The man the Washington Post called “the finest writer the science fiction world has ever produced” is delighted. Scanning the used book section at The Stars Our Destination bookstore on Chicago’s North Side, Gene Wolfe has found some yellowing paperback “Orbit” anthologies featuring some of his short stories from the ’60s and ’70s. He thumbs through the books like a proud papa looking at baby pictures.
The fact that Wolfe, considered by his peers to be at the pinnacle of his craft, is unrecognized by all except the clerk at the city’s premier science fiction bookstore seems not to faze the Barrington resident at all. Then again, Wolfe is a man of contrasts. A mechanical engineer by training, he writes some of the most poetic prose in all of science fiction and fantasy. He’s a “straight arrow” whose hobbies include knife-throwing. He’s a devout Catholic in a genre he says is full of atheists and agnostics; his best-known literary character is a torturer. He has won numerous awards, including a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1996 and a Chicago Foundation for Literature Award, but he finds it easier to tell new acquaintances that he’s “retired” rather than to explain just what a science fiction writer does.
“Gene Wolfe is undoubtedly in the top rank of science fiction writers of the last 25 years,” said New York Times science fiction critic Gerald Jonas. “His grandest achievement is his `New Sun’ series, in which he infuses far-future science fiction with a moral grandeur rare in any writing these days.”
A passage from his landmark 1980 novel, “The Shadow of the Torturer,” the first book in the “New Sun” series, makes it clear that Wolfe is no average writer: “Memory oppresses me. Having been reared among the torturers, I have never known my father or my mother. No more did my brother apprentices know theirs. From time to time, but most particularly when winter draws on, poor wretches come clamoring to the Corpse Door, hoping to be admitted to our ancient guild. Often they regale Brother Porter with accounts of the torments they will willingly inflict in payment for warmth and food; occasionally they fetch animals as samples of their work.”
He’s also not an easy one to pigeonhole. Fans of such special-effects-driven recent science fiction films as “Men In Black” and “The Fifth Element” may find Wolfe’s work a bit too cerebral, but those who like a good tale elegantly told will delight in his novels and short fiction.
“He has a very individual style,” said noted science fiction writer and Chicago area resident Frederik Pohl, who as the editor of the magazine If in 1966 bought Wolfe’s second professional sale. “You can tell Gene Wolfe’s writing from anyone else’s. It’s very dense writing, very complete. You get a sense of the smell of it, the look of it, the way that people react to each other. You feel like you’re there.”
Wolfe, 66, is a professorial sort with an intimidating intellect, a world-class handlebar mustache and a disarming and contagious laugh. He seems both proud and embarrassed by all the critical hosannas.
“I don’t consider myself somebody of primary importance to the history of humanity or of literature,” said, Wolfe, whose admirers included the late Clare Boothe Luce, who tried to option the “New Sun” series to a film production company. “I just want to reach the people who enjoy reading the things that I write. I just want to get my books into their hands.”
Of his 19 novels and 5 short story collections, Wolfe is best known for the 1980-1983 “New Sun” tetralogy. As with some of Wolfe’s other work, there is some controversy over whether the series is science fiction or fantasy. “The Shadow of the Torturer” won a World Fantasy Award as Best Novel in 1981. The second book, “The Claw of the Conciliator,” won a 1982 “Nebula” award for best novel by the Science Fiction Writers of America.
The series is set in an Earth (called “Urth”) so far in the future that the sun is dying. Despite the setting, Urth more closely resembles Europe in the middle ages, with its guilds and feudal society. Severian, a young and guileless apprentice to the Order of the Seekers of Truth and Penitence (the torturers guild) who eventually becomes Autarch or ruler of the commonwealth, tells the story as a memoir. At the end of the fourth book, Severian leaves for a nearby universe to attempt to save Urth’s dimming sun. A fifth book, 1987’s “The Urth of the New Sun,” picks up the story.
On one level a cracking good adventure tale, and on another a religious allegory, the “New Sun” books are filled with archaic words–exultants, cacogens, armigers and hierophants–that have caused some readers to run to their unabridged dictionaries. On several Internet web sites and mailing lists, Wolfe fans can be found trying to decipher the more arcane aspects of the “New Sun” and related “Book of the Long Sun” series.
Wolfe says he got the idea for the character Severian while attending a panel on costuming at a science fiction convention.
“I was sulking because nobody at these conventions ever dressed up as one of my characters,” he said over lunch at Egg Harbor in Barrington. “While listening to the rest of the panel I came up with this costume: black boots, black trousers, bare chest, black cape, black mask and a sword. Then I asked myself, `Who is this person? Where does he come from, and why is he dressed like that?’ And that was the beginning of the `Book of the Long Sun’ (series).”
Also set in the same universe is Wolfe’s more recent “Long Sun” series; its fourth installment, “Exodus from the Long Sun,” was published late last year. It’s set in a multigenerational starship called “The Whorl” that is so vast that its occupants don’t realize it’s a ship. Its central character is Patera Silk, a priest-turned-leader of a city-state. (Wolfe’s wife Rosemary says that of all the characters in his books, her husband most resembles Silk.) If the “New Sun” books recalled Europe of the Middle Ages, the “Long Sun” books were inspired by Byzantium. Currently, Wolfe is at work on a “Short Sun” series that will bridge the two previous series. Set closer to home is the 1991 fantasy novel, “Castleview,” which takes place in a small northern Illinois town.
Wolfe’s writing often bridges aspects of his fictional subject area.
“I draw the division between science fiction and fantasy differently than most people,” said Wolfe. “Fantasy is concerned with the implausible, such as someone on a flying carpet. I can also put that same person in a helicopter and dress it up with some rockets and it becomes science fiction.”
In some ways it’s amazing that such exotic worlds come from the mind of a man raised in circumstances fairly typical for their time.
Although Wolfe was born in Brooklyn in 1931, he lived in Peoria and Dallas before settling in Houston when he was 8. His father, Roy, tried various professions, owning a restaurant and working as a business equipment traveling salesman. His mother, Mary, was an avid reader.
“Up until the age of 13 or 14, I was constantly sick,” said Wolfe. “I had infantile paralysis and went to therapy for years. I was also allergic to just about everything. So my mother did a lot of reading to me when I was sick–the `Oz’ books, Lewis Carroll and a lot of murder mysteries, which were her favorites.
“One day I came across this paperback my mother had, with rocket ships on the cover. I didn’t know that there was something called `science fiction,’ but I was familiar with Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. The book was the first-ever American anthology of science fiction, `The Pocket Book of Science Fiction.’ The first story in it was `Microcosmic God’ by Ted Sturgeon, and I was absolutely blown away by it.
“After that I discovered the `pulp’ magazines. I read Weird Tales, Amazing, Astounding and Thrilling Wonder Stories. I used to spend hours hiding behind the candy case at the Richmond Pharmacy until I was found and thrown out.”
Wolfe wrote his earliest short stories for the college literary magazine at Texas A&M. Then he was drafted by the Army during the Korean War. While he had some harrowing experiences in battle, Wolfe’s closest brush with death came enroute to Korea on the USS Patrick, when he was nearly washed overboard into the Pacific during a storm.
“I was absolutely terrified after that,” said Wolfe, who later published a book of his war letters home to his mother. “I was so scared that I could not do anything except press up against the bulkhead shaking afterwards.
“I knew I had come within a whisker of dying.”
After military service, Wolfe transferred to the University of Houston, where he received his mechanical engineering degree. By 1957 Wolfe had married Rosemary Dietsch, literally his childhood “girl next door” from Peoria, and was working as an engineer for Procter & Gamble Co. in Cincinnati. To supplant his meager salary and support what would soon become a family of six, he renewed his interest in writing.
In 1965 Wolfe sold his first short story, “The Dead Man,” to Sir! magazine, “a cheap imitation of Playboy,” for $60. Soon his acceptance-vs.-rejection rate picked up, and he sold more often to the science fiction magazines and paperback anthologies such as “Orbit.” His first novel, “Operation Ares,” was published in 1970 after a three-year holdup, and the critically acclaimed “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” followed two years later.
While at Procter & Gamble, Wolfe was part of the engineering team that designed the machinery that baked Pringles potato chips.
“At one point I could open a can of Pringles and by looking at the broken chips tell you whether the damage had been done in shipping or in the production line,” said Wolfe. “I could also tell you exactly where in the production line the damage occurred.”
Tired of the low pay at Procter & Gamble, Wolfe took a job in 1972 as an editor for the trade journal Plant Engineering, which was based in Barrington. By then he was averaging a novel a year, writing in the morning before work, at night and on weekends. In 1983 Wolfe decided to write full time.
“It had reached the point where my full-time job was really kind of a hobby,” he said. “And my real career was something that I was doing in mornings, evenings and weekends. I was making more money as a writer than as an engineer. The publishing company gave me a `retirement’ lunch and a gold watch. I made my `thank you’ speech, then pulled off my tie, threw my jacket into the corner, took off my white shirt and exposed my T-shirt, which said, `Reality is just a crutch for people who can’t deal with science fiction.’ “
I remember the time Gene invited my husband Richard and me to dinner at his house,” said local writer Jennifer Stevenson. “We walked around to the back yard and there he and Rosemary were, throwing knives and hatchets at each other. It was pretty awe-inspiring.” (Wolfe laughs at this recounting, saying he and Rosemary throw only at targets.)
“Gene is probably the craziest guy I know,” said Algis Budrys, the science fiction author and editor. “He just doesn’t show it. At the same time he’s a very private person.”
That privacy extends to his inner sanctum, the basement office in his Barrington home where he does his writing, and which is off limits to all but immediate family. One of the most prized possessions in his office is a parody of the comic strip “Snoopy,” featuring Snoopy as his torturer character Severian.
“In many ways I am a straight arrow,” said Wolfe. “I mean, I’ve been married to the same woman for 40 years. In some ways I’m pretty ordinary, though I have also had some great adventures.”
When asked if there’s a common theme that runs throughout his writing, Wolfe barely hesitates to answer.
“What interested me initially about science fiction was the opening of possibilities, what the old-timers always referred to as the `sense of wonder.’ It was what made me see that the world didn’t have to be the way it was, that it could be radically different in any number of ways. There was also the feeling that one person could make profound changes, people like (light bulb inventor) Thomas Edison and (alternating current discoverer) Nikola Tesla. I don’t think we have that feeling too much today.”
As might be expected, Wolfe believes in the mathematical inevitability of intelligent life beyond the solar system, though he scoffs at all the UFO hoopla surrounding events in Roswell, N.M., 50 years ago.
The Mars/Pathfinder mission was of only passing interest to a man who, like many science fiction writers, had posited long ago that there was some sort of life on Mars millions of years ago. Wolfe wrote about cloning in “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” and about genetic manipulation in his short story, “The Woman the Unicorn Loved.” But Wolfe remains disappointed with real life progress in science and space.
“If you had told me when I was 20 that we were going to have a space station that was basically an old Soviet space station and was a little tin can with three men in it, I would have been bitterly disappointed,” he said.
“I would have expected the kind of space station that you saw in `2001: A Space Odyssey,’ a great big orbiting station with hundreds, if not thousands, of people on it. I’m damn disappointed that we don’t. I also would have expected that by 1999 we’d have Howard Johnson’s on the moon.”
In his mind, Gene Wolfe has journeyed to many worlds and has been to the far future and back again. When he’s not writing, though, he seems more than content with life in contemporary suburban Chicago. Wolfe says that if he had the opportunity to be cryogenically frozen and then thawed out 50 years from now, he’d take a pass.
“I would like very much to be able to see what that world was like, but I don’t think I’d want to live there,” he said. “I’d be a total misfit. I think I would be unsuited to any world that I’d wake up in, because I’m barely suited to this one.”
BACK TO THE FUTURE: SCIENCE FICTION THEN AND NOW
Men in Black.” “The X Files.” “Contact.” “Star Trek: Voyager” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” “Independence Day.” “Babylon 5.” “Jurassic Park.” It’s impossible not to notice that many of the most successful recent films and TV programs have been science fiction. There’s even an entire cable TV channel devoted to science fiction–the Science Fiction Channel. Once characterized as the province of adolescents, kooks and dreamers, science fiction has hit the mainstream in a big way. Take a look next time you’re riding the train or “L” to work and notice as many people reading Orson Scott Card and Marion Zimmer Bradley as Robert Ludlum and Jackie Collins. And what kind of computer and video games are most likely keeping your kids up past their bedtime? Right.
Yes, we’re living in what Isaac Asimov labeled a “science fictional world.” But, as the joke goes, the future isn’t what it used to be. From the fantastic, seminal early writings of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to the scientifically grounded work of Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke in the ’50s, the proliferation of “cyberpunk” in the ’80s and the current vogue for writing that verges on fantasy, science fiction has constantly evolved.
Today’s science fiction has as many different flavors as your neighborhood Baskin-Robbins. There’s science-driven or “hard” science fiction as exemplified by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven; military science fiction (David Drake, Fred Saberhagen); fantasy-oriented (Anne McCaffrey, Raymond Feist); humorous (Douglas Adams, Connie Willis); sociological (Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Bear); historical and alternate history (Harry Turtledove); and horror-oriented (Brian Lumley, Charles L. Grant). A few writers, notably Gene Wolfe and Robert Silverberg, have successfully worked in many sub-genres of science fiction.
But regardless of the style, a science fiction writer has to stay on his or her toes these days, as each day’s headlines seem to carry news of yet another wonderful scientific or technological discovery. A year ago scientists announced they had found evidence of primitive microbial life on Mars from a meteorite that collided with Earth 13,000 years ago. This year the Pathfinder mission to Mars dazzled us with amazing pictures from the surface of the planet that inspired such science fiction classics as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Barsoom” stories, Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” and Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger In a Strange Land.” The discovery of a crater containing what is thought to be ice at the moon’s south pole could start an international “cold rush” back to Neil Armstrong’s old stomping grounds. Then again, there’s also the trouble-plagued Mir space station, which isn’t quite the grand station Clarke wrote about in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Thanks to the Hubble telescope, we have seen the first proof of planets in other galaxies, a discovery that lends weight to the theory that life on other planets is virtually a mathematical certainty. New advances in computer technology, including “smart appliances,” promise to make our lives even more high-tech than they already are.
With the first “Baaaaa!” from Dolly, the Scottish lamb that was the first mammal cloned from a single adult cell, cloning–a longtime theme in science fiction–has scientists, doctors and theologians contemplating its ethical implications. Genetic engineering, touched on a hundred years ago by Wells in “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” is making great strides in laboratories all over the world. The Human Genome Project, a $3 billion, multinational effort expected to be completed in 2010, will map out the molecular blueprint for a “standard” human being with important genetic and medical results.
And there are more wonders on the horizon, such as nanotechnology–miniaturized, self-replicating robots working on the molecular level, which will do everything from building houses to creating fabrics that are a hundred times stronger than today’s. You hear a lot of techno-babble about “time warps” and cosmic “worm holes” on “Star Trek,” but physicists studying the quantum “foam” in the “empty” vacuum of space think they may be a reality.
Scientists studying brain-activated movement or “electroencephalography” have already proved that it’s possible for brain waves to interact with computers, with intriguing consequences for the disabled and controversial uses for the military. Other work on the brain seeks to find out exactly how the brain is wired.
Of course, science fiction has also influenced science and technology, with many of today’s scientists having started out as youthful science fiction readers. Gene Wolfe wrote about “teaching machines” in his 1972 novel “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” although the first personal computer, the Altair 8800, didn’t make its debut until 1975. Much of the current shape of the Internet and the World Wide Web was predicted by “cyberpunk” writers like William Gibson, whose 1984 novel, “Neuromancer,” remains the definitive work in the genre. Gibson introduced such concepts as virtual reality and cyberspace, and predicted a future where multinational corporations have taken the place of nations. The thought of Microsoft Nation already has some quaking in their shoes.
With so much of yesterday’s science fiction now today’s science fact, one wonders where science fiction will go tomorrow. According to Algis Budrys, the Evanston-based writer, editor and critic, the grist for science fiction is virtually limitless.
“Science fiction is about people exploring the unknown,” he said. “And the unknown is just as big as it ever was.”
