Pirate Freedom
by Gene Wolfe · first published 2007
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A young priest fresh out of seminary, Father Christopher finds himself inexplicably swept back in time to the Golden Age of Piracy, where he finds himself caught up in the life of a buccaneer and trolling the waters of the Caribbean in search of Spanish gold.
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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.
on “Gene Wolfe, 'magnificent' giant of science fiction, dies aged 87” ↗…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
on “Dark Futures: What happens when literary novelists experiment with Sci-Fi” ↗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.
on “Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them” ↗…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.
on “Ends of the Urth” ↗