On Blue's Waters is a masterpiece. The narrative structure is temporally very complex, but coherent, and alternates between wistful contemplation of the past by the protagonist (often times about things that have not yet happened yet), and and an account of that protagonist's search for Silk. On the whole it is a dream like experience.
I found the first-person narration of On Blue’s Waters emotionally devastating. Wolfe endowed that narrator with so much pain, bitterness, regret, and loss. I got On Blue’s Waters as soon as it came out and was eager for the following volumes, but I must admit that the rest of that trilogy really disappointed me, namely: 1) Wolfe’s putting characters’ dialogue in annoying thick dialect of various sorts, 2) mapping the distant planet’s various cultures to silly ethnic stereotypes of our planet’s Italians, Indians, and Dutch, and 3) gratuitously bringing the action back to The Book of the New Sun which didn’t add much to the plot and felt like a cheap commercial tie-in.
