WOLFE, Gene (Rodman)

(1931-)

   US writer, born in New York, raised in Texas, and now living in Illinois. After serving in the Korean War - his experiences there are recorded in Letters Home (coll 1991), which contains correspondence with his mother between 1952 and 1954 - he graduated in mechanical engineering from the University of Houston and worked in engineering until becoming an editor of a trade periodical, Plant Engineering, in 1972. Since retiring from this post in 1984, he has written full-time. Though neither the most popular nor the most influential author in the sf field, GW is today quite possibly the most important.He started writing early, but did not find it easy to break into print; his first published story, "The Dead Man" for Sir, appeared as late as 1965, years after he had begun to create fictionof some distinction. In his early career, much of his best work tended to appear in various volumes of Damon KNIGHT's Orbit anthologies, starting with "Trip, Trap" (1967) and climaxing with the superb KAFKA-esque allegory, "Forlesen" (1974). In the middle of the series came "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" (1970 Orbit 7), which was assembled - along with The Death of Doctor Island (1973 Universe 3, anth ed Terry CARR; 1990 chap dos), "The Doctor of Death Island" (1978), and "Death ofthe Island Doctor" (original to the coll) - as The Wolfe Archipelago (coll 1983). These 4 stories, each fully autonomous though each mirroring theothers' structural and thematic patterns, comprise an intensely interesting cubist portrayal of the mortal trap (or coffin) of identity, written in terms that are instrinsically sf in nature. From the first, in other words, GW created texts which - almost uniquely-married Modernism (FABULATION) and sf, rather than putting them into rhetorical opposition;his ultimate importance to world literature derives from the success of that marriage, though his use of a thoroughly natural sf idiom has of course ensured that the response to his work, on the part of non-sf critics, has been poverty-stricken. CHILDREN - as very often in his work - tend to be the viewpoint characters in the Archipelago stories, giving the texts a supremely deceptive air of clarity-for although the surface is nearly always described with precision in a GW tale, the true story within is generally conveyed by indirection, revealing itself through the reader's ultimate comprehension of the proper and hierarchical sorting of its parts. Constrained to metaphorically fecund ISLAND contexts, the Archipelago tales are particularly intricate. The first treats withassurance the shifting line that divides fantasy and reality as a young boy retreats from a harsh adult environment into the more clear-cut world generated by a pulp magazine. "The Death of Doctor Island" expands and reverses this theme in describing the treatment of a psychologically disturbed child constrained to an artificial environment which responds to his state of mind. In "The Doctor of Death Island" a cryogenically frozen prisoner is awakened to find that his bound isolation has been hardened into IMMORTALITY. All 3 protagonists must attempt - it is a compulsion that GW would inflict upon many of his characters - to decipher and to penetrate the stories that tell them, and by so doing to leap free. GW won a Nebula for "The Death of Doctor Island".During the 1970s, GW continued to publish short stories at a considerable rate, at least 70 reaching print before the end of the decade; in the 1980s, as he concentrated more and more fully on novels, this production decreased markedly. His short work has been assembled in THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR DEATH AND OTHER STORIES AND OTHER STORIES (coll 1980), Gene Wolfe's Book of Days (coll 1981),Bibliomen: Twenty Characters Waiting for a Book (coll of linked stories 1984 chap), Plan[e]t Engineering (coll 1984), Storeys from the Old Hotel (coll 1988 UK) and Endangered Species (coll 1989). Short stories of particular interest include "Three Million Square Miles" (1971 Ruins of Earth, anth ed Thomas M. DISCH), "Feather Tigers" (1973 Edge), "La Befana"(1973 Gal), The Hero as Werwolf (1975 The New Improved Sun, anth ed Disch; 1991 chap), "Tracking Song" (1975 In the Wake of Man, anth ed Roger ELWOOD), "The Eyeflash Miracles" (1976 Future Power, anth ed Gardner DOZOIS and Jack DANN), Seven American Nights (1978 Orbit 20, anth ed Damon Knight; 1989 chap dos), "The War Beneath the Tree" (1978 Omni) and "The Detective of Dreams" (1980 Dark Forces, anth ed Kirby McCauley). Later work was variously interesting, though in the 1980s GW was increasingly inclined, in short forms, to restrict his energies to the composition of oneiric jeux d'esprit.GW's first novel, Operation ARES (1970), in which a 21st-century USA is invaded by its abandoned Martian colony, was heavilycut by the publisher, and reads as apprentice work. His next, THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS (fixup 1972), comprises 3 separate tales, one previouslypublished but all so closely linked as to be crippled in isolation. Set on a distant two-planet system colonized by settlers of French origin, the book combines ALIENS, ANTHROPOLOGY, CLONES and other elements in a richly imaginative exploration of the nature of identity and individuality. It was the first significant demonstration of the great difficulty of reading GW without constant attention to the almost subliminal - but in retrospector after rereading almost invariably lucid and inevitable - clues laid down in the text to govern its comprehension. As with all his most important work to date, the protagonist (in this case there is also a more elusively presented second protagonist) tells from a conceptual or temporal remove the story of his own childhood, in the form of a confession whose truth value is unrelentingly dubious. The parenthood of the clone who narrates the first part of the novel is problematical - or concealed - as is usual in GW's work; questions of identity are poignantly intensified as it becomes clear - perhaps only upon a second reading - that, before the main action of the tale has begun, a shapeshifting alien (the second protagonist) from the oppressed second planet has taken on theidentity of a visiting anthropologist. By the end of the novel, both protagonists - one a clone engineered into repeating previous identities, the other an impostor caught in the coffin of his fake self and literally imprisoned as well - have come to represent a singularly rich, singularly bleak vision of the shaping of a conscious life through time.Peace (1975), an afterlife fantasy set in the contemporary middle USA, was, word for word, perhaps GW's most intricate and personal work; though not sf, it is central to any full attempt to understand his other novels, his sense of the great painfulness of any shaped life, or his methods in general. The protagonist of the book - who tells the story of his childhood, all unknowingly, from beyond the grave - is both a self-portrait of the artist as a teller of stories and a rounded, and murderous, character in his own right. The Devil in a Forest (1976), a juvenile set at the time of King Wenceslas, with little or no fantasy element, shares some of the lightnessof tone of Pandora by Holly Hollander (1990), which some feel may have been written around this time, a non-fantastic detective novel which might also be described as a juvenile of sorts.It was his next and most ambitious work - the long central tale and appendages of The Book of the New Sun sequence - which finally brought GW to a wide audience. The heartof the sequence was a single sustained long novel broken into 4 parts for commercial reasons and published as THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER (1980), The Claw of the Conciliator (1981), The Sword of the Lictor (1982) and TheCitadel of the Autarch (1983); the first pair were assembled as The Book of the New Sun, Volumes I and II (omni 1983 UK; vt Shadow and Claw 1994 US), and the second pair as The Book of the New Sun, Volumes III and IV(omni 1985 UK; vt Sword and Citadel 1994 US). Essays and tales in explanation of The Book of the New Sun were assembled as The Castle of the Otter (dated 1982 but 1983); tales supposedly extracted from one of theseminal books carried throughout his travels by Severian, the protagonist of The Book of the New Sun, were published as The Boy who Hooked the Sun: A Tale from the Book of Wonders of Urth and Sky (1985 chap) and Empires ofFoliage and Flower: A Tale from the Book of Wonders of Urth and Sky (1987 chap); "A Solar Labyrinth" (1983) was a metafiction about the entire Book; and the whole edifice was sequeled in The Urth of the New Sun (1987 UK). The 1st volume gained a World Fantasy Award and the 2nd a Nebula.As asynthesizing work of fiction - a type of creation which tends to come, for obvious reasons, late in the period or genre it transmutes - The Book of the New Sun owes clear debts to the sf and fantasy world in general, and in particular to the dying-Earth (FAR FUTURE) category of PLANETARY ROMANCE initiated by Jack VANCE. Though it is a full-blown tale ofcosmogony, the entire story is set on Urth, eons hence, a world so impacted with the relics of humanity's long residence that archaeology and geology have become, in a way, the same science: that of plumbing the body of the planet for messages which have become inextricably intermingled over the innumerable years. The world into which Severian is born has indeed become so choked with formula and ritual that early readers of THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER could be perhaps forgiven for identifying the textas SWORD AND SORCERY, though hints that the book was in fact sf-oriented SCIENCE FANTASY were - in the usual GW manner - abundant. Apparently anorphan, Severian is raised as an apprentice torturer in the Matachin Tower which nests among other similar towers in the Citadel compound of the capital city of Nessus, somewhere in the southern hemisphere (one of the easier tasks of decipherment GW imposes is that of understanding that the Towers are in fact ancient spaceships). Severian grows to young adulthood,falls into too intimate a concourse with an exultant (a genetically bred aristocrat) due to be tortured to death, is banished, travels through the land, becomes involved in a war to the far north where he meets-not for the first time - the old Autarch who dominates the world and who recognizes in Severian his appointed heir, and himself becomes Autarch.It is a classic plot, and superficially unproblematic. But Severian himself is very distant in conception from the normal sf or science-fantasy hero he seems, at some moments, to resemble. As usual with GW, the protagonist himself narrates the story of his childhood and early youth from a period some years later; Severian makes it clear that he has an infallible memory (but is less clear about the fact that he is capable of lying); he alsomakes it clear that he has known from an early age that he is (or has been, or will be) the reborn manifestation of the Conciliator-a MESSIAH figure from a previous, or through TIME PARADOXES, a possibly concurrent reality - whose rebirth is for the purpose of bringing the New Sun to Urth. At this point, sf and Catholicism - GW is Roman Catholic - breedtogether, for the New Sun is both white hole and Revelation. The imagery and structure of The Book of the New Sun make it explicitly clear that Severian himself is both Apollo and Christ, and that the story of his lifeis a secular rendering of the parousia, or Second Coming. His cruelty to himself and others is the cruelty of the Universe itself; and his reverence for the world constitutes no simple blessing. His family is a Holy Family, lowly and anonymous, but ever-present; and their absence fromany "starring" role - GW refuses in the text to identify any of them - has religious implications as well as aesthetic. (Much attention, some of it approaching the Talmudical, has been spent on identifying this Family, which does clearly include: Dorcas, Severian's paternal grandmother; his unnamed though Charonian paternal grandfather; his father Ouen; his mother Katherine; and-almost certainly - a sibling, who may be the homunculusfound in a jar in The Citadel of the Autarch.) The sequel, The Urth of the New Sun, takes Severian through reality levels of the Universe to thepoint-ambiguous in time and space, though related to the Omega Point posited by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) - where he will be judged as to his Autarchal fitness to bring the New Sun home. As foreordained, he passes the test. Urth is drowned in the floods that mark the passing of the white hole, the rebirth of light. Some survive, to begin again; or to continue in their ways.Subsequent 1980s novels were very various. Free Live Free (1984) is a TIME-TRAVEL tale, extremely complex to parse, through which shines a retelling of L. Frank BAUM's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). There Are Doors (1988), set in a bleakPARALLEL WORLD redolent of the USA during the Depression, most ambivalently depicts a man's life-threatening exogamous passion for a goddess. Castleview (1990) implants very nearly the entirety of the Arthurian Cycle in contemporary Illinois, where a new Arthur is recruitedfor the long battle. Most interesting perhaps is the Latro sequence, comprising Soldier of the Mist (1986) and Soldier of Arete (1989), with further volumes projected. Set in ancient Greece about 500BC, it is narrated in short chapters each representing a day's written-down recollections on the part of Latro, a soldier whom a goddess has punished by removing his capacity to remember anything for more than 24 hours. The sequence thus works, on every possible level, as a mirror image of The Book of the New Sun, with Latro's memory-loss reversing Severian'sinability to forget, ancient Greece reversing Urth - being at the start rather than the end of things - and the series as a whole being conspicuously open-ended rather than shaped inexorably around Severian's Coming.In The Book of the Long Sun - comprising Nightside the Long Sun(1993) and Lake of the Long Sun (1994), both assembled as Litany of the Long Sun (omni 1994), plus Calde of the Long Sun (1994), with 1 further volume projected - GW returned to the New Sun universe, though to a setting some thousands of years earlier, and to the large-scale sf mythopoeisis that so profoundly characterizes the earlier novel. Like New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun is in fact a single narrative, and cannotproperly be assessed until its completion. What can be said is that the entire tale is - so far - set within a vast GENERATION STARSHIP, in closed universe called the Whorl, and that the protagonist, Pater Silk - having had a vast infodump of memories epiphanically given him on the first page of the story by an AI who seems to be the avatar of some figure from Urth, and perhaps a proclaimer of Christ - gradually becomes a central figure in the destiny of the decaying cultures of the ship.It may be that GW has never had an original sf idea, or never a significant one, certainly none of the calibre of those generated by writers like Larry NIVEN or Greg BEAR. His importance does not reside in that kind of originality. Settingaside for an instant his control of language, it is possible to claim that GW's importance lies in a spongelike ability to assimilate generic modelsand devices, and in the quality of the transformations he effects upon that material - a musical analogy might be the Baroque technique of the parody cantata, in which a secular composition is transformed by reverent parody into a sacred work (or vice versa). GW's actual language, too, is eloquently parodic, and many of his short stories are designed deliberately and intricately to echo earlier models, from G.K. CHESTERTON and Rudyard KIPLING on through the whole pantheon of GENRE SF. GW's importance has been, therefore, twofold: the inherent stature of his work is deeply impressive, and he wears the fictional worlds of sf like a coat of many colours.

   JC

   Other works: At the Point of Capricorn (1983 chap); The Arimaspian Legacy (1987 chap); For Rosemary (coll 1988 chap UK), poetry; Slow Children at Play (1989 chap); The Old Woman whose Rolling Pin is the Sun (1991 chap); Castle of Days (omni 1992), assembling Gene Wolfe's Book of Days, The Castle of the Otter, plus new material; TheYoung Wolfe (coll 1992).

   About the author: Gene Wolfe (1986) by Joan Gordon; A Checklist of Gene Wolfe (1990 chap) by Christopher P. STEPHENS; Gene Wolfe: Urth-Man Extraordinary: A Working Bibliography (1991 chap) by Gordon BENSON JR and Phil STEPEHENSEN-PAYNE; Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle (1994) by Michael Andre-Driussi.

   See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; ESP; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FANTASY; GODS AND DEMONS; GOTHIC SF; JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD; LINGUISTICS; METAPHYSICS; MYTHOLOGY; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; POCKET UNIVERSE; SERIES; SUN; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; TIMESCAPE BOOKS; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.