I can't count the number of times I've re-read The Book of New Sun. Absolute masterpiece.
Wolfe's books are truly mind altering and forever change the way you think about science fiction and life in general.
Gene Wolfe, 'magnificent' giant of science fiction, dies aged 87
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Re: Gene Wolfe, 'magnificent' giant of science fiction, dies aged 87
#12A tremendous loss, his science fiction and fantasy novels are some of the best out there. Others have mentioned other books of his, but my favorite is still Book of the Long Sun. Patera Silk is a great character, and The Whorl is a marvelous setting.
Re: Gene Wolfe, 'magnificent' giant of science fiction, dies aged 87
#13Terminus Est.
Re: Gene Wolfe, 'magnificent' giant of science fiction, dies aged 87
#14I cannot recommend enough Latro in the Mist, a combination of two of his novels about a Roman soldier in Greek times given the curse of losing his memory every day. To me this was his most 'approachable' novel by virtue of the fact that I could cross-reference the names with historical resources like Thucydides -- I also highly recommend the Landmark series for their detailed annotations. Fifth Head of Cereberus is,…
I second that recommendation of Latro in the Mist!
Re: Gene Wolfe, 'magnificent' giant of science fiction, dies aged 87
#15"Peace" is a true masterpiece. When you reach the end, you start thinking what was this book about. Suddenly you will figure it out and you want to read it again, armed with this knowledge. And you might need a few iterations before you will be finally satisfied.
Obligatory Neil Gaiman quote: "Peace really was a gentle Midwestern memoir the first time I read it. It only became a horror novel on the second or the third reading."
Re: Gene Wolfe, 'magnificent' giant of science fiction, dies aged 87
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also, I remember reading somewhere that he was a working engineer while he wrote some of his first novels; You are correct - he was an industrial engineer. I'm not sure if he was working on a team, or just by himself, but he helped to design the machinery that creates Pringles (potato chip). He was also the editor for a trade magazine on industrial engineering.
Do you happen to have any references for that? I in no way doubt you, but I hope to use this fact to dazzle a child when I get home; and maybe persuade her to read some top class sci-fi.
Re: Gene Wolfe, 'magnificent' giant of science fiction, dies aged 87
#17Wolfe wrote some incredible masterpieces. The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, and some of his 1970s short stories deserve a place in 20th-century serious literature in general. The Book of the New Sun stunned me as a teenage reader, and I fondly reread the book every few years (that said, Severian’s habit of shagging everyone he meets doesn’t hold up well in this day and age, and I have seen female readers call The Book of the New Sun a risible male fantasy).
However, there is no doubt that Wolfe’s powers declined over time, and homages to him inevitably focus on the works from decades ago. Besides their intricate plots, those early works had incredible prose, just as rich as Proust, Nabokov, or Faulkner. Once the 1980s came in, suddenly Wolfe’s prose became plainer, more workaday. Then, his novels increasingly started to milk the “unreliable narrator” gimmick but without much else to them. Furthermore, it is not even clear that readers are appropriately given all clues to figure out the real action and themes. I have spoken to multiple Wolfe superfans who worry that A Land Across, for example, ultimately turned out to be turgid and impenetrable, and that Wolfe’s publisher accepted it just on blind faith that readers got earlier Wolfe novels, so surely there was something to this one too.
(I know the principle of de mortus nil nisi bonum and I don’t want to be too harsh about the man, but this is probably the only opportunity for a long time that the Hacker News community will get to discuss his work.)
Re: Gene Wolfe, 'magnificent' giant of science fiction, dies aged 87
#18On Blue's Waters is a masterpiece. The narrative structure is temporally very complex, but coherent, and alternates between wistful contemplation of the past by the protagonist (often times about things that have not yet happened yet), and and an account of that protagonist's search for Silk. On the whole it is a dream like experience.
I found the first-person narration of On Blue’s Waters emotionally devastating. Wolfe endowed that narrator with so much pain, bitterness, regret, and loss. I got On Blue’s Waters as soon as it came out and was eager for the following volumes, but I must admit that the rest of that trilogy really disappointed me, namely: 1) Wolfe’s putting characters’ dialogue in annoying thick dialect of various sorts, 2) mapping the distant planet’s various cultures to silly ethnic stereotypes of our planet’s Italians, Indians, and Dutch, and 3) gratuitously bringing the action back to The Book of the New Sun which didn’t add much to the plot and felt like a cheap commercial tie-in.
Re: Gene Wolfe, 'magnificent' giant of science fiction, dies aged 87
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also, I remember reading somewhere that he was a working engineer while he wrote some of his first novels; You are correct - he was an industrial engineer. I'm not sure if he was working on a team, or just by himself, but he helped to design the machinery that creates Pringles (potato chip). He was also the editor for a trade magazine on industrial engineering.
Do you happen to have any references for that? I in no way doubt you, but I hope to use this fact to dazzle a child when I get home; and maybe persuade her to read some top class sci-fi.
It's in this article! You can dig through philk10's link to find the interview, which is in the google books link. There is also an internet archive link on his wikipedia page which contains the same interview. He made the part of the machine that cooks the chips.
Re: Gene Wolfe, 'magnificent' giant of science fiction, dies aged 87
#20The Fifth Head of Cerberus is such a delight. Made me finally understand the concept of an unreliable narrator. It made me a better reader and expanded my attitudes around colonization. It is a great example of how science fiction can teach us about our modern lives.
> expanded my attitudes around colonization.
It is a remarkable thing that Wolfe, whose views were conservative and who occasionally voiced suspicion of modern academia with its focus on race and gender, wrote decades ago a work that really does mesh with modern post-colonial studies. I keenly recommended The Fifth Head of Cerberus to a friend of mine who is a scholar in that field, but sadly the robot on the cover of the Orb Books edition made him assume it was just goofy sci-fi.