Gene Wolfe

I "met" Gene Wolfe at Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions' bookstore in Hollywood when I was in law school.  I was surprised that a writer who could write so elegantly would look like an iron worker.

This is an interesting interview with Wolfe, including this:

//Which writers have most influenced you?

It’s a difficult question. My first editor, Damon Knight, asked me the same thing when I was just starting out, and I told him my chief influences were G. K. Chesterton and Marks’ [Standard] Handbook for [Mechanical] Engineers. And that’s still about as good an answer as I can give. I’ve been impressed with a lot of people—with Kipling, for example; with Dickens—but I don’t think I’ve been greatly influenced by them.

What struck you about Chesterton?

His charm; his willingness to follow an argument wherever it led.//

And:

//I see you often called a Roman Catholic writer. Once, even, “a very subtle but also very emphatic Roman Catholic propagandist.”  Is this identification unfair?

I think it an oversimplification. I’m a writer who is Catholic, as a good many of us are. I do not write Catholic books intentionally. I’ve never been published by a religious publisher.//

And:

//If it’s not too personal a question, do you consider yourself a professing Catholic?

Certainly I am. I go to mass; I receive Communion; I pray.

Were you born a Catholic, or was Rosemary?

No, I was a convert.

Like Chesterton.

It’s a bad thing in that born Catholics tend to look down on you. But being looked down upon has its advantages.

Like what?

You don’t put yourself forward as an expert. You understand other people who are in similar situations, and not only in religious matters. 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.

Did Sheen feel saintly? He was canny by your account; he had an intelligent eye.

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.

John XXIII was a little man, too.

Well, size only counts with football players, really.

But did Sheen feel saintly? Did he have a quality of holiness?

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. //

Chesterton is a gateway drug to Catholicism.

Religion and Science Fiction - 

Gene Wolfe

It is a familiar charge of modern atheism that the existence of pain argues against the existence of God. “For some time it has seemed to me,” Wolfe insists, “that it would be even easier to maintain the position that pain proves or tends to prove God’s reality.” The tale of Severian, apprentice to the Order of Saint Katharine of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, is the tale of a man reared in the state-sponsored infliction of physical agony who comes to discover over his life’s adventures that the power of pain ultimately points to something deeper. Expelled from his own guild when he shows mercy to one of their “clients,” he is sent into exile as a disgrace to his guild. His adventures lead him to the estate of an order of religious women from whom he unwittingly comes into possession of an ancient relic, called the Claw of the Conciliator.

Unaware of its seemingly magical powers, Severian comes to realize that he can sometimes—not always—heal people with a touch from the glowing artifact. Only gradually does it become revealed to the reader that the Claw is believed to be a relic of Christ, the Conciliator, also known as the New Sun, who will one day return, bringing not only peace but a rebirth of the dwindling red orb in Urth’s daylight sky. Severian eventually returns to the Guild from which he has been exiled, assumes the throne of the Commonwealth, and silences the machines of torture.

Claim to fame - My brother and I met Gene Wolfe at Harlan Ellison's bookstore when I was in law school.  For such a lyrical writer, his physical appearance reminded me of a steel worker.

Gene Wolfe on J.R.R. Tolkein.

Wolfe's tribute to Tolkein resonates with the love of a fan.  I am particularly enchanted by the fact that he wrote to Tolkein and shares Tolkein's typewritten response.  To think of the time that Tolkein must have taken to write out a response to his fans back before they age of email is impressive.

I've never been much of a Tolkein fan, but I was a Wolfe fan, and I remember going to Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions bookstore in Hollywood to have Gene Wolfe sign a copy of "The Shadow of the Torturer."  A gracious man who writes like Shakespeare and surprised me by looking like a steelworker.