Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe (born May 7, 1931, New York, New York, U.S.—died April 14, 2019, Peoria, Illinois) was an American writer, primarily of science fiction and fantasy. Known for his dense style, narrative complexity, and use of unreliable narrators, Wolfe acquired a reputation as a formidable literary artist while working mostly within the traditions of genre fiction. Fellow science fiction authors held Wolfe in especially high regard; Ursula K. Le Guin called him “our Melville,” and China Miéville described him as “one of the great living authors.”

Life

Though a native New Yorker, Wolfe and his family moved many times during his childhood for his father’s job before settling in Texas. He began studying mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University, but his studies were interrupted when he was drafted during the Korean War. Wolfe eventually got his degree from the University of Houston. As an engineer working for Procter & Gamble, he contributed to the design of the machinery that gives Pringles potato chips their distinctive shape. As an adult Wolfe converted to Roman Catholicism, and his religious beliefs were an ongoing influence on his writing. In 1972 Wolfe settled in the Chicago area to take an editorial job at Plant Engineering magazine. He held this position until 1986 while pursuing his creative work in his spare time. Wolfe lived with his family in Barrington, Illinois, for many years. In 2013 he and his wife, who was suffering from Alzheimer disease, relocated downstate to her childhood home of Peoria. Wolfe remained there until his death in 2019.

Work

Wolfe began publishing regularly in the 1960s, and his first novel appeared in 1970. He achieved a critical breakthrough with The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), a “fix-up” novel consisting of three novellas linked by their setting on two adjacent planets that have been colonized by humans. The novel Peace (1975), another highly acclaimed work, is often classified as realistic but contains elements of horror and fantasy. Superficially the memoir of an old man in a small Midwestern town, it is open to multiple interpretations, including supernatural and psychological ones. In addition to his full-length novels, Wolfe wrote a large number of short stories and novellas throughout his career.

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The early 1980s saw the publication of the work generally considered Wolfe’s magnum opus: The Book of the New Sun, a series of four novels set thousands (or even millions) of years in the future. The series is often classified as belonging to the “dying Earth” subgenre of futuristic science fiction. The hero of the story is Severian, a member of a guild that specializes in torture and execution who is forced to wander the Earth (“Urth” in Wolfe’s futuristic spelling) for the crime of showing mercy. The tetralogy was the first installment in Wolfe’s “Solar Cycle,” which he continued with the series Book of the Long Sun (1993–97) and Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001).

Wolfe continued to write and publish into the early decades of the 21st century. He eventually published more than 30 novels over his career—both stand-alone and as part of several series—as well as more than 200 short stories. His works engaged a wide range of subject matter. The “Latro” novels, about a Roman soldier in Greece who loses his short-term memory but gains supernatural insights, are an exercise in historical fantasy. Wolfe also wrote ghost stories and horror, as well as satire, alternative history, and original reworkings of myths and folktales.

Although Wolfe won many awards (including the Nebula and World Fantasy awards) and was highly esteemed by other writers, his reputation sits somewhat awkwardly between two stools. He was sometimes seen as “too literary” to be a popular science fiction writer, while his classification as a genre writer meant that he remained largely sidelined in the world of literary fiction and academic criticism. This reputation is a function of both Wolfe’s stylistic and narrative complexity and his early immersion in popular genre writing. Among his avowed influences are such classic authors as Marcel Proust and G.K. Chesterton. (Chesterton was also important to Wolfe for the way he incorporated Catholic theology into his own fiction.) At the same time, Wolfe was influenced by such genre writers as Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. Those authors were among the factors, including Wolfe’s engineering background, that steered him toward science fiction.