Wolfe began writing short stories early, sometime in the early '50s, but his first professional publication did not come until 1965, a situation which should be encouraging to any hopeful writer. Once his career was established he became one of the most prolific writers in the genre, with 30 novels and nearly 200 short stories to his credit at last count. His personal writing regimen included two hours every morning before going to his engineering or editing job, and one hour in the evening proofreading and editing that morning's work. Wolfe also credited his first real editor, Damon Knight, and his agent, Virginia Kidd - both SF writers in their own right - with helping shape his style and perfect his craft. Other than these two mentors he had no formal writing education even though he has taught creative writing courses himself on several occasions. The best of his early work often appeared in Knight's Orbit, an annual series of original anthologies. His first novel, 1970's Operation ARES, proved to be an inauspicious debut due to the extensive editing imposed by the publisher, and it bore little evidence of the strengths his later work would exhibit. [EDIT: That assessment was confirmed on a recent re-read. Click HERE for my full review.]

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His next book, 1972's The Fifth Head of Cerberus, more than made up for the deficiencies of the former however. It is actually a series of three linked novellas, each telling a related tale from a different character's perspective, but all exploring the major themes of identity and memory which Wolfe would return to again and again throughout his career. The title story is still among my favorite short fiction of any genre after more than forty-five years of additional reading. It is a tale related in first person by a young man living on a distant world of a two-planet system. We slowly come to realize he is a clone, possibly only one of many. It ends with the most haunting and (still to this day) puzzling line of fiction I have ever read. The second tale of the book, "'A Story' by John V. Marsch," concerns the shape-shifting aboriginal culture native to the second world in the system, who may or may not have killed all of the human explorers on their world. "V.R.T." tells of an anthropologist who returns to the first world to present his theory which postulates that the aborigines have recreated themselves in the image of humanity in order to expiate their guilt for the genocide of the colonists, although in retrospect it is still possible to assume it is the aborigines who were completely destroyed. One further possibility is that the anthropologist is himself an aborigine. [EDIT: Another re-read confirms my love for this complex, mesmerizing tale. Check out my full review HERE.]

"It was the first significant demonstration of the great difficulty of reading Gene Wolfe without constant attention to the almost subliminal—but in retrospect or after re-reading almost invariably lucid and inevitable—clues laid down in the text to govern its comprehension." - John Clute

During the 1970s Gene Wolfe, with the possible exception of James Tiptree Jr., was the most prolific short story writer in all of SF, with work appearing in every genre magazine and original anthology series imaginable. He has always exhibited a predilection for groups of stories that mirror each other both structurally and thematically, as witnessed by the aforementioned The Fifth Head of Cerberus. Another such series, again with the question of identity as its major concern and utilizing islands as the unifying metaphor, is known collectively as the Wolfe Archipelago. Although each story is fully autonomous and had seen publication separately in differing venues it is obvious there was a conscious intent for them to be viewed as parts of a whole. In "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" a young boy retreats from the reality of a harsh adult world into an imagined one engendered by the stories he reads in a pulp magazine. "The Death of Dr. Island" relates the psychological treatment of a disturbed child who is confined to an artificial environment which responds to his state of mind. The protagonist of "The Doctor of Death Island," a cryonically frozen prisoner who awakes to the realization of not only his isolation but also his seeming immortality, perhaps is the same character as in the first two stories, although with Wolfe nothing is ever certain.

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Original to this collection was "The Death of the Island Doctor." This book is no longer in print, in fact I have never seen a copy of it (except on Ebay at exhorbitant prices), but another Wolfe collection entitled The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories was subsequently published which includes the first three of this series along with eleven other unrelated stories. "The Death of the Island Doctor" appears in Storeys from the Old Hotel. Other great collections of Wolfe's shorter works are Endangered Species, and Castle of Days, which is a compilation of two previously published collections, Gene Wolfe's Book of Days (stories written around the themes of major holidays) and The Castle of the Otter (more on this one later), along with a third section of essays on writers and writing. Another collection, Strange Travelers, is a more recent publication. [Update: Since I first wrote this article there have been several other collections published - Innocents Aboard, Starwater Strains and The Best of Gene Wolfe.]

It would be a pointless task to attempt to identify Wolfe's best written work—I am tempted to say whichever of his books I happen to be reading at the time. Perhaps for the average reader his most accessible is The Devil in a Forest from 1976 (out of print at this time, but available for Kindle), which contains minimal fantastic elements. It is essentially a juvenile tale, set in medieval Europe, although one of the main characters is either based on Wat Tyler, leader of an English peasants' revolt, or possibly the forerunner of the Robin Hood myth. [Devil is another I've recently re-read, and I've reviewed it HERE.]

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I read somewhere that Wolfe considers 1975's Peace to be a particular favorite. It might be his most personal and intricate story, and at times the most frustrating. Throughout the book the narrator—who many readers think is speaking to us from beyond the grave—quite often leaves you hanging in anticpation of promised revelations, only to drop them inexplicably and not return to them for many chapters. There are also passages that might at first be difficult to distinguish between the ravings of a senile old man, the revelations of dreams, or quite possibly the realization that ghosts and other fairy-like spirits actually exist in his reality. [EDIT: When I first wrote this article it had been a while since I had read it, but now, after the third time, I attempt to tell you what I think of Peace.] Wolfe first and foremost is an artist at word-play and names, and he is at times purposefully a trickster. He is a master at unobtrusively inserting hints throughout his works which in retrospect one wonders why they initially went unnoticed. In a review of Wolfe's On Blue's Waters, John Clute described him thus: "…an author who has never in his life told a straightforward tale, an author who has never in his life published an inadvertent word."

[EDIT, November 25, 2022]: At this point in the essay I originally had several paragraphs concerning The Book of the New Sun, but with a recent re-read I've created a new page devoted to the series. Take that link, which at this time has some background information and comments on the first book, but I'll update it as I go through the series.]

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Only time will tell, but it is quite possible Gene Wolfe has already written his greatest masterpiece, the work that will always be regarded as the pinnacle of his career, that being The Book of the New Sun. Using that as a benchmark, it was inevitable his other novels of the '80s and '90s would suffer in comparison, which means they are merely very good novels, on a level of sophistication equal to any of the rest of the genre. This is equivalent to comparing the films "Citizen Kane" and "Casablanca." The former is almost universally praised as a masterpiece and the greatest film ever made, whereas the other is "merely" one of the most entertaining and beloved films Hollywood has ever produced.

A long-time reader of genre SF himself, Wolfe also has a definite interest in its sister genre Fantasy. Other than the capstone of the Severian saga, The Urth of the New Sun, and the four volume series known as The Book of the Long Sun, the only other one of his novels of this period that could in any way be described as science fiction is Free Live Free. It is a complex time-travel tale which, since I have only read it once, I will not attempt to relate as I am sure I was not able to decipher all of its various meanings. For example, John Clute's article on Wolfe in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes it as a retelling of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a novel which I did not think of once while reading. What I did think of was the fabled "Philadelphia Experiment" of World War 2, wherein SF authors Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and L. Sprague de Camp, working in research and design at the Naval Air Experimental Station, were rumored - erroneously of course - to have been conducting experiments in time travel and matter transmission.

In 1986 Wolfe published Soldier of the Mist which was followed by a sequel, Soldier of Arete in 1989. Set in the 5th Century B.C., these tales follow the journeys of Latro, a soldier of one of the many Greek city-states, injured and separated from his regiment following a battle. Whereas Severian had been the beneficiary of an unfailing memory, Latro has been cursed by a goddess into recurring amnesia. He is plagued with the dilemma of forgetting everything each day, and the story is related in short chapters which are his written-down recollections of things he feels necessary to remember in order to continue his search for his comrades. The individual titles have been out of print for a while, but they have been reissued again in a combined volume - Latro in the Mist. There have also been rumors of other forthcoming books in this sequence. [UPDATE: Rumor confirmed, as Soldier of Sidon, has now been published, but I have yet to read it.] Two other fantasy titles are 1988's There Are Doors and 1990's Castleview. The former is about portals to parallel worlds, one of which is inadvertently opened for an unsuspecting man who meets the woman of his dreams on the other side, and he is prepared to sacrifice everything, perhaps even his own life, to win her love. Castleview transposes the Arthurian legend to modern-day rural Illinois, and concerns the search for a new champion to wield Excalibur.

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1993 saw Wolfe's return to science fiction, and to Severian's universe, with the beginnings of another series, The Book of the Long Sun, a tale of clergyman Patera Silk and his journeys across the Whorl, a giant, cylindrical starship, whose inhabitants have long forgotten both its origin and its mission. The story-teller this time is Horn, one of Silk's parishoners and students, who records Silk's adventures across a strange landscape filled with birds and beasts with the gift of speech, intelligent cyborgs bent on the destruction of humanity, and gods who speak to them through "Sacred Windows," computer terminals programmed by the ship's long-dead creators. The long sun of the title is the source of the Whorl's illumination, a thin tube of light that transverses the central axis of the ship. The Individual titles in this series are Nightside the Long Sun & Lake of the Long Sun (collected as Litany of the Long Sun), and Calde of the Long Sun & Exodus from the Long Sun (Epiphany of the Long Sun). As the series concludes, the Whorl has finally reached its destination, and Silk bids farewell to Horn, who travels down to Blue, one of the two planets destined to be colonized by the ship's bewildered passengers. Late in 1999 Wolfe sequeled this series with On Blue's Waters, which was followed in 2000 by In Green's Jungles, with Return to the Whorl being released in February, 2001, to complete another complex saga, The Book of the Short Sun.

The last section of this essay, beginning with the title Free Live Free, was less detailed than previously mainly because, with the exception of Soldier of the Mist, I have only read these titles once each, and as I hope I have made clear, this is hardly enough to thoroughly understand the full impact of Wolfe's work. I felt it best to wait until the third volume of the Book of the Short Sun was published before reading it. I am glad that I did wait for this series, because the Science Fiction Book Club offered it in a one-volume omnibus edition (unfortunately, no longer available directly from them). I have recently finished it, after a re-read of the Long Sun series, and I will return with my thoughts on these books as soon as I can. [Done that - read that review HERE] Hopefully I will also be able to flesh out my analysis of all his books in the near future. For now, I have intended this piece to be a general overview of Wolfe's career to date for those not knowledgeable of his work, and to hopefully make it evident that I consider him to be the greatest stylist the SF genre, and perhaps any genre, has ever seen.

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[Update:] The Knight, which is Book One in The Wizard Knight series has recently been released, and you can read my review of it HERE. The second half of this story, The Wizard, is also available, but I did not care for it as much as the first part, but I will probably read it again one of these days and may review it then. There have been other novels and stories since then, but I have not had much time for reading lately so I haven't gotten around to them yet either.

[Another Update:] 10/27/15 - I review Wolfe's most recent novel, A Borrowed Man.

Sadly, Gene passed away on April 14, 2019 from complications of heart disease. We shall not see his like again.

[LATEST UPDATE]: The posthumously published Interlibrary Loan is a sequel to 2015's A Borrowed Man.

Related Links:
ultan.net - this page translated into Japanese by Tadashi Tago
Ultan's Library - comprehensive critical essays on Wolfe's work (makes my efforts pale in comparison)
Wolfe's Bibliography at fantasticfiction.com
Wikipedia

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