Pirate Freedom

What Hacker News says

1. kejApr 2019
   It gets lost in his other excellent books, but I really liked Pirate Freedom. A guy from the near future finds himself sent back in time to the golden age of piracy, and Wolfe does a masterful job of tying the plot threads together at the end.
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2. akvadrakoJun 2017
   I consider the Solar Cycle (including this book) possibly the best work of fiction ever, but it's quite heavy. I'm not sure I'll ever reread them, because I remember feeling a bit like I'm drowning in the story.

   For someone new to Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus gives a good taste about what's in store without so much commitment.

   Besides those I also strongly remember these works:

   - The Wizard Knight: straight-up fantasy but quite philosophical like sci-fi should be

   - Pirate Freedom: an interesting "historic" view of pirate life

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3. Mediterraneo10Jun 2019
   Wolfe was terrific for the brief span of a decade or so. It is no accident that the books for which he is so often acclaimed (The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, BotNS) were all written in the 1970s. At that time he managed to combine intricately plotted, deceitful-narrator plots with excellent prose that was fully the equal of Proust or Nabokov. Beyond those three book-length works, his short stories of this period are also worth reading.

   Once the 1980s arrived, Wolfe’s prose suddenly became plain and lackluster. His works continued to mine the same vein of deceitful narrators where the actual plot and events have to be riddled out by attentive readers, but these started to get dull and frustrating. All that was left to his writing was the book-as-puzzle, and literary value or even mere enjoyment went out the window. His editor kept accepting what Wolfe gave him and took it on faith that the work was competent, but even Wolfe fans have wondered if A Land Across, for example, can even be completely figured out.

   Not to mention some cringeworthy stylistic choices and concerns of the late books, like putting the speech of characters on a distant planet into 20th-century ethnic stereotypes (The Book of the Short Sun) or old-man rants about modern society (Pirate Freedom). As someone who got into Wolfe through the early books and then voraciously read everything he wrote after that, the gradual disappointment was crushing.

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4. jessaustinAug 2017
   It would be difficult to do Wolfe justice in a film? Maybe something self-contained like Pirate Freedom or The Fifth Head of Cerberus, but everything in the "Solar Cycle" has such bizarre complications and connections to everything else that a movie couldn't avoid making many cruel cuts.
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