Gene Wolfe
Based on Wikipedia: Gene Wolfe
Gene Wolfe died in April 2019, and most of the world barely noticed. No obituary in the New York Times. No trending hashtags. Just a quiet departure at age eighty-seven in Peoria, Illinois.
Which is fitting, really. Because Gene Wolfe spent his entire career being the best writer almost nobody had heard of.
He's been called "the Melville of science fiction." Ursula K. Le Guin said "Wolfe is our Melville." Michael Swanwick went further: "Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning."
Strong words. And yet if you asked a hundred random people on the street who Gene Wolfe was, maybe two would know.
The Engineer Who Wrote Like a Poet
Gene Rodman Wolfe was born in New York City on May 7, 1931. He contracted polio as a small child—one of countless kids who suffered through that terrifying disease before the Salk vaccine. His family moved to Houston when he was six.
At Texas A&M University, he published his first speculative fiction in a student literary journal called The Commentator. Early in his writing career, he exchanged letters with J. R. R. Tolkien himself. Imagine that correspondence: the young American engineer and the Oxford don who created Middle-earth.
But college didn't last. Wolfe dropped out during his junior year and was drafted to fight in the Korean War. After returning to the United States, he earned his degree from the University of Houston and became an industrial engineer.
Here's a delightful fact: Gene Wolfe's most famous professional engineering achievement is a contribution to the machine used to make Pringles potato chips. Yes, those hyperbolic paraboloid curved chips that stack so neatly. Gene Wolfe helped engineer that.
For years, he worked as a senior editor on the staff of the journal Plant Engineering. He wrote his novels and stories on the side, before work and after dinner. He didn't retire to write full-time until 1984, when he was already fifty-three years old.
The Book of the New Sun
Wolfe's best-known work is The Book of the New Sun, a four-volume series published between 1980 and 1983. It's set in a bleak, distant future influenced by Jack Vance's Dying Earth series—a time when our sun is guttering out and Earth has become Urth, a world layered with the ruins of countless civilizations.
The story follows Severian, a journeyman torturer exiled from his guild for showing compassion to one of the condemned. He's an executioner who commits the unforgivable sin of mercy.
The four volumes are The Shadow of the Torturer (1980), The Claw of the Conciliator (1981, which won the Nebula Award for Best Novel), The Sword of the Lictor (1982), and The Citadel of the Autarch (1983). A coda called The Urth of the New Sun appeared in 1987, tying up loose ends, though it's generally considered a separate work.
In 1998, Locus magazine ranked The Book of the New Sun as the third-best fantasy novel published before 1990, based on a poll of subscribers who considered multi-volume series as single entries.
But here's what makes Wolfe different from almost every other fantasy or science fiction writer: his prose is dense, allusive, and demands your full attention. He doesn't explain everything. He trusts you to be smart enough to figure it out.
The Unreliable Narrator
Wolfe loved unreliable narrators. He said, "Real people really are unreliable narrators all the time, even if they try to be reliable narrators."
His characters are unreliable for different reasons. Some are naive, like the protagonists of Pandora by Holly Hollander or The Knight. Others aren't particularly intelligent, as in There Are Doors. Severian, from The Book of the New Sun, tells his story from the perspective of his younger, ignorant self—even though he claims to have perfect memory. And Latro, from the Soldier series, suffers from amnesia and must write down everything that happens to him each day because he'll forget it by morning.
This creates a reading experience unlike almost anything else in genre fiction. You have to pay attention. You have to think. You have to reread.
Wolfe wrote in a letter: "My definition of a great story has nothing to do with 'a varied and interesting background.' It is: One that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure."
He left subtle hints and gaps that may never be explicitly addressed in the text. For example, a backyard full of morning glories in Free Live Free is an intentional foreshadowing of events—but only if you know your horticulture. A story-within-the-story provides a clue to understanding Peace, but you have to recognize it as such.
The Language of Urth
In the appendix to The Shadow of the Torturer, Wolfe includes a note from the fictional translator of Severian's manuscript:
In rendering this book—originally composed in a tongue that has not achieved existence—into English, I might easily have saved myself a great deal of labor by having recourse to invented terms; in no case have I done so. Thus in many instances I have been forced to replace yet undiscovered concepts by their closest twentieth-century equivalents. Such words as peltast, androgyn, and exultant are substitutions of this kind, and are intended to be suggestive rather than definitive.
This gives you insight into how Wolfe worked. All of his terms—fuligin, carnifex, thaumaturge—are real words. Fuligin is a color described as "darker than black." A carnifex is an executioner. A thaumaturge is a wonder-worker, a magician.
He could have invented words. He chose not to. Instead, he dug through the English language and found forgotten treasures.
The Solar Cycle and Beyond
In the 1990s, Wolfe published two more works set in the same universe as The Book of the New Sun. The Book of the Long Sun consists of four novels published between 1993 and 1996, following a priest who becomes wrapped up in political intrigue and revolution in his city-state aboard a generation starship.
The Book of the Short Sun, published between 1999 and 2001, deals with colonists who have arrived on the sister planets Blue and Green.
Together with The Book of the New Sun and The Urth of the New Sun, these works are called the Solar Cycle. They span thousands of years and ask profound questions about religion, identity, memory, and what it means to be human.
Wolfe also wrote many standalone novels. Two held in particularly high esteem are Peace and The Fifth Head of Cerberus. Peace is the seemingly rambling narrative of Alden Dennis Weer, a man reviewing his life under mysterious circumstances. The Fifth Head of Cerberus is either a collection of three novellas or a novel in three parts, dealing with colonialism, memory, and the nature of personal identity.
The Writer's Writer
Wolfe was never a bestseller. He didn't have the mass appeal of Stephen King or the cultural phenomenon status of George R. R. Martin. But among writers and serious readers of science fiction and fantasy, he was revered.
Patrick O'Leary said: "Forget 'Speculative Fiction.' Gene Wolfe is the best writer alive. Period."
Harlan Ellison, reviewing The Shadow of the Torturer, wrote: "Gene Wolfe is engaged in the holy chore of writing every other author under the table. He is no less than one of the finest, most original writers in the world today."
Neil Gaiman, introducing Wolfe at the World Horror Convention, offered this advice on how to read him: "There are two kinds of clever writer. The ones that point out how clever they are, and the ones who see no need to point out how clever they are. Gene Wolfe is of the second kind, and the intelligence is less important than the tale. He is not smart to make you feel stupid. He is smart to make you smart as well."
Gaiman also wrote about Wolfe in The Guardian: "I've met too many of my heroes, and these days I avoid meeting the few I have left, because the easiest way to stop having heroes is to meet them, or worse, have dinner with them. But Gene Wolfe remains a hero to me."
A Life in Peoria
Wolfe lived in Barrington, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, with his wife Rosemary, where they raised four children. They moved to Peoria in 2013.
In 2010, Wolfe underwent double bypass surgery. In early 2013, he had cataract surgery on his right eye. His wife Rosemary died on December 14, 2013, after a series of illnesses including Alzheimer's disease.
Wolfe said of her: "There was a time when she did not remember my name or that we were married, but she still remembered that she loved me."
He continued writing. He kept producing deep, complex, brilliant fiction that slipped between genres. He just turned eighty. Then eighty-five. Then eighty-seven.
He died at his Peoria home from cardiovascular disease on April 14, 2019.
The Awards and the Recognition
Wolfe won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1996. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2007. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him its twenty-ninth Grand Master in December 2012.
He won Nebula Awards and World Fantasy Awards for individual works. He accumulated sixteen Nebula Award nominations and eight Hugo Award nominations over his career.
In March 2012, he was presented with the first Chicago Literary Hall of Fame Fuller Award for outstanding contribution to literature by a Chicago author. After his death, he was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in a ceremony on September 21, 2021.
The Dedicated Few
Wolfe's fans are devoted. An internet mailing list called URTH, begun in November 1996, amassed over ten years and thousands of pages of discussion and analysis of his works. Much more analysis and interpretation has been published in fanzines and small-press books.
His readers reread. They find new layers. They argue about what really happened in Peace or what Severian's true nature is in The Book of the New Sun. They decode the subtle hints Wolfe left scattered through his prose.
Thomas M. Disch, when asked about the most overrated and most underrated authors, identified Isaac Asimov and Gene Wolfe respectively. He wrote: "Between 1980 and 1982 he published The Book of the New Sun, a tetralogy of couth, intelligence, and suavity that is also written in VistaVision with Dolby Sound. Imagine a Star Wars–style space opera penned by G. K. Chesterton in the throes of a religious conversion. Wolfe has continued in full diapason ever since, and a crossover success is long overdue."
Michael Dirda wrote: "If Proust, while listening to late Beethoven string quartets, wrote I, Claudius and set it in the future, the result might resemble this measured, autumnal masterpiece."
The Catholic Imagination
Wolfe was a devout Catholic, and his faith deeply influenced his work. Not in an obvious, preachy way—Wolfe was far too subtle for that. But his books are full of questions about grace, redemption, sacrifice, and the nature of God.
Severian the torturer becomes Severian the Autarch. The compassion he showed to one condemned woman sets in motion events that will either save or doom the world. His story is about mercy, about second chances, about the possibility of transformation.
These aren't Sunday school lessons. They're profound meditations on what it means to be fallen and yet capable of grace.
Why He Matters
Gene Wolfe proved that science fiction and fantasy could be literary without being pretentious. He showed that genre fiction could be as complex, as rewarding, as demanding as anything labeled "serious literature."
He didn't dumb things down. He didn't explain everything. He trusted his readers to rise to the challenge.
And for those readers who did—who worked through the allusions, who caught the subtle foreshadowing, who reread and discovered new depths—the reward was immense.
He was the finest living male American writer of science fiction and fantasy. Possibly the finest living American writer, period.
Most people hadn't heard of him. And that didn't bother Gene in the slightest. He just got on with writing the next book.