Remembering Gene Wolfe, 1931-2019

Abstract

440 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Remembering Gene Wolfe. Gene Wolfe, born 7 May 1931, died on 14 April 2019, his heart having finally given up the ghost. Wolfe believed in ghosts, had seen at least one, and believed in spiritual transcendence as well, so this is how I describe his death from heart disease. His writing will certainly continue to haunt us as long as we read it, an activity about which he seemed less than optimistic, if his last novel, A Borrowed Man (2015), is any indication. Its economically, ecologically, and culturally impoverished future imagines books as human beings consigned to the bonfire if ignored; this is a fate Wolfe may have feared but which the readers of SFS must hope to prevent. He is best known for his book of interconnected novellas, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) and his magnificent tetralogy, THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN (1981-1982), achievements which have yet to be equaled for their haunting inventiveness, beauty of language, and richness of metaphor; his non-sf ghost story Peace (1975) and many of his novellas, including the four stories collected in The Wolfe Archipelago (1983)—“Seven American Nights” (1978), “The Haunted Boarding House” (1990), “The Sailor Who Sailed After the Sun” (1992), and “Memorare” (2007)—are also of this caliber (he loved guns as a young man). I list here only my own favorites: others will name different works that proved to be their “book of gold,” as he called such touchstones in The Book of the New Sun. He received many awards, including the Locus, World Fantasy, and Nebula Awards for individual works (but never the Hugo, awarded by fans, although nominated many times), and was named both SFWA and Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for the body of his work. Most of Wolfe’s stories resist genre classification: sf? fantasy? horror? mainstream? art fiction? pulp fiction? Nevertheless, he embraced the “ghetto” of sf and shunned the respectability of academic study. The result seems to have been a relative dearth of academic study of his work, given how important it is, and a corresponding wealth of non-academic study instead. I have hinted at some of his common themes above; they include haunting, the compatibility of faith and reason (his Roman Catholic faith was deep and complex), loneliness and isolation, memory and archive, kinds and degrees of sentience. Common motifs, also reflected in the works I have mentioned, include isolatos, especially children, ghosts, and roses (both as representations of Mary and as gestures toward his beloved wife, Rosemary). His work is extremely, sometimes exhaustingly, allusive, reminding one that as a literary figure he was self-taught, so his references are both wide-ranging and unpredictable—Borges, Melville, Irish ghost stories, Kipling, Dickens, comic books, G.K. Chesterton, and so on. They often employ unreliable narrators and ambiguous, maze-like plots. Stylistically, he moved from the incantatory, metaphoric, and complex sentences and arcane vocabulary of The Book of the New Sun to an increasingly spare sentence structure and vocabulary, as evident in his most recent work. 441 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Wolfe fought in the Korean War, trained as an engineer, and worked as one while he honed his considerable skills in writing. He married his childhood friend Rosemary, who influenced him to embrace Catholicism, and to whom he was fiercely devoted. Together they had four children. He was a generous mentor to many writers, including George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, and Kim Stanley Robinson, and some scholars, including me. While I was in graduate school, I conducted a long and wide-ranging interview with him that was vital to my writing of the Starmont Reader’s Guide to Gene Wolfe (1986). Along the way he offered me encouragement and what I felt was fatherly advice. He was a wonderful raconteur, a warm presence at sf conventions, and a wise teacher at the Clarion workshops. He could also display temper, especially if he felt he was being criticized, disrespected, or misinterpreted, or if Rosemary was being slighted in any way. In short, he was as complex as his writing. As puzzling as people often found his stories, he...