(urth) The Distant Suns of Gene Wolfe
Matthew King
automatthew at gmail.com
Mon May 28 11:28:29 PDT 2007
"The Distant Suns of Gene Wolfe", by John Farrell, is finally
available in the online archives of First Things magazine.
Farrell makes the common mistake of identifying Jesus with the
Conciliator, and he smears Gaiman and Stephenson by mentioning them
in the same clause as Robert Jordan, but this is an otherwise worthy
article.
--
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5466
Lots of novel readers—from the highest brow to the lowest—nod
politely when the science-fiction writer Gene Wolfe is mentioned. But
even among science-fiction fans, one gets the sense that they’re
saying, “Yes, yes, we know how good he is, but we’d rather talk about
such bestselling authors as Neil Gaiman or Robert Jordan, Laurel
Hamilton or Neal Stephenson.” As Glenn Reynolds, the inveterate
science-fiction enthusiast and popular blogger of Instapundit.com,
recently wrote, “Gene Wolfe is a superb writer, but I’m not crazy
about his storytelling.” I recently asked a veteran New York editor
whether Wolfe could find a publisher today if he were just coming
along as a young writer. “Probably not,” she admitted. His writing is
too religious, too difficult, and too strange.
Both the Soldier cycle and the Book of the New Sun series reveal the
problem and the promise of Gene Wolfe. The New Sun series, for
instance, takes place in a world more than a million years in the
future, where artifacts of Christ still have healing power, while the
Soldier novels chronicle the life of a mercenary bedeviled by gods
and goddesses in the Mediterranean world a few centuries before the
birth of Jesus.
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