(urth) Review: upcoming Wolfe anthology
Dan Rabin
wolfe-lists at danrabin.com
Sun Apr 1 15:34:50 PDT 2007
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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