Apr. 16th, 2019 04:35 pm
Gene Wolfe, 1931-2019
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muckefuckWhile France's most famous cathedral was burning, the USA lost one of our greatest living writers, Gene Wolfe. Judging from the dearth of encomia, he doesn't seem to have been well-known outside of the literary SF community, but he was reportedly one of the few US genre authors (alongside the late Ursula Le Guin) ever seriously considered for a Nobel.
As I summarised briefly on FB, I have an odd history with Wolfe. I'm pretty sure his The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and other stories (1980) is the first volume of science fiction I've ever owned. It was my older brother who introduced me to the genre with two collections of award-winning fiction, one of Hugo winners and another of Nebula winners. I guess someone in the household noticed and in Christmas of '82 or '83 I got the Wolfe.
It wasn't something I'd asked for specifically, so I have no idea how my mom (if that's who gifted it) selected it. And it was, truth be told, a little too challenging for me at the time. I didn't have a lot of experience with unreliable narrators and ambiguous endings at that age, nor with descriptions of sex and other adult situations, so I found it equal parts baffling and intriguing. To this day, I still don't know what some of the stories were getting at. But the cleverness of, for instance, having three stories on different themes and in different styles called "The island of Doctor Death", "The Death of Dr. Island", and "The Doctor of Death Island" wasn't lost on me.
Still, it would be about twenty years before I tried reading him again. Monshu had all three novels in the Book of the New Sun and that was enough of a recommendation for me to give them a shot. Again, I was deeply impressed by his cleverness and the boldness of some of his choices. When we packed up to move into our joint condo, I brought the books with me thinking I would want to read them again someday.
And then another decade went by without me sparing much thought for Wolfe until a chance encountre with The fifth book of Cerberus in a second-hand bookstore two years ago. If not quite on a par with those other works, it nonetheless exhibited the same odd mixture of writer's creativity and reader's confusion.
Two points don't determine a trend, but if they did, we could expect only 3-5 years before I start in on another of his novels. Certainly I don't intend to wait longer than that. He was a rare talent (and--by all accounts--a wonderful human being)--we were lucky to have him for so long.
As I summarised briefly on FB, I have an odd history with Wolfe. I'm pretty sure his The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and other stories (1980) is the first volume of science fiction I've ever owned. It was my older brother who introduced me to the genre with two collections of award-winning fiction, one of Hugo winners and another of Nebula winners. I guess someone in the household noticed and in Christmas of '82 or '83 I got the Wolfe.
It wasn't something I'd asked for specifically, so I have no idea how my mom (if that's who gifted it) selected it. And it was, truth be told, a little too challenging for me at the time. I didn't have a lot of experience with unreliable narrators and ambiguous endings at that age, nor with descriptions of sex and other adult situations, so I found it equal parts baffling and intriguing. To this day, I still don't know what some of the stories were getting at. But the cleverness of, for instance, having three stories on different themes and in different styles called "The island of Doctor Death", "The Death of Dr. Island", and "The Doctor of Death Island" wasn't lost on me.
Still, it would be about twenty years before I tried reading him again. Monshu had all three novels in the Book of the New Sun and that was enough of a recommendation for me to give them a shot. Again, I was deeply impressed by his cleverness and the boldness of some of his choices. When we packed up to move into our joint condo, I brought the books with me thinking I would want to read them again someday.
And then another decade went by without me sparing much thought for Wolfe until a chance encountre with The fifth book of Cerberus in a second-hand bookstore two years ago. If not quite on a par with those other works, it nonetheless exhibited the same odd mixture of writer's creativity and reader's confusion.
Two points don't determine a trend, but if they did, we could expect only 3-5 years before I start in on another of his novels. Certainly I don't intend to wait longer than that. He was a rare talent (and--by all accounts--a wonderful human being)--we were lucky to have him for so long.
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