(urth) New Wolfe stories

[Gwern Branwen]

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Matthew Keeley
<matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I didn't realize the Amazon listing had shown up already, nor that the book
> came out so soon. Home Fires is a novel. He talked about it at Readercon
> 2009 – spoke about some characters, the setting, etc.
> I wrote a post to Urth on Wolfe at Readercon in July of last year; the post
> is presumably in the Urth Archives for July 2009.
> Here's the relevant section of my report on Wolfe's comments:
> (Minor spoilers, I suppose)
> When I asked what Wolfe was working on, he talked a little about Home Fires,
> the
> second draft of which he finished in February. Apparently it involves
> an energy-poor future Earth, an interstellar war, and complications in
> love arriving as a result of time dilation.
>
> -Matt

Here's someone who has written a review:
http://mordicai.livejournal.com/1817587.html

(Must have an advance copy.)

     "Home Fires is the story of a couple torn apart by war. She ships
off to serve while he stays home to build a life for when she returns.
Of course, the war is set on a far off world, & due to the vagaries of
space-time dilatation at high speeds, she returns just a few months
older while he has aged twenty years. Their May-December romance is of
course complicated. The world the story is set in is an odd future--
like the future of Mad Men perhaps, a future of a past that skips our
current history. Or a history that, in cycles, returns to old
patterns. The man-- Skip, a lawyer-- takes his partner ("contracto,"
the civil & religious ceremonies of marriage having been split) on a
cruise to win his love-- Mastergunner Chelle-- back, along with her
mother-- more or less-- & they are swept up in the machinations of one
of Robert Louis Stevenson's Suicide Clubs, or the stratagems of spies,
or both, or neither. Shockingly, all is revealed by the end-- that is
the thing that gets me the most. Gene Wolfe has a tendency to leave
you guessing, to never spell out just what has been going on-- yet
here, he does. The inquisitive Skip's barrister background makes him
both good at ferreting out the truth & laying it out. So caught up in
the plot-- & the plotting-- was I that I totally didn't see the final
"twist" (by which I emphatically don't mean an M. Night Shyamalan
anagnorisis) coming. So obvious that I over-looked it entirely. I
think Home Fires, like many of Mister Wolfe's recent novels, is the
sort of narrative that he would have once written as a short story &
then put aside. In fleshing them out into full novels he provides
something eminently readable & very intimate. They become character
studies-- because Gene Wolfe has written enough tight novellas &
shorter works, he has room to lay out the story while paying attention
to the tucked away parcels of the characters."

-- 
gwern