Science fiction writer Gene Wolfe died on Sunday. If you know who Gene Wolfe was no explanation is necessary, and if you don’t no explanation is possible.
He was the best of us all: the cleverest, trickiest science fiction writer alive, capable of carrying off narrative gambits the rest of us could barely conceive of. And this was not just my opinion: it’s all but universally held in the field, from Neil Gaiman to Howard Waldrop.
In The Book of the Short Sun, protagonist Horn sets off to retrieve Patera Silk, the protagonist of The Book of the Long Sun. He comes back thinking he’s failed. The great tragedy of the work is that he hasn’t. In Return to the Whorl, there comes a line of just two words: “Silk nodded.”
And it’s absolutely heartbreaking.
Gene Wolfe was a Korean War veteran, a fact that greatly shaped The Book of the New Sun, whose last volume features protagonist Severian gradually being drawn into a distant war. He was also a working engineer, and helped develop the cooking portion of the machine that makes Pringles potato chips. He was also an editor on Plant Engineering magazine, where he handled (among other things) robotics and cartoons.
Gene was a friend, albeit one I saw only every half a decade or so. I interviewed him for Nova Express at the 1998 Worldcon, bringing a box of his books with me to sign. (Since then, of course, I’ve picked up many more.) We had lunch together at the 2012 Chicago Worldcon, by which time his beloved wife Rosemary was dying of Alzheimer’s.
Here’s a scanned picture of Gene and Rosemary on their wedding day from A Wolfe Family Album:
And here’s a picture of Gene and Rosemary (with Elizabeth Hand in-between) at the 2009 Readercon:
And here are some pictures of Gene’s books from my library:
He will be deeply missed.
