Whorl.  While it’s obvious that Silk becomes more dominant in the narrator as the story progresses (culminating with Silk finally acknowledging himself), and I did not detect the break, it clearly happened and other bits of information in the book point to it.  It’s an awful sacrifice on Horn’s part; something I found really quite shocking when I understood what had happened.

Now, things are not as simple as “Horn is gone, Silk is the captain now”.  Silk was clearly “there” before Horn’s “escape”.  For instance, Horn made it clear at the end of Long Sun that he despised the vulgar and vicious prostitute Hyacinth, but the narrator of Blue’s Waters is entranced by the memory of her beauty.  Likewise, in Return to the Whorl, the narrator’s knowledge of boats and sailing implies that a bit of Horn remains within him.  I also wonder that Horn might not have made his “escape” into Babbie had he not carried the influence of the sometimes suicidal Silk.  That such “imprints” will be left behind following “possession” is well established within the text.

On first reading, I had chalked up the evasive recounting of events on Green as resulting from the narrator’s unwillingness to relive them in detail.  I still think this is true, but they would also have been to a large extent someone else’s memories (very unpleasant ones, for the most part, although later astral “journeys” to Green are notably free of the horror aspects of Horn’s original trip).

The Nature of the Inhumi

The inhumi are the most fascinating aspects of the Short Sun.  First, Wolfe’s little game with their appellation: it apparently comes from the practice of “inhuming” (burying alive) captured inhumi, but obviously also sounds like “inhuman”.  Duh.

Anyway: The inhumi live and breed on Green.  They can fly from Green to Blue when the planets’ orbits are closest: a piddly “thirty five thousand leagues” i.e. about 120,000 miles or half the distance from Earth to the Moon.  They live by drinking blood and can shapeshift in order to get close to their targets.  Their true form is a sort of scaly, reptilian leech.

Wolfe manipulates his portrayal of the inhumi to inspire both horror and pity at different times.  Over the course of the books, it is revealed that the inhumi mimic not merely the form but the consciousness — possibly even the souls — of their victims, and pass these traits onto their offspring.  The implication is that ultimately the inhumi cannot rise in violence and evil above the humans on whom they feed.  Indeed — they might become good, although this appears less certain.

The inhumi in fact appear to be frankly demonic.  Silk speaks authoritatively that they have a fundamental inhuman malignancy.  Yet he appears to think that the proper response to these demonic creatures is to love them so far as possible (though he — probably assisted by Horn — kills an inhumi he had previously adopted as a daughter in Return to the Whorl after she attempts an extremely evil act without warning.  This may represent a limiting case.)  Other aspects of the inhumi appear demonic; the parody of human life they enact among themselves is both horrific and tragic (we see the horror first).  That they yearn to be human but cannot — and are driven to spite and evil by this fact — matches portrayals of demons elsewhere, such as Satan’s attitude towards Adam in Paradise Lost.

Probably the treatment Silk advocates for the inhumi is intended, ultimately, to benefit the souls of humans rather than the inhumi.  Likewise, Silk/Horn realizes that while manipulating the inhumi to aid him might be helpful in the short run, it is not merely physically dangerous to the individual doing so but will unleash deeper, more serious forms of corruption.

(Others who don’t know the mechanics of what Silk/Horn did ascribe the effects to “magic”, and he denies such a thing exists even though he binds demons to pacts in order to accomplish superhuman feats and scourge his enemies.  An amazing touch.)

The inhumi claim to fly between Green and Blue is suspicious, but on the other hand they can clearly survive burial for years.  I don’t think a giant bat can plausibly reach escape velocity unless Blue and Green are much less massive than assumed.  Perhaps something else is going on involving their preternatural/psychic deception ability that allows them to fly between planets without using a spacecraft.  Or maybe it’s all a lie and they’re completely reliant on captured spacecraft.  I suspect the former, and that the ability was somehow “inherited” from the Neighbors, but I could be convinced otherwise.  I do think the travel occurs and that the inhumi cannot spawn on Blue.

Blue and Green are Ushas (?)

The Wolfe scholar Marc Aramini has a theory that Blue and Green are Mars and Urth/Earth, respectively (I’m going to call it Urth to avoid detailing Wolfe’s cosmology).  Basically, the Whorl left Urth in the reign of Typhon (whom we meet in New Sun; Typhon is undoubtedly the Zeus-like Pas, this is made absolutely clear) long before the events of New Sun.  Although only somewhere between three and four hundred years passed subjectively aboard the Whorl, far more time passed on Urth because of time dilation.  In the meantime, the New Sun came, flooded Urth, and perturbed the orbits of the planets (which may also have been artificially adjusted to bring them both into a more commodious distance zone).  This accounts for the absence of the Moon and the unfamiliar orbits of Green & Blue.  The “City of the Inhumi” on Green is Nessus.  The Neighbors are a plant-human hybrid developed on Mars.  Anyway, the Whorl went out into space, then turned around and came back.

I’m going to admit something: I have an aesthetic objection — I just don’t like this.  Making the Whorl’s journey all about old Urth instead of a new beginning around a new star just doesn’t sit well with me.  In Vance’s Dying Earth, the story of Guyal the Curator tells of the eponymous character’s escape from the Dying Earth into space while noting that others have done the same.  The point is that the universe is bigger than Urth and and that other possibilities exist out there rather than making it all about one rock.

By far the most suspicious thing about this theory is that never, not once, do any of the characters note a difference in gravity between the two worlds.  Mars gravity is one third that of Earth’s.  Severian might have elided his observation of such a detail, but Short Sun’s narrator would not.  If anything, the prodigious size of the trees on Green suggests that if either has weaker gravity, it’s Green.  Yes, there are parallels between the crumbling world of New Sun and the decayed Green; the two do remind the narrator of each other.  Of course, Green also reminds the narrator of Urth’s Lune (it’s green, probably from terraforming) but Green is definitely not the Urth’s moon.

The most intriguing aspect of Aramini’s theory is that it accounts for the existence of Martian plant men i.e., the Neighbors are trees.  Also that the inhumi are the lianas on Green’s trees.  There is certainly something going on with the trees and lianas that is never made explicit in the text because it is outside of the narrator’s understanding.  Also, the “Green Man”, oblique references to a plant-human hybrid, and Mars in general from New Sun are serious dangling threads to that story, something that Wolfe very likely intended to use later within the setting.

That being said, textual objections aside, I just don’t like it.