Interlibrary Loan

Hardcover, 240 pages

Published by Tor Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-250-24236-5

(1 review)

Interlibrary Loan is the brilliant follow-up to A Borrowed Man a new science fiction novel from multi-award winner and national literary treasure Gene Wolfe

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.

4 editions

David Scrimshaw reviewed Interlibrary Loan by Gene Wolfe

Review of 'Interlibrary Loan' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

This is apparently the last book Gene Wolfe wrote and it feels like he didn't get to finish it. But I'm still glad I read it. It was great to see how things were going with this version of Ern Smithe after the events of A Borrowed Man.

Smithe is a reclone in a world where he is treated as a thing that can be damaged or destroyed with little to no repercussions. I found it refreshing that Wolfe tells how Smithe copes with this instead of making this a story of the massive revolution that would be required to correct this injustice.