Sunseed

Okay, that title was mostly an excuse to link to this. But it's also a bit of a play on words since I'm going to talk about the Long Sun series by Gene Wolfe. You need to read Wolfe's books. Read them!

I read the first two books in a single volume, Litany of the Long Sun, but the library only has individual volumes for the last two books. I finished Caldé of the Long Sun a couple days ago and it's fantastic stuff. It's a slow realization (at least it was for me, since I don't try to puzzle books out as I read them, preferring to be pulled along by the story if it's conducive to that) that the series ties in with the same universe as that of the New Sun series.

These books focus on a young priest named Silk (throughout the series everyone has a name that is related to the natural world, Blood, Auk, Lemur, Marble, etc) and his quest to save what in our world would be called his parish. He begins the tale by being a priest and worshipper of the nine gods of his world, but is given a vision from what he thinks of as a minor god, called the Outsider. If I've been interpreting things correctly, this corresponds to the true God and he has been becoming more and more disillusioned about the divinity of the nine he has always thought of as gods.

Eventually his quest to save his small parish broadens as he is sucked into the civil unrest that begins when more and more people flock to see him when it becomes known that he receives visitations from the gods. When people see the manifestations during the religious ceremonies over which he presides, they begin to agitate for him to be declared the leader of his city-state. Adventure ensues.

Anyway, I don't want to be too spoilerish. Again, the books are solid and the characters are believable and easily differentiated. Some authors (I'm looking at you David Eddings) end up with all their characters seeming the same; they've all been taken from the same mold and just had some minor differences tacked on. Wolfe manages to keep people distinct.