Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction into High Art (2019)
theringer.com
theringer.com
So I love Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion, Martian Chronicles (and other Ray Bradbury books), Ursula K Le Guin(Earthsea), Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle, Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse Five etc), Dune, Game of Thrones series, Neuromancer, Asimov (basically everything but especially Foundation series), Terry Pratchett, and so on...
And I consider Gene Wolfe's work to be on a par with all of the above, and I would say he takes sci-fi to another realm. The Book of The New Sun is the first sci-fi series I read where I thought, "this is literature," as in, comparable with books by Dostoyevsky and Hemingway, and I don't believe this is hyperbole, it's just that good.
The other amazing thing about The Book of The New Sun is that each time you read it you realize you missed about 100 things in the previous read-throughs, there is so much "hidden" in plain sight and the subsequent read-throughs are like reading a completely different book.
So just read it please.
Edited to include Le Guin as another example of "genre fiction" as literature.
I had to read two of her short stories in jr high. One was "those who walk away from omelas" and the other was "the power of a name". Those probably aren't the full titles, but should be close enough and should be available online.
I read books for the story (well, aren't books stories?) if it is written poorly - I don't enjoy it. And for me Gene Wolfe is written poorly the world is interesting but the story there was not entertaining at all for me and I read just the first book.
(BTW. I'm probably the only one but I just couldn't bear the constant mentions that some females face was shaped like heart).
Hyperion has interesting story and keeps you on your toes (just the first book).
Some writing simply makes you go “Wow, what an amazing sentence” even if the plot is gibberish.
George Orwell on prose: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli....
Also, see Elements of Style.
A good story can be "written poorly," that's where prose quality comes into play. When you say written poorly it seems you are referring to narrative and structure--as you deemed it not entertaining--not prose.
I find that I would read different books differently - some books I would read for the writing style or prose, and others purely for the story. I will literally skip 'prose-y?' sections to not waste time and get back to the story.
Though I gotta say, I found both the writing style and story great in Hyperion. One of the few books I actually went back and re-read sections of, while going through the first time.
Helpful comment, possibly adding value: In a comment I mentioned another author and why he is interesting. I have a reference for comparison because I have read Wolfe.
Same goes for any other topic.
For the record, I was looking for comparisons between the two from people who have read both. Hopefully that makes it a little less strange for you.
While Severian is groomed to be a torturer, for most of the book his job (and Severian repeatedly emphasizes that it's just a job) is that of executioner, and he later holds the position of lictor for around a month. While Severian often recounts the procedures practiced in the guild tower, it's not really torture that he is concerned about.
The themes of death and resurrection, however, are central to the plot, together with the water motif as a symbol of cleansing, from the moment Severian nearly drowns in the river (and is rescued by an undine) to the destruction of Urth.
And my books are quite similar to yours with few exceptions:
- Martian Chronicles - interesting concept but eventually it goes into some ecological + anarchist sci-fi which I'm not a fun of
- Earthsea - good, but it is mostly for teens, young adults (I read it as a teen and loved it, reread it years later and it was so so)
- Dune - the whole series, each book is unique in its own way
- Kurt Vonnegut - never read anything by that author
- Hemingway - I read just The Old Man and the Sea (or actually was forced in school to read it) - and this was a short novel about basically nothing, boring as it can be
And books I really liked that are not on your list:
- Cixin Liu - Three Body Problem and the rest in the series - I loved it, never read anything like it
- Anything by Naomi Novik (so just two books right now)
- Vernon - A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep
- N.K. Jemis - Stone Sky and the other two in the series
- Ann Leckie - Ancillary Justice (but only this, the other book was worse)
- (Almost) Anything by Philip K. Dick
That's from my recent reads (so few last years).
I'm not sure why schools tend to fixate on that particular work. Hemingway may not be to your taste anyway but I much prefer A Farewell to Arms, A Moveable Feast, many of his short stories, etc.
I've heard Gene wolf is a good writer but after trying the book of the new sun I'm not tempted further. It probably comes down to personal taste.
He said that as part of his Pringles work he and a lab partner were doing some kind of experimentation that involved a lot of steam and humidity. I forget why. Their lab was a fairly small temporary enclosure, in the middle of a big space. Gene dealt with the vapor by wearing a lab coat. His partner, muscular and six feet seven inches tall, just wore shorts.
The company liked to take tour groups through the area. One day, Gene opened the door and a tour group stopped and stared. He realized how they looked: him in a white lab coat, an apparently-naked giant behind him, steam clouds billowing out. So he said "Not now Igor, there are people here," and closed the door.
https://ultan.org.uk/ is another fantastic resource for Wolfe fans.
In that decade, Wolfe produced three large works (The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace and The Book of the New Sun) and a number of short stories where the prose was incredibly rich and beautiful, fully the equal of Proust or Nabokov. His reputation should rest on these.
But from the early 1980s, his prose became drab, lackluster. He still could impress readers with his plots that invariably featured unreliable narrators and ellipsis, but even this was gradually taken to the point of absurdity. By the turn of the millennium, he felt like a one-trick pony. His editors at Tor apparently accepted every manuscript he submitted, but the late flood of weak novels IMHO diluted his stature.
I think he had some good books in that period, but there wasn't going to be another Peace or Fifth Head of Cerebus.
Sort of like a little external entropy added to the random number generator.
I think someone like Thomas Pynchon shows that an author can very well be producing very good work well into the old age. There are rumours about him being both a professor or exCIA but I’m sure he’s been reasonably well off since the late 70s. While I haven’t read Bleeding Edge, his most recent novel, Inherent Vice is wild and excellent.
Maybe keeping a job keeps a writer honest or at least in the public watching and note taking. But I don’t think this is always true and it would be heartbreaking to take the dream away from everyone about ever becoming a full-time novelist.
I also don’t think making great art is easy. A few family deaths and accumulated illnesses and bad experience can really do a number on people. Not to suggest that this is Wolfe but there are many factors at play.
But, writers commonly get better with age. You see that if you read their later books and then go back to first ones.
In my own view, Long Sun is as good as New Sun: I don’t think the simpler prose detracts from it, it fits the tale and Silk’s personality (to say more threatens spoilers). We see a huge yet mostly stable set of characters evolve throughout the tale. Compare with New Sun which is mostly just Severian wandering around, having adventures and occasional encounters with characters from earlier. They are very different stories. After reading both series many times, Long Sun grew to be my favorite. This could change again.
I agree that Fifth Head is fantastic, but when I tried to reread Peace I couldn’t get through it (it was apparently his own favorite). And I agree with your assessment of his post-2000 novels. I did enjoy The Sorcerer’s House and The Land Across, but neither is calling out to be read again, and their details are vague in my mind.
It starts out very small and slow: the entire first book takes place over the course of a single day and night. What you get, though, is a living city complete with petty squabbles, political intrigue, complex relationships, all from the perspective of people who have no idea that they are living inside of a man-made ship. They venerate the ancient technology they live with in a syncretistic religion that seems to have been created for that very purpose.
As the story progresses, themes of identity come into larger play, and you start to see more of just how far awry the ship’s journey has gone compared to the intentions of the builders. Like most Wolfe books, things are progressively revealed that reshape your understanding of what came before—though you have to pay close attention to catch many of them. You are never handed the exposition of “this is how the ship works, here’s all the cool tech behind it.” Instead, you have to extrapolate it from what the characters know and are willing to reveal.
It’s not fast-paced or action-packed; it’s very character-driven. I read that there are as many named characters as in War and Peace, over 500. I didn’t like the beginning the first time I read it; things get more interesting once Silk decides to rob Blood on the first night, and I think that’s when I started to warm up to it. So if you recall how far you got, and it was beyond that point, it may just not be to your liking. I’d go so far as to say that if you don’t want to read about Silk frying up tomatoes and feeling bad about not offering them to a workmate, you could try skipping ahead a hundred pages to see if it catches your interest then.
I have one criticism of him and it's a strong one -- I hate it because it has locked out just about every woman I've introduced to his corpus: his treatment of women. So very many of them: Chenille, the fire nymphs, just about every one Severian sleeps with save for dear Thecla, Chenille-as-Scylla, the prostitutes of Fifth Head, Jahi, Jolenta, Hyacinth, Jesus there must be a legion more I can't recall just now... So many of them are vampish, buxom women who are either put on a pedestal or written to be beauteous victims. That's not to say strong women don't exist in his books: there are a few but it's by and large the men who are written as whole people. One woman runs around for a few hundred pages stark naked with a flimsy premise as to why.
If readers can repeatedly forgive him for these excesses, his writing can transform the way you see the world and the purpose of living in it. A small excerpt: "We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges."
In defense of the BotNS, I think that it's mostly lazy readers that think Severian is having his way with all these women - astute or second time readers will note that these women are manipulating Severian who is actually somewhat dim. (Consider Agia). But this is more likely to turn off female readers.
In the context of Wolfe's treatment of women The Sorcerer's House becomes a favorite novel. It seems designed to bait that most common criticism. Here's an excerpt from a 3/5 review:
"I'm not overwhelmed with the treatment of women in this book -- every woman wants to sleep with Our Hero, for example, and quickly opens up to him, and I don't see why. He's not charming, he's unsettling. But maybe that's because we see him through his own report of himself to his brother... I don't know. I'm not a fan, anyway. Even if it works for the character, I could have done with a female character who really stood out."
This response is I think what Wolfe was going for. Baxter getting all the girls is a glaring clue hiding in plain sight. But even if it's in service of the novel it's normal to want to have a character for yourself and is a reasonable expectation of a fantasy novel. Fair enough.
>"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges."
"The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all."
Back in the 80's I started seeing so many raves for TBotNS that I went out and bought them all at once.
About 80 pages into the first one, I was turned off, bored really. They sat on my shelf for a decade at least, before I just gave them away.
My question is this: how long did it take you to "get into" this series. Should I have plowed on further? Or tried a restart? (I read the first 100 pages of Dune about 3 times before it clicked, and I loved it all after that)
Or is it a taste/style thing, and if someone doesn't like it within 80 pages, they're not likely to enjoy the rest?
It aims at a great curiosity but like you say, is far too drab. I think it misses.
Wolfe had a long career and a big reputation, and he certainly was distinctive among his peers. But I found that many of his stories lean heavily into two tricks. They are occasionally effective, but encountering them in story after story in rapid succession wore me out.
The first is opening a scene with a "hook" sentence. "I was standing in line to buy a newspaper -- of course, this was before I divorced my own mother." If you've read the well-known "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," you know exactly what I mean. It can be an effective trick, but Wolfe's career is basically an exploration of how far it can take you by itself.
The second is nenuphars. It's a technique for alienation that Wolfe uses with gusto. I happened to know the trivial fact that a nenuphar is a kind of water lily, but Wolfe relies on the reader not knowing what the word means to produce the effect of alienation. So sometimes a word like "nenuphar" will be a term for a unique concept within the world of the story, and other times it will just mean "water lily, but, like alien water lily, you know?" Do not call a rabbit a smeerp.[1]
Wolfe was, of course, a Catholic and admired the writing of religious moralists like Chesterton. One short story that, to me, illustrates a lot of what Wolfe as a writer is all about is titled "The Detective of Dreams." Allow me to summarize it for you.
A wealthy client begs an old detective to stop a man from ruining his dreams. The client dreams of arriving at a vast, illustrious palace, but soon upon entering, he meets the thief, who puts an abrupt end to the pleasant vision. One by one, several more wealthy clients approach the detective, asking him to apprehend the thief. The detective goes about town in a vain attempt to find out the thief's identity. Tired, he takes a seat on a bench near a church. His weary gaze rests on a robed figure in the beautiful stained glass window. He has found the man who troubles the sleep of the wicked.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmee...
I don't think it distracts from the quality of BoTN, which stands on its own, and does a much better job of using this style.
That Catholic sentence is awful, thankfully there aren't in Catholics in BoTN.
I never read Gene Wolfe after I started reading in English, I've read him in my native language. I'll need to bump him up in my reading list to see how it reads in English.
His books are incredible and really pay off careful rereading.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Lexicon-Urthus-Dictionary-Urth-Cycle/...
A bit hard to explain, but not something I've experienced to the same degree outside of Wolfe.
He is talking about people and creatures and things that are far removed from our everyday experience in one direction (the remote future), and he is doing so through archaic words that are just as far removed in the opposite direction (the remote past).
When you start reading the book it could be anywhere and anywhen and you have no idea about the wider universe and setting and inevitably possibilities start to shrink as you read and come to understand the bigger picture.
If Cerberus works for you, there is a ton more to chew in New Sun, and you should absolutely read it whether or not you like more mainstream fantasy works.
And if you like New Sun but haven't read Jack Vance's original take on a similar world, "Dying Earth", it's absolutely worth it. Nowhere near as deep as Wolfe, but way more funny — a truly unique voice from the golden era of sci-fi.
Despite this, I love Vance's work (AFAIK I have read almost all of his work except the detective fiction and his one book for teens), but there's really some hard stuff to justify from a modern perspective about assault, gender and race in there.
And then, of course, there is "The Murthe," in which the hero must defeat a sorceress who is turning wizards into women.
A novella with a pretty hard punch was Seven American Nights.
Book of the New Sun is obviously his top work, but he had some other stuff that as really damn good such as his two books series "The Knight"/"The Wizard"
Given the popularity of scifi/fantasy TV shows lately would be interesting to see someone attempt to adapt BoTN, but maybe that would be just too difficult..
Yeah... I mean I think it could be done, the actual events of the story are straightforward enough, but it'd be impossible to produce something that wouldn't make fans of the novel pull their hair out. What I'd love to see is Severian's play adapted to a screenplay, like a one-off HBO special.
So, a screenplay adaptation of Eschatology and Genesis would be missing the point.
But I loved it.
And I didn't mind that the references were mysterious to me. It added to the feeling of the book, actually, which is very melancholic, and sort of follows the Odysseus template.
Couldn't recommend the book more.
I have tried to read Gene Wolfe several times. I must confess that all I obtained from his works was a sense of profound ennui.
I am prepared to admit that the fault is likely to be entirely mine, considering how many people admire Mr Wolfe's writing.
I read it while on holiday and listening to particularly appropriate music, which may have enhanced the experience and influenced my positive opinion. I admit that it's tough going in parts and there are a lot of obscure references, but the imagery is unparalleled.
I recommend Howl by Subheim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB49oSvLkqs
And there are plenty of New Wave authors that also fit into this Ballard and SRD (Chip Delany) especially
If I may put on my pedantic hat for a second: the article writes of the world of the New Sun tetrology: "The sun is so old that it is dying." I thought it was pretty well establish that the sun was dying of unnatural causes--possibly an artificially created black hole.
Regarding the "worm" in the Sun being a black hole, I don't think the Prophet's description in Dr Talos's play (Claw, ch. XXIV) leaves much doubt: "Yet even you must know that cancer eats the heart of the old sun. At its center, matter falls in upon itelf, as though there were a pit without bottom, whose top surrounds it." He also says of it: "We know it to be far more, for it is a discontinuity in our universe, a rent in its fabric bound by no law we know. From it nothing comes - all enters in, nought escapes."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AThe_Book_of_the_New_Sun
When he described a star fighter as a hate fractal I admit I cackled.
To me There Are Doors really punches way above its weight.
There are numerous collections available, some focus on horror, others literary sf, and others just an all-around mix. I can't recommend them enough.
Often they include background regarding what he wrote, or why, or who he wrote it for, where it was first published, and what not.
For novels that don't get as much acclaim as the BotNS, or FHoC, I highly recommend the Soldier series. More wonderful mystery hidden in plain sight.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ShittyGeneWolfe/comments/k58ar4/lis...
He was an industrial engineer by training, and was a senior editor on the staff of the journal Plant Engineering. This always tickles me given how that has to be the absolute nether pole of his own writing.
> Gene Wolfe might be considered as "High Art" by his fans, but that only means they don't read the New York Review of Books - and don't know much about literature for most of them
This is super odd implication.
If you want an example of science fiction as high art, personally I would suggest Vernor Vinge (specifically A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky) and Ursula Le Guin.
It’s far from an endorsement of torture and abuse. Master Gurloes is a deeply broken man. Severian’s childhood trauma colors the entire story, especially his relationships with women. Part of Severian’s maturation throughout the books is his slow abandonment of his life and identity as a torturer.
To get anything out of BotNS you need to separate yourself from Severian’s point of view, and Wolfe makes this deliberately difficult. There’s what Severian believes, there’s what he wants us to believe, and there’s what “really” happened. Between those three poles there’s usually a lot of empty space.
Compare the similar "eww" reaction to Larry Niven's The Ringworld Throne where the author kept describing the characters' casual sex with the locals of the places they passed through.
I’d argue that Wolfe’s other work shows that even in Urth that aspect is more about Severian than Wolfe. Long Sun for one certainly takes a very different tone, but you could argue it’s the work of a more mature author.