(urth) Review: upcoming Wolfe anthology

[brunians at brunians.org]

Sounds great.

I've been hoping to hear more from Mani.






.


> I just thought the folks on this list might be interested in the
> following review of mine that was just accepted by the online jounral
> _SF Silicon Valley_ concerning Wolfe's upcoming anthology.
>
>    -- Dan Rabin
>
> -----------------------
>
> Long-time fans of Gene Wolfe's shorter fiction will remember with
> delight a trio of thematically-unrelated stories having similar
> titles: "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories", "The Death of
> Dr. Island", and "The Doctor of Death Island".  The three works, all
> collected in _The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other
> Stories_, were joined in a long-unavailable volume appropriately
> entitled _The Wolfe Archipelago_ by a fourth permutated title: "Death
> of the Island Doctor".
>
> Scholars of high-school algebra among Wolfe's readers have often
> noted, however, that the words "island", "doctor", and "death" can be
> permuted in _six_ ways, not merely four.  Some, assuming the author's
> apparent omission to be intentional, have ascribed the absence of the
> orderings island-death-doctor and doctor-island-death to deep
> principles developed by Christian Kabbalists (yes, there have been
> some!) based on reordering the names of the Persons of the Trinity.
> Other critics have preferred to infer that the ever-fertile
> imagination of Gene Wolfe had just moved on, or that he gave the
> missing titles to stories that were rejected (either by editors, or
> by comparison with the author's own notoriously high standards).
>
> Now, at last, Wolfe himself supplies the missing pieces of the
> puzzle.  His new collection _Isolating Insulation, Doctor Death in
> Purr-Mutation!_ not only delivers the two entirely new novelettes
> "Island of the Death Doctor" and "The Doctor's Island Death", but
> also indulges the author's bent for frame stories by including new
> versions of the pre-existing four works as is "edited" jointly by the
> engaging felines Mani (from _The Wizard Knight_) and G. Gordon Kitty
> (from _Castleview_).
>
> These editorial changes constitute the "purr-mutations" of the title,
> as Wolfe deadpans in his brief introductory remarks in his own
> literary persona.  The changes, however, are minor in themselves:
> most notable is the subsitution of felines for primates in "The Death
> of Dr. Island".  As so often with this tricksy author, deeper
> meanings emerge from an accumulation of hints, here hidden in Gordon
> and Mani's commentaries on the six stories.
>
> THe commentaries, each written in one of the cats' first-person
> voice, are all dated within a two-week period in the spring of an
> unspecified year.  The last commentary, in the voice of G. Gordon
> Kitty, casually mentions "going over to my owner's in-laws for
> Passover" before trailing off into an agitated and incoherent tirade.
> The Gene Wolfe voice then returns in an afterword to say that,
> however distasteful it may appear to the reader, the last piece is
> included in the hopes of assisting the authorities in solving the
> recent bloody killing of an ordinary Jewish family at their Seder in
> a suburb of Chicago.
>
> Readers are left on their own to reflect that the Passover Seder,
> which occurs on a fixed date according to the lunar calendar used in
> Judaism, always takes place on the full moon, and that a plausible
> explanation for the carnage alluded to is that old Wolfean favorite,
> lycanthropy (or the feline equivalent) on the part of G. Gordon
> Kitty.  "Purr-mutation" indeed.
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