Gene Wolfe is 83

And as if by magic – and it may have been magic, for I believe America is the land of magic, and that we, we now past Americans, were once the magical people of it, waiting now to stand to some unguessable generation of the future as the nameless pre-Mycenaean tribes did to the Greeks, ready, at a word, each of us now, to flit piping through groves ungrown, our women ready to haunt as lamiae the rose-red ruins of Chicago and Indianapolis when they are little more than earthen mounds, when the heads of the trees are higher than the hundred-and-twenty-fifth floor—it seemed to me that I found myself in bed again, the old house swaying in silence as though it were moored to the universe by only the thread of smoke from the stove.

From Peace, one of the great books of its century.

I just was not smart enough for those books, I guess. Will have to try them again sometime.

I remember reading the first part of “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” in Damon Knight’s Orbit series of original SF back in the day, and later buying “The Shadow of the Torturer” at the Harvard Coop when it first came out. I’ve never looked back, but instead turned back to almost all of his books for many re-readings, each of which awakens new ideas.

I wish him many more birthdays and (selfishly on my part) many more productive writing years.

I’ll add that if you can find a copy of _Castle of the Otter_, it’s a lot of fun for those who enjoyed the tetralogy. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of battlefield tactics and how Wolfe talked about his concern that someone would insist on giving one of the books a more science-fictiony name like _Star-Breaker_ or the like.

His plots are often hard for me to follow, like a three-dimensional being trying to perceive a four-dimensional shape, but all his characters are alive, which makes him a great writer in my book (and in his books).

Didn’t he have something to do withthe invention of Pringles too?

I’ve only read a little of Wolfe’s stuff, mostly short stories; wasn’t familiar with the mining-of-the-past passage quoted in the OP. What struck me about it was how similar it is to some of M. John Harrison’s “Viriconium” material.

A little like Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker translated into, er, English.

Sigh. The New/Long/Short Sun books are so amazing; it makes what happened in Wizard/Knight and the shockingly awful Home Fires all the more depressing.

Yeah, he sort of seems to have gone down the MRA rabbithole at some point. I just pretend all that shit is non-canon. I read one later short story of his and just–! The dude’s ex is planning to take him for all he’s worth by making her young daughters falsely plead on the stand that he sexually abused them, and since he loves the kids he’s rolling over without a fight. Then, separately, aliens have crashed in a nearby pond (it’s winter in VT or Maine), and they are brownies, really. The time you spend in the ship is short but when you get out hours have passed. The brownies get the adult daughter of the evil divorcing wife, and hero ex goes to save her, and torches the brownies ship (WHY DUDE? WHY?!) AND kidnaps one of them which he takes home to he his sex slave, since they’re sort of like human girl children, really. Which–DID YOU READ THE BEGINNING?! But this was not Wolfe being tricksy, this was Wolfe having lost his mind. Whatever, it doesn’t detract from his previous achievements.

Belle@22: Yeah, “The Ziggurat”, as I recall. A story so awkward and goofy I couldn’t help wondering if there might be something mental— I remember thinking: perhaps some sort of senile dementia, whatever— involved.

Hm, I kind of like military SF but haven’t read any in ages, maybe I should try. Henry: I’m sort of flabbergasted at the idea of KSR as genius critic because…have you read his books? I have. I have this problem, where I read long series of books I don’t like. You guys may have heard about this. KSR…er, at first I was siced he was a chick who wrote hard SF, and then he wasn’t. There are memorable moments, but. Yeah, so, why, after reading all three Mars books, did I read Antarctica, which has got at least 100 pages of minutes from anarcho-syndicalist committee meetings? I DON’ EVEN KNOW. No, I know, it was before there was enough internet to entertain me with what I have measured as being 300-500 pages of genre fiction a day. (Zoë helped me/suggested I time myself to compare maybe twp years ago.) There was a bookstore here that used to have trade-ins.

A review of “An Evil Guest” at Strange Horizons begins: “I’ve now read this novel twice and I’m still not entirely sure what exactly is going on, or whether it’s any good or not. ”

Unfortunately, as with “The Sorceror’s House”, there’s less going on than you’d hope, and no, it isn’t very good. Readable, yes, and better than the woeful “Home Fires”, but certainly not even average by Wolfe’s high standard.

MRA? Market Reduction Approach? Moral Re-Armament? Mutual Recognition Agreement? Men’s Rights Activist?

I didn’t like Home Fires at all. It’s a story where the government knows how to make you want whatever they want you to want. If they don’t notice you, then you can want whatever you happen to want, but if they care what you want then it will happen. Also they can do lots of biological things like brain transplants and partial brain transplants.

It might not be just the government. Maybe enemy spies have that technology down pat, to the point they can take a witness or whoever and quickly convince him of whatever they want.

We have known for a long time that when people do things and don’t know why, they make up reasons. That’s true with primitive hypnosis, with hypnotic suggestion that people are told not to remember, ask them why they do the suggestions and they come up with reasons the whole audience knows are not true.

In the story when people do things that make no sense, they come up with reasons the same way. But there is a reason, somebody made them. The characterization doesn’t have to make sense, it doesn’t matter whether their explanations make sense.

Occasionally the narrator believes things that are not compatible with physical reality. He knows this is because somebody made him believe it, and that doesn’t phase him. He privately without telling the reader thinks out what their purpose might be in persuading him of this, and reasons on from there.

His sympathies change from scene to scene, though he reasons to himself and to us that he’s still supporting the same things behind it all. He literally does double-think, he carefully avoids thinking things that would get him in trouble, but still comes up with rationalizations that get him the same results he would get if he thought those thoughts.

And so he finally solves a whole collection of mysteries and finds the spy/saboteur, even though he is getting manipulated by both sides or multiple sides all through the process. Success! In the process he demonstrates to the government that he is uncommonly valuable, so he volunteers to join the military and be subject to far-more-intense mind control, for utterly unconvincing reasons.

It’s the ultimate unreliable narrator. Anything he says could be a lie, and you don’t even know whose lie. Lots of characters who act like a clunky writer is making them do whatever the plot requires with no regard for their own character development. Lots of gaping plot holes. If an unpublished writer asked me to read it, I probably get past the first couple of chapters. But the plot holes are important pieces of the plot….

I hated it. He was trying to establish tiny islands of free will in a vast sea of mind control, and those islands were shrinking. Depressing and disgusting. Yuck.

Henry, I agree with JakeB about David Drake. He’s a much better writer than his most visible fandom would lead one to believe, and he has much better values than a lot of mil-sf whiners and ranters (both authors and fans). He’s humane, and quietly elegant with his craft.

This thread makes me want to re-read a bunch of Wolfe.

For those not into 100-page anarcho-syndicalist meetings, earl KSR is better: the three California novels, Escape From Kathmandu, The Planet on the Table. Mars, in my view, was sorta interesting and then a slog.

C. Valente doing Wolfe is an interesting concept! I have to admit that Circumnavigated didn’t really grab me until about 2/3 of the way through. The start was good, then there was a bunch of Shiny! Squirrel! Shiny squirrel! and then it got down to a story that was emotionally coherent but didn’t seem to require all the shininess that preceded it.

For some reason, more of Free Live Free has lodged in my poor brain than Peace. I’m sure the flaw is mine rather than Wolfe’s.

I like Peace. I haven’t so much liked discussing it because I ran into people who were sure they were right when I was sure the text didn’t really say but only allowed the implication, and then they’d say “Gene Wolfe told me I was right.”.

I like Free, Live Free better. To me it’s not nearly so bleak.

There was a short story, I can’t remember the name, in which the US government was falling and the insurgents were calling for suicide bombers exactly like NPR asking for donations…. It was worth a very careful reread if only for what Wolfe was saying almost directly and openly about US society.

Bah, the author and his opinions. I’ve had Ken McLeod tell me I’m wrong about what’s in one of his books, but I still see it! And his notion of what’s in the book is clearly wrong!

Which may imply that it was originally a Charlie Stross book, and then the Eschaton immanentized stuff so it became a Ken book (which then influenced Charlie).

Belle: I’m with Henry from the anarcho-syndicalist minute-taking point of view — I think one could get around the boring meetings objection to socialism, if it were possible to clone KSR as every commune’s secretary — but given that for obscure reasons you don’t seem to revel in these agendatastic qualities of his, can I recommend, as well as the early Three Californias novels, The Age of Rice and Salt and Galileo’s Dreams? The first is a metempsychotic alt-hist of a world without Europe, the second a beautiful and immensely good-hearted meditation on scientific history, plus stately planetary romance. You were a bit unfortunate with Antarctica. I think of it as a kind of dwindling literary aftershock of the Mars books, with the same materials producing smaller effects in the polar setting. Though it does have some very fine nature writing indeed in it.

Meanwhile I had better buckle up and apply myself to Wolfe at last. I’ve only ever tried The Wizard Knight, which I persisted with for what felt like forever, with everyone’s insistence that the true greatness only became clear on re-reading ringing in my ears, till I just couldn’t stand it any more. It’s a relief to hear that was a bad one.

Re: The Ziggurat, my interpretation was that Emery had abused his step daughter. We know that Emery hopes to keep the woman from the future as a sex-slave; and she has a really suspicious resemblance to the step-daughter he was accused of abusing (possibly Tamar really is Aileen, and Emery is under a psychotic delusion; or Tamar is Aileen’s clone from the future, and the branch point she is in the process of altering — in the manner of Terminator etc. is Emery’s murder of his family). Other clues point in the same direction; and there’s a strong hint that he intended to murder his son (“Say that I was to try to kill you. …But you’ld love me afterward, just the same.”)

It’s a bit reminiscent of The Shining, with them snowed in with an insane killer. (Also: Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is not quite so insane, but shares some qualities as a protagonist).

In any case, hardly men’s rights, as Gene Wolfe is going out of his way to suggest that Emery is the prime suspect.

KSR’s introduction to THE VERY BEST OF GENE WOLFE is available in issue 300 of The New York Review of Science Fiction, which is available free at Weightless Books.

I’ve read pretty much all of Wolfe’s work through ~2004. Of the later work, I am very partial to The Book of the Short Sun, which is rawly emotional in exactly the way that most of Wolfe’s work is cool, and The Wizard Knight, which has one of my short bits in Wolfe’s work, when our protagonist meets an angel from the world above the world of the gods:

“It does not trouble you that your dog prefers me to you?”
“No,” I said, “I prefer you to me, too.”

Err, anybody like Bujold?

51: The original context for my crack about military SF was making an exception for Bujold, who I think is extraordinary.
By coincidence, if it is that, I am also re-reading the Book of the New Sun, but haven’t yet come to this passage.

Although the Sharing Knife books are as horrible in their own way as the worst of late Wolfe, unfortunately.

I hate to say it, but Wolfe is the one author where it is almost likely that his readers just won’t get the subtext, and enjoyment of late Wolfe, in my opinion, relies more on unearthing that subtext to get the full effect of his novels and short stories. He has written a few straightforward stories, but those are usually very short snippets. I hasten to posit that the vast majority of readers don’t realize who Silk’s biological father is, though the cogs that lead to his caldeship and much more start almost immediately after his enlightenment in that gnostic closed whorl.

@ J Thomas above. Once upon a time Gene answered my questions. One met with a categoric no, no, no. He has an objective solution in mind at least for his major elided resolutions, though some interpretations are obviously crazy and fail to be rigorous. I always insist on textual evidence

Not to pick on some critics, but the patterns they espouse are sometimes asinine (navigator as j f k, cues as a story about taking a poop, for example – whimsical forced pattern – cues is a Faustian tarot story)

When patterns explain major narrative mysteries and provide sense or overarching theme they cease to be arbitrary observations. (Spoilers for short sun) For example, in Return to the Whorl the creature Babbie is angered when Horn’s son is attacked, hugs Horn’s son and points at his two tusks saying huh huh huh. Even though this is all Babbie ever says, his reaction to the boy reveals the reality of the prophecy that Horn would ride a beast with three Horns, and the cannibalistic trees with their liana brides provide a mechanism through constant presence, personification, and outright juxtaposition with the Vanished People. Here at least Babbie is trying to get out the name Horn, and this is the structural excuse for Babbie to always make that noise – intentional authorial concealment from the passive reader.

The only admission I heard from him that actually acknowledged the obscurity was at breakfast at the Nebula awards at which he was named Grand Master. He complained about blurbs and synopses being extremely inaccurate for books in general, paused, then said “especially for my work”. He is more like a kabbalistic modernist than a true relativistic postmodernist, and stories like “Trip, Trap” have a theme which shows individual subjectivity and ego fall to universal objective spiritual communion even if it is physically impossible. (The two different different characters join in the spirit world to become the third billy goat and destroy the troll- and the pointless sword in the spirit world overrules the physical laws of the waking world with it’s pointed sword such that there are cuts but no stabs on the body). This is the furthest thing from a destabilization of objectivity that you can get.

Marc Aramini hugely helps to decode it all, just lay it all out straight. Then afterwards we can talk about what’s going on in all his famil(y)iar relationships with friends, family, and pets. I’m wondering if he made his work REQUIRE so much work decoding, so that no one would explore how his relationship with his mom was worked out in his works — I’m talking YOU, gigantic sea-mother thing from New Sun; I’m talking YOU, whomever-matera Blood-killer in Long sun — or at least feel under the allowance to deal it optional.

Just one more point I wanted to make on a slightly different note is that while some of his short fiction is less dense in recent years, a lot of it is very good and does not deal with the ideology people find problematic in Home Fires. Since 2000, “In Glory like their Star”, “From the Cradle”,”monster”,”the little stranger,” “the hour of the sheep,” “innocent”, “why I was hanged,” “dormanna”, “josh”, and “the giant” have all been pretty strong short stories written into 2013, though obviously they are not quite as sublime as his Island stories or Seven American Nights.