Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 2007 by Spilogale Authors

Author:Spilogale Authors [Authors, Spilogale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Magazine, 2012
Publisher: Spilogale, Inc.
Published: 2010-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

Gene Wolfe: The Man and His Work by MICHAEL ANDRE-DRIUSSI

John Clute has called him “quite possibly the most important” author in the contemporary sf field. Ursula K. Le Guin has called him “our Melville.” Michael Swanwick has called him the greatest living writer in the English language. Who is this mild-mannered man named Gene Wolfe, and how has he won these accolades?

Through a lot of hard work, it turns out.

Gene Wolfe came to writing after returning home from the Korean War (1954), completing his college education at the University of Houston, and getting married in 19561.

Looking for a way to supplement his salary as an engineer at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, the twenty-six-year-old newlywed began writing stories in whatever free time he could find.

His first sale came eight years later, in 1965.

To put this into perspective, at that point he had three children (of an eventual four), with the eldest already in second grade. That's a long time in “parent years."

His first novel was published in 1970, and since then he has written twenty-three more, some of them singletons, most of them set in one of several series (The Book of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun, The Book of the Short Sun, The Wizard Knight, and the Soldier series). His novels have won awards: the Nebula, World Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards, British awards, among others. Although he is primarily a novelist, Gene Wolfe has never abandoned the writing of shorter works and he has seen more than 210 of them published.

His stories cover a broad spectrum of science fiction and fantasy, ranging from high-brow literary puzzles to low-brow tabloid realism, with several odd tangents in between. He has a knack for taking a genre staple and turning it on its head. For example, an early space adventure titled “Alien Stones” (collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories) in which the starship's empath thinks like a child and the rugged captain can solve the first-contact mystery only by thinking like an engineer, seems like a topsy-turvy version of Star Trek.

There's some Horror, there's some Mystery, and there's some Humor. Looking across it all, certain trends become apparent in each of four decades: the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, and the present.

The Seventies: Literary Tricks

This is a trick question, but an easy one.

—Number Five

Gene Wolfe first gained attention in the 1970s through two different series of linked stories: the three novellas of The Fifth Head of Cerberus and the “Island” stories. His technique was to take an initial story, shift it dramatically for a second story, and then shift it again for a third story. This literary gambit paid off handsomely: the second “Island” story, “The Death of Doctor Island,” won both a Nebula and a Locus award.

In 1972 Wolfe left Procter & Gamble to become a senior editor at Plant Engineering, a trade journal located in Barrington, Illinois (a job he would stay with until he became a full-time writer in 1984).

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