(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: the honorable Gene Wolfe

[Gwern Branwen]

On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 5:55 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.sfsite.com/news/2012/01/07/gene-wolfe-honored/
>
>> The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame will be presenting Gene Wolfe with the first Fuller Award for lifetime achievement in literature on March 17 at an Evening to Honor Gene Wolfe. The event will take place at the Sanfilippo Estate in Barrington Hills, IL and will be hosted by Gary K. Wolfe. Authors scheduled to pay tribute to Wolfe include Neil Gaiman, Luis Urrea, Michael Swanwick, Audrey Niffenegger, Jody Lynn Nye, and Patrick O’Leary with a performance of an adaptation of Wolfe’s story “The Toy Theatre” by Lawrence Santoro. Tickets begin at $65.

A much more interesting description:
http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blogs/honoring-gene-wolfe

Also http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/01/12/qa-with-the-founder-of-%E2%80%98the-encyclopedia-of-science-fiction%E2%80%99/

> What are your favourite works of SF and Why?
>
> Someone once quipped: ‘the Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve’, meaning that what you read when you are twelve impresses itself upon an area of the brain that will seek out more like it. It follows that as your reading level and experience becomes greater, your favourites will continually alter. Readers in their seventies may have developed the kind of sophistication that would allow them to enjoy the sequence of four novels known as ‘The Book of the New Sun’ (1980-83) by Gene Wolfe. Unusually, the book masquerades as a fantasy about an ancient and depleted civilisation of the future, but readers will sooner or later notice that all this fantasy has an astonishingly firm – if elusive – underpinning of SF. Younger readers may, however, be more likely to enjoy ‘Snow Crash’ (1992) by Neal Stephenson, set in a much closer future than the one Wolfe creates, starring among others a high speed pizza delivery girl, and some very clever, very young hackers creating a cyberworld.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net