“Wolfe, who has been publishing excellent stories since the 1960s, is the Old Master . . . still very much in his prime.” —Locus on Innocents Aboard

“If any writer from within genre fiction ever merited the designation Great Author, it is surely Wolfe . . . [who] reads like Dickens, Proust, Kipling, Chesterton, Borges, and Nabokov rolled into one, and then spiced with all manner of fantastic influences from H. G. Wells to Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft to Damon Knight. . . . Gene Wolfe has taken science fiction to its highest artistic pitch, transcending genre, creating a literary monument unlike any other . . . Modernist or postmodernist, formal allegorist or anatomist of the deepest complexities of the human soul, he is a wonder, yes, a genius, with a crooked lupine smile.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning.” —Michael Swanwick