Gene Wolfe
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“One-Two-Three For Me” (1996) is a ghost story at an archaeological dig in the distant future.
“Counting Cats in Zanzibar” (1996) has a woman with seven pseudonyms being pursued by her past: the robots she helped create. (New Wave-ish, as if Ballard did a downbeat version of Asimov’s robopsychologist heroine Susan Calvin: something we might call “Eurydice in the Robot Kingdom”?)
“The Death of Koshchai the Deathless” (1995) is a tale of Old Russia, inspired by the tale of the same name told by Andrew Lang in The Red Fairy Book. A blend of (very funny) comical and horrific elements.
“No Planets Strike” (1997) is told by a donkey on an alien world inhabited by cruel, fairy-like beings. It could very well be set in Briah, the same universe as The Book of the (New/Long/Short) Sun. (The title is from “Hamlet.”)
“Bed And Breakfast” (1995) is about a man and a woman who meet at an inn close to hell. Almost hard-boiled, a sort of “supernatural realism” that reminds me of Chesterton and C. S. Lewis at their best.
“To the Seventh” (1996) describes a chess game between God and the Devil, which translates into galactic warfare on the smaller scale. Space Opera.
“Queen of the Night” (1994) gives us a boy raised by ghouls until he comes to the attention of the Queen of the Night herself and trades one world for another. Erotic Horror.
“And When They Appear” (1993) is a very sobering Christmas story, with a boy in an automated house. (Makes me think again of Ballard: imagine Empire of the Sun crossed with Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” in The Martian Chronicles.)
“Flash Company” (1997) has a man being tutored in the ways of love by a haunted player piano.
“The Haunted Boardinghouse” (1990) is located in a neo-Victorian Illinois, a few centuries in the future. A young classics scholar is invited to be the new librarian at a school in a strange town that played a pivotal role in a war against Mexican invaders several generations before. (The building of the title is highly reminiscent of the house in John Crowley’s Little, Big, and the story begins as a low-tech world-renewed, the sort of agrarian arcadia beloved by both survivalists and ecotopians.)
“Useful Phrases” (1992) could fit in with Wolfe’s earlier Bibliomen, since it concerns a book dealer who becomes obsessed with a primer of an imaginary language and the world it seems to describe. Clearly related to Borges’ famed “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”
“The Man in the Pepper Mill” (1996) has a boy exploring a magical world that intersects our own through the dollhouse of his dead sister. He is also trying to find a man to marry his mother and be his stepfather.
“The Ziggurat” (1995): a mountain cabin, a messy divorce-in-progress, a suicidal engineer, the promise of child custody battles, a sudden snowstorm, an alien invasion. A horror story.
“Ain’t You ’Most Done?” (1996) features a successful businessman whose secret dream is to be a professional musician. He is caught in a traffic jam that seems to last forever ...
Because the last story links directly back into the first story, I find myself pondering over how the other stories might connect to each other: Quixote Complex (“enamored of other worlds found in books”) forms a link between “The Haunted Boardinghouse” and “Useful Phrases” (both also have foreign phrases as their keystones); the fates of the boys in “Queen of the Night” and “And When They Appear” might link the stories as being similar; the haunted artifacts of “One-Two-Three For Me” and “Flash Company” show them as contrasts. As far as themes go, the struggle between men and women in the name of love seems to be present in nearly all the stories. Couples in various permutations (pursuit, courtship, consummation, estrangement) dot the landscape rather like they do in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Many of the stories seem to have a reinvigorated “New Wave” aesthetic: I have mentioned Delany and Ballard (twice), but there are also three stories that seem linked to James Tiptree, Jr.: “Counting Cats in Zanzibar,” “The Ziggurat,” and “The Man in the Peppermill” (which mentions Tiptree directly). Technology is bad; a post-technological world is a pastoral utopia; stories are downbeat (situations go from bad to worse; problems can hardly be identified, let alone “solved”; characters suffer depression, suicidal impulses, paranoia, etc., and do not get better; etc.); sexual relations are free but pointless when not actually destructive.
Is this a collection of homages and near-pastiches? After all, in the past Gene Wolfe has given us such gems as “Our Neighbor by David Copperfield” (Dickens), “Remembrance to Come” and “Suzanne Delage” (Proust), “The Rubber Bend” and “Slaves of Silver” (Arthur Conan Doyle), among others. And in talking about Strange Travelers with other readers, a few people have mentioned that “One-Two-Three For Me” is very much like a classic horror story by M. R. James (“Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”).
This line of speculation (i.e., “is this story original or based on something else?”) of course links back to the two types of artist depicted in “Bluesberry Jam.” And where there is jam, we must have toast. So I propose this one: “To Gene Wolfe, for providing such a smorgasbord of food for thought. Cheers!”
(What? My editor gestures from down the table ... I am far under word-count, he wants more ... all this while he reads The Dying Earth for the first time! Well, that’s certainly important, better late than never. Toss back this glass of wine, pour myself another.)
Oo-kay. Now I will do a bit of work on one of the stories, “The Haunted Boardinghouse” — I will carve the roast, as it were.
As I mentioned before, the building seems inspired by John Crowley’s Little, Big, in which a rambling house with five faces serves as the axis for the family saga. Each face of Crowley’s house is done in a different architectural style (but he is a bit sneaky about revealing what the fifth one is; there’s a slight paradox involved) and there are hints in Little, Big that each face matches up to a different season (again, slightly odd since we moderns usually count four seasons).
Wolfe’s house has four faces, and we know what the styles are, and even most of the street names:
Style: Neo-Classical
Street: Water
Note: boy climbing out window (p. 229)
Style: Tudor
Street: (not given)
Note: window of Enan’s room (p. 230)
Style: Neo-Victorian
Street: Prescott
Note: “your world is neo-Victorian” (p. 230)
Style: Contemporary
Street: Gate
Note: (p. 230)
The haunting details about the boy who fell out the window, took years to die of the injuries sustained, and continues to climb out the window: this points to the time warping nature of the architecture. It may also be that the boy in question is none other than Wade, the student who befriends Enan.
In addition, rather than being (possibly) related to seasons, each face seems linked to its appropriate time point in history: since the story clearly ends with Enan going off across time and space to save Rome from Hannibal, the Neo-classical face leads to there; and since we are told that Enan comes from a neo-Victorian world, then that is the face that leads to Enan’s world. Finally, the miraculous saving of Rome from Hannibal is matched by the saving of Granville from the Mexicans, thus the link to the Contemporary face is made plain. So these time-travelers go to the lands they are most enamored of, at the time when they are most needed.
But wait, I have only traced out three of the faces. Is the Tudor face another recruiting station, like the Neo-Victorian face, with no associated “miraculous” save from invasion? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.
Architecture: Invasion
Neo-classical: Hannibal’s attempted invasion of Rome
Tudor: Spanish Armada’s attempted invasion of England
Neo-Victorian: (recruiting station for Enan and Wade)
Contemporary: Mexico’s attempted invasion of Granville
What makes me think of the defeat of th
e Spanish Armada (aside from another spoiled invasion that ranks up there with the Mongols failing to take Japan) is the fact that the defense of Granville involved a lot of boats on the river (p. 214), and the big ships of the Armada were done in by a lot of smaller, more nimble craft.
A final Crowley note: the mystery of the two Mrs. Seelys has a slight parallel in Little, Big but a much more pronounced one in Crowley’s Ægypt books.
Anyway, one of the surprises in my reading of this story is this: just as Rome was nearly wiped out in relative infancy, yet then went on to undreamed of glory and accomplishment of the Roman Empire; (and perhaps England, too, narrowly missed being crushed and delivered the English Renaissance and its avatar William Shakespeare;) so has Granville been spared ... strongly suggesting that all of America’s true greatness still lies before it in Enan’s non-technological, neo-Victorian period (rather than behind it, as we might expect in such a post-technological setting).
Okay, that’s it. I’m done, I’m outta here. Enjoy your meal!
Review of Shadows of the New Sun
I avoid writing reviews because it only leads to writing more reviews. Despite this adamantine fortress, my opinion on the Gene Wolfe tribute anthology Shadows of the New Sun (2013) was sought out by the curious, and thus I find myself here, bending my rule for vanity, even in a case where I should recuse myself. So, here is not a review.
To begin with the obvious, I am an unreliable reader. You already know what I am going to say about this book, so let's just get it out of the way: Buy it, read it with joy, give copies as presents.
With that done, I now embark into the weeds, the details, the “behind the scenes.” It is a journey across much time and little space.
I remember very well when the concept of a Gene Wolfe tribute anthology first appeared to me, but the second time was a few years later. It was sometime in the mid-1990s, at a house in Berkeley. There were fissures in the backyard.
I was sharing an afternoon with my two favorite poets, Andrew Joron and Robert Frasier, at Andrew’s house. We were in the kitchen, away from the hypnotic fissures whispering their thirst for blood. Over a bottle of wine — white, I believe, but that doesn’t make sense since Andrew is a stickler for red — we were discussing Gene Wolfe, mainly because my poetry acumen is quite limited. (You will recall that Robert interviewed Gene Wolfe in the 1980s, for the fanzine Thrust.) We spoke of Gene’s poetry, his 1978 Rhysling Award, and then I suppose under the unspoken topic of “What would Michael publish next?” Robert floated the thought-balloon of a tribute anthology.
I groaned, I sighed, I rolled my eyes. We discussed three angles of the prospective project: the good (the celebration of an author); the challenge (selecting among a spectrum from “homage” to “pastiche,” while avoiding the lowest grade fan fiction); and the work (how to find and recruit the biggest names possible, in addition to the usual small press troubles). On the one hand it seemed the quintessential small press project, a work of concentrated, dedicated love, realistically limited to a print run of 500 copies; but in the next sip of Riesling the idea looked so difficult as to be effectively, quixotically, Sisyphusianly impossible, a project for a mainstream publisher, and there seemed faint likelihood of that coming to pass.
In short, I admit I had dreamed of such a book — more accurately, others had independently spoken to me of the notion, and I had repeatedly refused to do it myself. Instead I chased after such projects as a hardcover edition of The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, two collections of uncollected stories, et cetera.
None of those were published. The tribute anthology, though, is here.
Let’s start with that title, Shadows of the New Sun. It is a good one — so good, in fact, that it had already been used for Peter Wright’s 2007 book of essays and articles by and about Gene Wolfe (including, I must add, Robert Frasier’s aforementioned interview). Obviously, such a titling is a Wolfean thing to do. Acknowledging this, it is with some sorrow I admit having advised Robert Borski not to title his first book “The Naked Sun,” because that was the title of Asimov’s 1957 robot novel. (He went with Solar Labyrinth.) If he had gone ahead with his first choice, he might have quite logically titled his next book, the one about the Long Sun and the Short Sun, “The Caves of Steel.” (He went with The Long and the Short of It.) Still, the case in question is another twist again, a loop-the-lupine loop (tip of the hat to Philip José Farmer), to name a Wolfe tribute anthology after a Wolfe-studies collection, such that any confusion results in more Wolfe-related sales, rather than sales of Asimov, Mark Twain (Innocents Aboard ≠ Innocents Abroad), or Nabokov (The Laughter at Night ≠ Laughter in the Dark).
This tribute anthology confirms what I thought before, when poets and Rhône wine sharpened my mind, and yet it also manages to avoid all the pitfalls. It achieves the difficult task of providing the virtues of both the small press and the big press, in effect forging an alchemical wedding. It has mainly big name authors, as befits a big press production, but I was pleasantly surprised by the intensity of feeling coming through in these stories. Nobody here is “phoning it in,” and at times the emotions on display made me feel as though I were reading private, personal letters. Kudos to the writers, and kudos to the editors! Even with all the resources at their fingertips, they still could have produced a mediocre tome, but they did not — they succeeded in wonderful triumph.
From my perspective, that should be the best outcome, right? Being able to enjoy a top-rate product without having had to go through all the blood, sweat, and tears of producing it.
Gene Wolfe himself has two stories in the book, which makes him both the honored guest and the waiter, or something. The course of reading through the story sequence has a compounding effect upon me, the echoing and reactive nature of the stories in The Arabian Nights, or better, The Canterbury Tales, where each narrator is a separate individual united to the others by threads of common interest. Here it is as if eighteen writers sat together around a table, each telling a tale in turn, and though each had arrived by a separate path, still there were the similar sights they had seen and the strangest coincidences. In all, a shared meal of nineteen courses.
But I get ahead of myself. While I will not comment on every one of the stories, I must start with the first story, or the story of the first story, and my reason to recuse myself. It is a bitter tale.
The first story is “Frostfree” by Gene Wolfe, about a fembot sent from the future on a mission. I was intimately involved in its writing, a project that began in 2009 when I was approached by a group of Wolfe fans whom I knew from the Internet. They wanted to commission an original short story from Gene Wolfe for inclusion in a small print-run book. I was skeptical, but I mentioned it to Gene and he said he was amiable if I hammered out all the details first. I hammered and I hammered, and it all seemed right. Then, as per the agreement with Gene, I pestered and I pestered him to write the thing on time, and he did. The story itself seemed to be partially inspired by a Tee-shirt Gene had seen me wearing in Seattle one day in 2007. This shirt is a unique artifact I had made myself, grabbing an anime image from a favorite Japanese cartoon and adding to it the words “Combat Waitress … From the Future!” (For my musings on such cartoons, please see my latest Kindle e-book, True SF Anime.)
After all those months, problems arose with the publisher and Gene had to withdraw his story from the project. I hope he has forgiven me. (And I hope that other enterprising fans — the graphic novelist in San Francisco, the game designer in France — will forgive me for not helping them more.)
The anthology’s second story is from Neil Gaiman. I first knew Neil Gaiman as a Wolfe fan in the early 1990s where I saw him write on the topic on the GEnie board. He had interviewed Gene at Fantasycon 1983, his first chance to meet his hero. Neil Gaiman is a genial person but I bungled my way into offending him on the topic of comic book studies — my follow-up expansion, never given, was that I felt the English department did not have the vi
sual arts vocabulary to deal with anything other than text; even the typographical antics of Tristram Shandy push the limits. Comic book art requires art studies and cinema studies, it seems to me. I hope Neil Gaiman has forgotten the incident, or, even better, forgiven me.
I did not meet Neil Gaiman at World Fantasy Con in Tucson 1991, even though we were both there. That was where he won an award for Sandman, and saw a shooting star that inspired him to write Stardust; whereas I met Gene Wolfe in person for the first time, and together we tried to pressure David Hartwell into buying my lexicon project, one (big press) way or the other (small press) way. No dice!
In 2012 Neil Gaiman did me the honor of introducing himself to me at the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame event celebrating Gene Wolfe. He said that I was “fan number one.” That is flattering, or unsettling, or both — who, then, are these other fans, who know so much more than I do? Who is “fan zero,” and “fan minus one”? Who are the secret masters, wise enough to go unnamed?
At that same event I renewed acquaintances with Michael Swanwick, who provides the ninth story in the tribute anthology. I had first met him at World Fantasy Con in Baltimore 1995, where Dan Knight, small press publisher of Young Wolfe (1992) and Letters Home (1991), introduced him to me as a Gene Wolfe fan. At the fabulous mansion of coin-operated machines and vast musical organs, I spoke with Michael Swanwick about the recent John Carter (2012) movie, happy to find that he enjoyed it nearly as much as I. He said green Martians were based on American blacks, and I was about to argue with him on that point but then the show was starting and I had to shut up and find a chair. So here is what I was going to say — Hadn’t it already been established in print that the green Martians were based upon Arabs? I believe that is the case, and John Carter’s uniting of the tribe is a lot like that action by Lawrence of Arabia … except that John Carter did it first, which is boggling. Was T. E. Lawrence inspired by Barsoom?