Interlibrary Loan
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4.1 • 7 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Interlibrary Loan is the brilliant follow-up to A Borrowed Man: the final work of fiction from multi-award winner and national literary treasure Gene Wolfe.
A 2021 Locus Award Finalist!
Hundreds of years in the future our civilization is shrunk down but we go on. There is advanced technology, there are robots.
And there are clones.
E. A. Smithe is a borrowed person, his personality an uploaded recording of a deceased mystery writer. Smithe is a piece of property, not a legal human.
As such, Smithe can be loaned to other branches. Which he is. Along with two fellow reclones, a cookbook and romance writer, they are shipped to Polly’s Cove, where Smithe meets a little girl who wants to save her mother, a father who is dead but perhaps not.
And another E.A. Smithe… who definitely is.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With this wily, witty work, SFWA Grand Master Wolfe (1931 2019) takes readers on a final trip to the far future world of 2015's A Borrowed Man, in which clones of long-dead writers can be borrowed from the library. Ern A. Smithe, a library clone of a deceased mystery author, is on loan to little girl Chandra Fevre and her bedridden mother, Adah, who hope for his help in deciphering a treasure map and recovering Chandra's missing father, Dr. Fevre. Smithe, together with the clones of a cookbook author and a romance writer, moves into their haunted mansion, plans an expedition to follow the map to the mysterious Cadaver Island, and succeeds in bringing home Dr. Fevre, a scientist with grandiose dreams. But all is not as it seems, and soon Smithe has to solve Fevre's murder. This devious, often difficult series ender pushes its Gothic aesthetic to an extreme until the plot becomes a surreal fever dream. Throughout, Wolfe raises questions about the agency of the clones, challenging whether Smithe is really any less human than his borrowers. It's a sardonic view of human relationships on offer, leavened with a droll, punny narrative voice. Complex and clever, this last offering from Wolfe is sure to please sci-fi readers.
