Did you know Gene Wolfe, who turns 85 years old today, invented Pringles? Well, okay, okay, that is a smidge hyperbolic, but he did develop the machine that makes them. I like to imagine that their famously mustachioed logo is an homage to Wolfe—look at that twinkle in his eye—but that is strictly head canon.
That is just the sort of person Gene Wolfe is though; he’s not content with writing a science fiction epic, or revolutionizing the fantasy epic, or creating a science fantasy epic that bridges the subgenres. Or that Neil Gaiman called him “…possibly the finest living American writer.” Or that Michael Swanwick called him the “…greatest writer in the English language alive today[,]” or that the Washington Post called The Book of the New Sun “[t]he greatest fantasy novel written by an American.” Oh no. He has to take a detour and help invent a new kind of potato chip. Even his life has secret nooks and crannies for the wary reader.
If I had to use two words to describe Gene Wolfe’s writing—say it was my one chance to avoid the fate of being given to the apprentice torturer who is the protagonist of The Book of the New Sun—those words would be “unreliable” and “narrator.” If I had to compare him to a couple of writers—if, say, the mercenary Latro, suffering from amnesia ever since he took a knock on his head fighting at the Battle of Thermopylae, needed it in short-hand—I would invoke Jack Vance and Jorge Luis Borges. Gene Wolfe paints lush worlds with a sense of history, vivid worlds that convince you they exist even after you close the covers of the book. Mythgarthr, the fantasy setting of The Wizard Knight, must be just next door to Earth, and the Urth of the Solar Cycle certainly is the far future fate of our world, isn’t it?
If you were ever going to take my word for something, take it for this: you should read Gene Wolfe. I’ll help you pick something out. If you like “Dying Earth” science fiction or fantasy—they blur together, as I’m sure you know, and Wolfe can be the blurriest—you should start with Shadow of the Torturer, book one of The Book of the New Sun, collected in an omnibus called Shadow and Claw. If you like high concept science fiction, try out Nightside the Long Sun, the first book in The Book of the Long Sun, collected in Litany of the Long Sun. If historical fantasy is more your speed, Soldier of the Mist, in the omnibus Latro in the Mist, is where you should start. If high fantasy is what you crave, The Knight is the book for you; its companion, The Wizard, concludes The Wizard Knight. Short stories, you ask? Wow, there are a lot of collections, but I guess The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (yes, sic) is my favorite, but then I’m a sucker for “The Hero as Werwolf” (again, sic). In the mood for something less fantastic? Try Peace, or read my review of it if you aren’t convinced.
I’ll leave you with a few words from Neil Gaiman on “How to read Gene Wolfe”:
There are wolves in there, prowling behind the words. Sometimes they come out in the pages. Sometimes they wait until you close the book. The musky wolf-smell can sometimes be masked by the aromatic scent of rosemary. Understand, these are not today-wolves, slinking grayly in packs through deserted places. These are the dire-wolves of old, huge and solitary wolves that could stand their ground against grizzlies.
This article was originally published May 7, 2013.
Mordicai Knode thinks Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix are Blue and Green; if not on a literal level than on a spiritual one. You can argue about with him about it on Twitter or see pretty pictures on Tumblr.
I’ll just leave this here: “Three Wolfe Moon.”
Where can I order a shirt! That is splendid.
Happy Birthday, sir!
and yes, that shirt is divine.
I must confess, the blame for that shirt must fall squarely on my incredibly terrible MSPaint skills.
Tiny nitpick: Latro lost his memory at the Battle of Plataea, not Thermopylae.
But Wolfe is a fantastic writer all around and almost everyone will find something they like in his catalog.
Long live the Wolfe!
5. DemetriosX
So noted! I probably just heard “Xerxes” & “Rope Makers” & my brain jumped to the obvious. I’m not the Hellenic scholar I wish I was.
If you’re a historical fiction fan, you might also like Wolfe’s nearly forgotten historical novel A DEVIL IN A FOREST. PIRATE FREEDOM is also pretty close to a historical novel with some fantastic elements added.
If you’re a fan of mainstream novels of depth and complexity, try PEACE, one of his best, although, being Wolfe, it’s very tricky, and turns out to be a good deal more than that.
8. Gardner Dozois
I must confess to the hope that the re-issue of Peace spells good news for Devil & Pandora…
Pringles? Hyperbolic? I see what you did there.
Majicou (@10): Nice, nice catch! Pringles chips and hyperbolic planes, yes! You win the “Three Wolfe Shirt”.
10. Majicou & 11. Eugene R.
(can’t decide if he should admit that glorious pun was unintended, or let people believe that he’s a pun genius.)
@12: Nonetheless, what a Wolfean way of putting it. (I half expect to find out that the article was unreliably narrated and, if interpreted, turns out to be about crisp manufacture) I haven’t read much Wolfe yet but my most recent is The Fifth Head of Cerberus (he even predicted Vernor Vinge!).
“If you were ever going to take my word for something, take it for this: you should read Gene Wolfe.” There it is in a Pringles tube.
The man and his work are Living Treasures.
13. SchuylerH
I really, really, really like Fifth Head. As I allude to in my sign-off, I like to pretend it directly & factually prefigures the Solar Cycle; while I realize that is probably not entirely accurate, it is hard not to see how it directly prefigures it literally– as in, from the stand point of literature– with shapeshifting aliens, mated worlds, ghoul bears, & all that jazz. The Lexicon Urthus speculates that the nearness of the Moon– Lune– in New Sun would have created tidal patterns matching those in Fifth Head…
@15: Imagine the effect it had on me: I hadn’t even heard of Gene Wolfe and picked it up in a hurry because it seemed short and was in the SF Masterworks line. I spent the next week re-reading it.
Wolfe’s writing style: haunting and hypnotic. Even if I have no idea what in the world is going on or who to trust, I find the story always irresistably compelling. A couple favorite short stories (or are they Novellas?): Forlesen; Tracking song.
You do not read Gene Wolfe stories. They happen to you. Then later, even when you are doing other things you begin to figure out what exactly happened to you and why. Re-reads shorten the cognitive louping.
16. SchuylerH
Ha ha ha oh man now I am cracking up. I remember when I figured out that the protagonist’s name is a pun on “gene” & that his last name starts with a “w” & isn’t “dog”…
…& then reading about how when there is just one Shadow Child alone, it’s name is “Wolf”…
17. Stephen Early
I just finished reading The Moon Pool— stay tuned to Tor.com for a forthcoming review– & if you liked “Tracking Song” you might like The Moon Pool.
18. Jonnyten
…until at some point the re-read finds the hidden gem that makes the 2d loop into a 3d sphere…
Thanks for the article, Mordicai. Gene Wolfe is a great, great artist. (For what it’s worth, St. Anne and St. Croix, while blue and green, seem to have been somewhat thematically inspired by the Virginia Woolf volume mentioned in the libary scene in Fifth Head – the story “Blue and Green” by Virginia Woolf, in which green represents fecundity, plants, and life while blue is the death of a rotting sea creature contrasted with a maddona’s veil from a cathedral). Sol can be seen in the sky from St. Anne and St. Croix, and Earth is actually a location that they can travel to and from. For many many reasons, that simply cannot be the case of Blue and Green in the Solar Cycle. The theme of the Short Sun book is that when you are trying to go home, both you and the home will have changed so much that you won’t recognize it anymore. Green is the hell in Short Sun, Blue the new chance. In Fifth Head, green St. Anne, named after the Virgin Mary’s mother, (associated with the immaculate conception) is a paradise lost, and blue St. Croix (the cross, named after the crucifixion of Christ (a parthenogenetically reproduced God-man, by the way)) a decadent, decayed, and over administrated society that no longer functions. Despite the city under the sea in Blue, the symbolic association would have reversed. The four armed man in St. Croix, another failed Wolfe clone, is the product of science and is definitely not a hybrid. The four armed creatures in Short Sun are biological in origin. The (not so) coincidental relationship between the two settings is authorial misdirection.
18. Jonnyten
A month later & I finally get “cognitive louping.”
Hooray for today!
I enjoyed the four books of the New Sun in that dazzled I-didn’t-understand-a-word kind of way. Is there an undergrad course on this somewhere, cause sign me up!
I always think his birthday is 7 March instead of May, but if anyone deserves two parties a year, it’s Mr. Wolfe.
@23: I’m celebrating with another Wolfe novel, Operation Ares. At least, when I’ve finished the Christopher Priest I’m on at the moment. (there’s another author who likes archipelagos, misdirection and unreliable narrators…)
@24: Wolfewiki is a good online resource and the man himself wrote The Castle of the Otter.
24. Cecrow
There are actually a fair chunk of scholarly resources to help you out! Michael Andre-Driussi’s Lexicon Urthus is probably the place to start. A really useful book!
25. Xena Catolica
Well there is the were-wolfe & the wolfe-were!
26. SchuylerH
I am purposefully putting off chasing down some of his early stuff, to save it for later. Treating myself on his birthday is a good idea…
Really need to revisit the entire Solar Cycle. If only Lake of the Long Sun was available in eBook format …
A merry Wolfemas to all! Time to open one of his collections at random, read something wonderful, and give thanks.
@28 I too have plans to re-read the entire Solar Cycle and an upcoming long vacation in which to do it but I would really prefer not to drag dead trees half way around the world to do it.
Can any Tor-eans shed any light on why only books 1, 3 and 4 of the Long Sun are available as ebooks?
Finished Operation ARES. Pretty minor Wolfe: 60s space advocacy drives the plot, where abandoned Martian colonists launch a war of the worlds to overthrow an anti-scientific, increasingly dystopian US government. Apparently heavily-edited, especially in the second half, my 1978 edition is the most recent.
Retrospectively, Home Fires seems to be a more successful reworking of some of this novel’s basic material, especially when it comes to the near-future backdrop. Still, there are some neat moments in the original: ARES doesn’t actually exist but that doesn’t matter, since everyone believes that it does and acts accordingly. Also, a novel that makes repeated reference to chess has a protagonist named John Castle…
@29: I seem to think there was a delay in releasing Exodus for a time. I haven’t read Long Sun yet but is there anything typographically complex in Lake?
There are Doors, too! Most times it pays not to step through them, but on the other hand … errr, paw, sometimes it can be very rewarding.
I re-read it a few years after I’d first read it, and the historical context leapt out at me. He couldn’t have written it any other time.
@30 There was a delay releasing Exodus but that’s been available for a year now with no sign of Lake. I don’t recall (and a quick flip through my dead tree edition doesn’t reveal) anything typographically unusual but even if there was, why would anyone release parts 3 & 4 before part 2? Maybe there’s some reason for it but if there is, I can’t figure it out.
Lake is available in French! Epiphany is available, but not Litany! Has anyone managed to find out why?
Many more happy returns: today I’m reading There Are Doors.
In my house, this is a Major Holiday with ice cream.
If you’ve never done so, read New Sun aloud. Really.
34. SchuylerH
Have you read it before? I have a pet theory that it happens in the same “world(s)” as An Evil Guest.
@35: And Pringles! Don’t forget Pringles! Wolfe is one of those writers who is better still when read aloud, like Wodehouse and Vance.
@36: No, I bought it a while ago but I decided to save it for today. Thus far, it’s been harder to predict than the outcome of the 2015 General Election (the main difference being that the election result is ultimately made clear…). I’m not familiar with An Evil Guest, beyond it being Wolfe’s 30’s-40’s pulp book. Could you elaborate?
this post almost brought tears to my eyes. i read the first book in the “latro” series sometime in the ’90s, moved across the country and was unable to bring all my books with me, forgot who’d written and convinced myself it was greg bear. so, you see, i remember the name/animal thing, but got the wrong combination. at any rate, i was anxious to read more: that book just got into my head. no pun intended. and all the greg bear books i bought were … well, okay, but they weren’t gene wolfe.
eventually, of course, i discovered my error and made up for lost time. i have literally consumed the man’s work. i jumped into “the solar cycle” at the wrong place entirely: i read “the book of the long sun” first. and loved it. backtracked to “the book of the short sun,” and then dove into “the book of the new sun.” the stories still haunt me. i have to re-read them regularly, or i start to experience symptoms of withdrawal. and, while i’m not quite so immune to other books (i love GRRM, for instance, and ASoIaF, but i also know that others find it hard to get into) and, before reading “the solar cycle,” my favorite series was “dune,” “dune messiah,” and “children of dune.” the rest of the sequels in the story just didn’t speak to me, not even with the voice of duncan idaho, who was my favorite character, but the first three were so excellent. and, yet, since reading wolfe … nothing holds a candle to him. nothing at all. and why am i effusing about all this with no real point to make? because no matter how many science fiction clubs i’ve joined, no one else has read him. no one else GETS it. thank you all for getting it, and thank you all for talking about it. this has brought me joy. :)
Wow, this has come round again and I am unprepared. Anyway, happy birthday once again: I suppose I will have to read A Borrowed Man soon…
I tried reading The Knight once. I didn’t even make it halfway. I thought it was a pretty badly written book. Never read anything else of his.
So like so much with Mr. Wolf the pun ten and 11 mention. I have read the lorato stories through Egypt. I wish there were more as they were very cool. The new sun I have read was amazing but man did I miss a TON. A reread of that would be amazing. PLEASE! I felt so good when I figured out they were looking at a picture of armstrong the moon. And when naturiam was Sodium. Since I am a chemist though that was easy. I missed so much though that I want to understand!
Marc Aramini @20:”Sol can be seen in the sky from St. Anne and St. Croix, and Earth is actually a location that they can travel to and from. For many many reasons, that simply cannot be the case of Blue and Green in the Solar Cycle.”
Nevertheless, both *are* the case. A character points out Sol in the sky of Blue, and he and some other characters travel there, albeit by way of astral projection.
Having had my reading preferences set so high by discovering Wolfe in my early teens, I was fortunate enough to stumble into a few other writers whose works can evince some of the same glory-in-prose. My two favorite are: John Crowley (“Little, Big” and “The Aegypt Cycle”) and the incredible “Gormenghast” novels by Mervyn Peake. Find them, set your sights on slow revelations, and dig in…