Gene Wolfe
Revered author whose work transcended the genres of fantasy, science fiction and magical realism
GENE WOLFE, who has died aged 87, was sometimes named “the greatest writer in English alive today”, although not, on the whole, by those responsible for literary prizes. In a just world, perhaps, Wolfe would have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and been regularly nominated for mainstream literary awards; instead, where he was known at all, he was pigeonholed as a writer of “genre fiction”: science fiction, fantasy, magic realism.
He did not repine, however, and liked to point out that writers such as Homer and Shakespeare would today be put in the same category: “SF represents literature’s real mainstream.” His fans included Neil Gaiman, and Ursula K Le Guin, who said: “He is so good he leaves me speechless.” A life of steady application produced 30 novels, several novellas and seven collections of short stories. His 12-volume Solar Cycle is one of the outstanding achievements of 20th-century imaginative fiction.
Gene Rodman Wolfe was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 7 1931. His father, Emerson Leroy Wolfe, originally from Ohio, was a travelling salesman; while working in North Carolina he married Mary Olivia Ayers. They later moved to Peoria, Illinois. Gene, their only child, contracted polio when young. When he was six, the family moved to Houston, Texas.
As a sickly child Gene was a voracious reader: favourites included Edgar Allan Poe and The Wizard of Oz, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. In high school he discovered pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Planet Stories.
After school, he went to study Engineering at Texas A & M University, where his room-mate, an illustrator for the college magazine, persuaded Wolfe to write stories for him to illustrate. Wolfe dropped out after a year, was drafted into the Army, and fought in Korea.
He returned to America in 1954, and went back to university (this time to the University of Houston) under the GI Bill.
Wolfe’s experiences in Korea had left him, in his words, “a mess … I’d hit the floor at the slightest noise”. After graduating, he worked for the research and development department of Procter & Gamble, and moved back to Peoria.
He worked for P & G until 1972; his most famous achievement was designing the machine that makes
Pringles potato crisps. He could, he said, “open a can of Pringles and look at every broken Pringle and tell you why it broke”.
In later life, his flamboyantly moustachioed face bore a perhaps coincidental resemblance to the iconic character on Pringles tubes. Wolfe’s college hobby of writing became a habit, although it was eight years before he sold a story, in 1965, to the magazine Sir (“a poor man’s Playboy”). He wrote to earn extra income – he claimed his first fee went to buy children’s clothes – and he took a workmanlike approach to his craft. An early riser (sometimes as early as 4am), he would write before breakfast, sometimes also in the evenings, and at weekends. Throughout the following decades he published a steady stream of short stories.
He also wrote novels: his first, Operation Ares, was cut into unrecognisability by the publisher. But the next two, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) and the quietly disturbing Peace (1975), established his distinctive voice and method. These early books are dense, allusive, and enchanting; he combined an unusually lucid and poetic style with wilfully tricksy plotting and narration. Later, feeling that he was unfairly pilloried for obscurity, he wrote in a consciously looser manner, but any simplicity was only apparent.
Wolfe had become a Catholic before his marriage in 1956 to Rosemary Dietsch, a childhood neighbour and a cradle Catholic. His faith was a strong influence on his writing, and he was unafraid to introduce themes of sin and redemption into what some might think the incongruous setting of science fiction. He once said his main literary influences were Tolkien, Chesterton and Marks’ Handbook for Engineers. Proust, Borges and Dickens also went into the mix.
In 1972 the Wolfes moved to Barrington, Illinois, and he got a job on the editorial staff of the trade magazine Plant Engineering. This freed him from the obligation to write for money, and he allowed himself to dilate into his first long work, the four-novel sequence The
Book of the New Sun (1980-83). Only after this was published to critical acclaim did he feel able, in 1984, to give up his day job and write full-time.
The New Sun books borrowed the SF writer Jack Vance’s conceit of a far-future “dying earth”, where old or alien technologies misunderstood (perhaps) as magic are shown against a cod-medieval, or in Wolfe’s case cod-byzantine, background. Wolfe made this the vehicle for a wholly bewitching narrative told by an apprentice torturer, Severian, who comes of age, goes to war, and eventually becomes a Christ-like saviour figure.
However absurd this sounds in summary, the novels are finely wrought meditations on identity, recurrence, truth and lies, good and evil, memory and reality, all done in characteristically involute prose. Imagine Mervyn Peake retold by Borges, but informed by Catholic metaphysics and alternate world theory, and one might go some way to describing the New Sun books; but they are, in truth, uncategorisable. Wolfe wrote a further eight books, extending the narrative in unexpected directions; together, they make up the Solar Cycle.
In the years of the later Solar books (1987-2001) Wolfe wrote six other novels, including two, narrated by an amnesiac Roman mercenary after the Battle of Plataea, technically ambitious beyond anything he had done before. Next (2004) was The Wizard Knight, a swords-and-sorcery epic with (inevitably) darker and subtler elements concealed within.
Wolfe’s early literary tastes were for Tolkien, Kipling and pulp magazines; he had an enduring and unashamed fondness for the popular tropes of speculative fiction. His later novels include a pirate escapade, a disguised Japanese ghost story and a sly homage to HP Lovecraft.
Another, The Land Across, is superficially a travel-writer’s account of visiting an unnamed Mitteleuropean country; its deliberate discontinuities, however, reveal a morally ambiguous vampire story whose actual narrative is never in plain view.
Some may find this irritating, or frustrating, but Wolfe was never obscure for the sake of it: “What I am trying to do is show the way things really seem to me.” He aimed to write stories “that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure”.
Wolfe’s narratives are typically oblique, and his narrators notoriously unreliable: one is unable to forget anything but habitually lies or conceals; another is chronically amnesiac and puzzled; others exhibit unknowable levels of stupidity, naivety or disingenuousness. “They’re all unreliable,” Wolfe would say. “Well, we all are, aren’t we?”
But behind the unreliable narrator was, always, a clear narrative, recoverable for a reader willing to exercise as much cunning and diligence as Wolfe had used in concealing it. He was scrupulous in leaving clues (etymological, mythological, literary) hidden in asides and, as a point of principle, never repeated (he claimed to find this irritating in other writers). The reader has a strong sense of a story being told, but often is not sure exactly what or whose story it is.
Although revered among science fiction writers and readers, Wolfe was given relatively few awards: nominated for the Nebula 17 times, he won only twice; and despite eight nominations, he never won the Hugo. But he received five World Fantasy Awards, and in 2012 the Science Fiction Writers of America named him Grand Master.
He was unstinting in his advice to other writers, both aspiring and established; his various writings on writing are humorous, illuminating, starkly honest.
Gene Wolfe’s wife Rosemary died in 2013 and he is survived by a son and two daughters; another son predeceased him.
Gene Wolfe, born May 7 1931, died April 14 2019