(urth) May 2014 Wolfe interview in _Technology Review_

[Gwern Branwen]

TR has published a lengthy interview with Gene Wolfe. It asks plenty
of standard questions, but also some interesting ones about some of
the short stories which have come up recently, particularly "Tracking
Song" and "The Hero as Werwolf".

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/529431/a-qa-with-gene-wolfe/ "A
Q&A with Gene Wolfe; A Twelve Tomorrows exclusive: Science fiction
legend Gene Wolfe looks back on his career", Jason Pontin, 25 July
2014

> ...when Wolfe dropped out of college, he was drafted into the Army, and fought in Korea as a combat engineer. He returned home, by his own account, “a mess”: “I’d hit the floor at the slightest noise.” Rosemary, whom he met again shortly after he was discharged, he says simply, “saved me.”
>
> ...I met Gene Wolfe at home in Peoria, where he returned in 2013 after many years in Barrington, Illinois. Although he had recently published a new novel, _The Land Across_, and was working on another, it was a melancholy visit. He had moved because his wife, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, wanted to go home. But not long after their return, she entered an assisted-living facility, and she died on December 14. Wolfe had been ill himself, his eyesight and heart troubled, and for a time he had also been confined to a facility. The day before I arrived, workers had found his dog, who had been missing for weeks: the animal had been hit by a car, and had crawled behind a garden bush to die. The house was nearly empty except for the author’s own books, some family photographs (including one of an implausibly young Wolfe in uniform), a little furniture, and a makeshift shrine, with a statue of the Virgin, rosary beads, and a Bible, in front of a window overlooking the back lawn.
>
> In person, Wolfe is large, kindly, and unfailingly courteous. His hands are huge and spatulate. He sports an exuberant hussar’s moustache. He speaks carefully, in a higher register than the voice of the books might suggest. We talked the day after his 83rd birthday. [8 May 2014]
>
> ...Q: What struck you about G.K. Chesterton?
>
> A: His charm; his willingness to follow an argument wherever it led.
>
> Q. What of the founders of science fiction?
>
> A. When I was a boy, I read all the pulp magazines, which were still around in those days. You’ve no doubt seen collector editions, but in those days you could buy a pulp for 10 or 15 cents. One of my favorites was _Famous Fantastic Mysteries_, which reprinted good stuff from the turn of the century. Once, they did Wells’s _The Island of Dr. Moreau_ [1896] as an entire issue. And I read it, and I absolutely loved it, and when I had read the last page I went back to the first page, and I started again. And when I started my fourth reading I thought, “Well, I know everything that’s going to happen now and I’ll just put it aside for a while until I’ve kind of forgotten it, and then I’ll read it again.” And I never looked at it again until I was about 50. And when I was that age, somebody wrote to me and said he was putting together one of those books that honor the hundred best science fiction novels. It would have essays from writers like me, and this person wanted me to do _The Island of Dr. Moreau_. I thought, “Gee, I remember that fondly. I will take him up on that. But first, obviously, I have to get a copy of it and read it, since I haven’t read it since I was a kid.” And I did …
>
> Wonderful cover on that book, by the way—wonderful! The man was bare-chested—not quite muscular enough to be a hero, but muscular and good-looking—and behind him is this enormous, shaggy monster. And the monster has one hand on the man’s shoulder. In a most buddy-looking sort of way, you know. [Chuckles merrily.] I thought that was a lovely cover; I still do …
>
> Anyhow, I read the book and immediately saw there were things in there that had completely sailed over me that were now hitting me like a brick. The book starts when the narrator gets on a ship from some city in South America. On the third day out, they ram a derelict and their ship sinks. He spends three days in a lifeboat with two men, a fellow passenger and a sailor, and he mentions, just in passing, that he never learned the name of the sailor in the boat with him. And another thing: the sailor and the passenger fall overboard in a struggle, and the narrator is picked up by a boat carrying Dr. Moreau’s doctor, who gives him “a dose of some scarlet stuff, iced. It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger.” That one, too, just whizzed by me. All this stuff, and I was too dumb to appreciate it as a boy!
>
> ...Q. I know you thought Algis Budrys a tremendous writer.
>
> A. A.J. was a friend. I admired _Who_ [1958] enormously. The plot of _Rogue Moon_ [1960] is striking: Budrys tells us that if you destroyed a man here and reconstituted him somewhere else, you’re fooling yourself if you think that the reconstituted man is the same as the original man. The man who goes into the matter transmitter is going to go dark; he’s going to die. You can create a new man with the memories of the dead man; but that doesn’t mean that the dead man is still alive. The dead man is dead.
>
> ...Q. Do you stay up with contemporary science fiction?
>
> A. Oh, I can’t. There’s too much to read, and I’ve had too many eye problems recently. I can read for maybe 15 minutes, and then I have to stop. At the time I was reading The Island of Dr. Moreau over and over again, I could read for eight hours a day, and sometimes I did....
>
> ...Q. Your father was lucky to have such a job during the Depression.
>
> A. Absolutely. We traveled from place to place, wherever my father could find work. But say this: we always had a place to live; we always had food. One time I said as much to Ben Bova, and he replied, “Well, we didn’t.” His father was a day laborer, and sometimes he just could not get work. And if he didn’t, the Bovas did not eat. All of us from that time grew up with the feeling that you shouldn’t waste anything: you don’t waste rags, because rags can be useful.
>
> ...Q. In the Soldier series [1986–2006], which begins shortly after the Battle of Plataea, are Latro’s gods real beings in the way that Silk’s gods are not? Latro has theophanies—or, at least, he has strange visitations that his friends interpret as theophanies.
>
> A. I’m assuming that the gods actually exist and are there, although from a Christian perspective they should not be worshipped. But on the other hand it’s foolish to think that they’re not there, because they are.
>
> ...I once met Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who we’re trying to get made a saint now. He looked at you and you felt that he knew all about you, that he had taken your worth, both positive and negative, and had formed a correct opinion about you, and that was it.
>
> Q. Did Sheen feel saintly? He was canny by your account; he had an intelligent eye.
>
> A. Sheen was a very intelligent man. He was smaller than I had expected. I suppose he was about five-five, five-six, or something like that.
>
> ...Q. But did Sheen feel saintly? Did he have a quality of holiness?
>
> A. He had a quality of something really quite extraordinary. I was at a party once for locally important politicians—a former governor of Illinois, for example. And Sheen came through as somebody who was actually on a higher level. A hundred years from now, he was the only one at the party who would still be important. The rest of us were lost.
>
> ...Q. How did you write when you had a day job and a young family? And how did that change when writing became your full-time job?
>
> A. I would write for about an hour before work on workdays, and then I would write on Saturdays and Sundays. That left my afternoons and evenings free to play with my kids or read to them. And then in those days—and believe me, I no longer do this—anytime I woke up after 4:00 a.m., I stayed up and I wrote. I stopped writing when Rosemary called down to me that breakfast was ready. When I left off editing, I increased the time I spent writing by a factor of three.
>
> ...Q. Your writing changed when you became a professional writer. When you stole time to write, your prose style was denser and more literary. _Peace_ and _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_ are very worked-over books, with echoes of Proust and other writers you admired. Since you became a full-time writer, your prose has become looser: the paragraphs are shorter, you rely more on dialogue, and the entire tone is less poetic.
>
> A. It’s not that, really. It’s that I’ve gotten so much criticism for being unreadable and overcomplex and hard to get into and all this stuff. And I thought, “Well, I’ll loosen up.”
>
> Q. I find that hard to bear. While I admire many of the books after _The Book of the New Sun_, your early and middle prose style is very original. Nabokov would have recognized you as a being like himself. Yet this feeling that “Wolfe is too difficult” is not uncommon. When I asked the MIT Science Fiction Society what I should ask you, they wrote, “How should a science fiction reader who is more accustomed to [Larry] Niven, [Orson Scott] Card, or [David] Brin start reading Wolfe?”
>
> A. I think it’s probably _The Sorcerer’s House_. It’s an epistolary novel, and that seems to help people along. So long as they don’t get bothered by the fact that the style changes from one letter writer to another.
>
> A. See? You’re incapable of being simple.
>
> ...Q. Sometimes those challenges can seem eccentrically difficult. In the _Soldier_ series you created a narrator who forgets everything at the end of every day.
>
> A. Yes, I came across an article about a brain injury that is perfectly real [anterograde amnesia]. People have short-term memory and long-term memory. One of the things you do in your sleep is transfer certain short-term memories into long-term memory. Unconsciously, you decide what’s really important: if it’s not, you forget it; if it is, you put it into long-term memory. If you destroy a certain portion of the brain, short-term memory is just overwritten. And I thought, that’s very interesting. In Severian, I had created a character who forgot nothing. And I thought: let’s do one of these guys who forgets everything.
>
> ...Q. Alden Dennis Weer, the narrator of _Peace_, is unreliable in this particular sense: he’s dead, and doesn’t know it.
>
> A. He’s a ghost. Ghosts often don’t realize they’re dead. That’s the explanation of much of the behavior of ghosts that we find puzzling.
>
> Q. In _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_, does John Marsch understand that he’s really V.R.T., a “shadow child,” one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the colony planet, who is aping a man?
>
> A. Yes, he does. He knows he’s not a real Earthman, but he’s trying to talk himself into believing that he is. That’s what he wants to be.
>
> ...Q. You’re very interested in anthropology. In _Peace_, one of the suitors of Weer’s Aunt Olivia, a Professor Peacock, is an anthropologist. Marsch in _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_ is one, too. "Tracking Song" imagines different types of intelligent-speaking hominids alive on the same planet at the same time, as Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans once coexisted.
>
> A. If intelligence is just a matter of evolution, what happens when a bunch of species get to a similar point at the same time? We are unhappy to find ourselves the only intelligent animals on our planet. It would be so interesting if we could find others. We can’t. But suppose we could: suppose the lion was intelligent and the deer were also intelligent. It’s very hard to imagine. You have to have sympathy with both. The lion cannot eat grass no matter how much you would like him to. But the deer do not wish to be eaten, and who can blame them for it?
>
> Q. In many of your fictions—the short story "La Befana" [1973], for instance—you imagine intelligent species coexisting on the same planet, who can talk to each other after a fashion but who are fundamentally different.
>
> A. Another intelligent species, but fundamentally different: the amazing thing would be to get to some foreign planet and discover people already on it, and now you’ve got to say, “How in the world did that happen?”
>
> Q. There’s a similar, eerie idea at the heart of "The Hero as Werwolf" [1975]: you imagine a future where humans have diverged into separate species after one population has evolved through biotechnology and another remains fixed as modern Homo sapiens.
>
> A. Some fool said, “If human beings evolved from apes, how come there are still apes?” But I always think about that from the ape’s standpoint. So I imagined two human races: some people who’ve evolved into something superior, and a few who haven’t. I wondered: well, what would it be like for them?
>
> Q. For the old-fashioned humans in "The Hero as Werwolf", what it’s like is a shamed scuffling around in the shadows, forced to live off the meat of Homo superior.
>
> A. That’s the hero as werwolf.
>
> ...Q. Do you have a favorite amongst your own children? Is it _Peace_? Or is your “Book of Gold” _The Book of the New Sun)?
>
> A. Oh, it changes. Peace is a favorite, yes. But it floats around and around, you know....

-- 
gwern