INTRODUCTION

Gene Wolfe was a funny guy. Kind of a goofball. The stories in this collection will give you plenty of evidence of that.

Once I visited him at his home in Barrington, Illinois. It was the summer of 1981, six years after he had taught me for a week at Clarion. My grandparents lived twenty miles to the east of him, in Zion, Illinois, and I was visiting them as I traveled by Greyhound bus around the country, before starting my new life with Lisa. I was in a good mood. Gene was working on The Book of the New Sun; he was in a good mood.

He picked me up at the bus station in Barrington and drove me to his house. The house was an objective correlative of his mind, as he confessed when I proposed this theory to him. He had designed it that way, he admitted. So everything above ground conformed to the ideal of the house of a conventional Midwestern professional. Then downstairs, the basement was a riot of pulp magazine covers, flags and kites hanging from the ceiling, and genre knick-knacks such as the coveted Balrog.

Acknowledging with a grin that his house was an image of his Conscious and Unconscious, he added that he kept his World Fantasy Award upstairs in the dining room, in a spot where it would lurk in the peripheral vision of dinner guests. Through the course of evenings when he and Rosemary were entertaining, these guests often became more and more disturbed, until some broke down and demanded to know what that pewter monster meant by staring at them so balefully. Later I did the same thing in the dining room of my house, and Gene was right; it works pretty often. No doubt this little touch of the Uncanny was also an objective correlative of Gene in the world. I don’t think anyone ever thought of him as ordinary for very long.

That evening, as he drove me and his wife Rosemary and son Roy to dinner at a nearby restaurant, he told us a story from “Get Smart” in which Maxwell Smart is driving a car he had forgotten that he had previously booby-trapped, exclaiming things like “Yikes, I forgot I put sulfuric acid in the windshield wiper fluid, sorry about that!” and so on, and then Gene’s favorite: “Oh heck, I forgot about that bomb I put under the brake pedal!” at which point Gene was laughing almost too hard to drive.

That was Gene.

* * *

At Clarion in 1975, he was also in a good mood. He taught our second week, following Samuel R. Delany. He started his first morning by telling us, “You’ve just seen how a genius does it, now you get to see how an ordinary person does it.” This was not right; in fact, we were seeing two geniuses in a row. Yes, we had a good Clarion. But at that point Gene might not have realized he was a genius. He had however recently published The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and Peace had just come out; for sure he was in a good mood.

He partied with us every night, and even though we were a gang of foolish callow hippies, such that he had no great opinion of our seriousness as writers, he enjoyed himself. He had a wicked fast wit, and soon treated us as if he were at a Milford conference, in a group of his equals, rather than as if we were his students; we liked that a lot. One night we took turns at a typewriter in the room, adding a page per person to a group-written story. It started silly and went downhill from there, and Gene’s page came around tenth in the sequence. I offer it here, as I am the proud possessor of the whole batch: thus one more paragraph of previously unpublished Wolfe appears in this book, which has several of them:

* * *

“In the slow mists that wrapped the ancient city of K___, the lean figure of Volpolo V___, the stranger, seemed no more than a walking tree, or, as it might be, a milestone on which some passerby, moved by the perverse impulse the atmosphere of decay seemed forever to inculcate in the inhabitants—and those unfortunate strangers who, for reasons seldom so much financial and practical as twisted, fantastical, and umbilical, found themselves (and, too often were found by others, head down in the fetid swamps or thrown with that terrible but indecipherable respect the inhabitants too often showed the near-dean into the privies of the countryside) within its almost unfrequented precincts,” he said, and left.

Lester Wazznuttes, the tap-dancing carrot, watched him go, commenting to Dr. Scholl, “You’re the usher—isn’t he from your house?”

* * *

In the years right after Clarion, I wrote to Gene often, sending him copies of every story I completed. He cheerfully commented on them all, in the context of quick jaunty letters that I loved to see in my mailbox. I also enjoyed rereading the page of advice he had given us at Clarion, much of it jokey (“Never name a character Fred,” which I therefore often did). It’s called “WHAT I KNOW FOR SURE ABOUT WRITING (in no particular order), by Gene Wolfe.” I had him sign my copy.

* * *

Gene Wolfe was a formidable man, often severe, sometimes irritated, occasionally angry. In fact, kind of scary.

This other aspect of him was quite real. I was chilled by his gaze more than once, and often unsettled. I think this is what Ursula Le Guin was referring to when she called him “our Melville”—not just the deep brilliant prose of his novels, but also that sense of reserve and inner darkness, of a hard difficult past.

The shadow of the torturer—this was no mere title to Gene. He lived in that shadow. He had seen torture himself, committed by fellow Americans, his comrades in arms. This was in Korea, when he was twenty-two years old. On June 10, 1953.

I mentioned this incident in my 2009 introduction to his collection The Very Best of Gene Wolfe, and when I sent him a draft of that introduction for his approval, he wrote back immediately to thank me, then to say, “One correction of fact. Those were not Chinese prisoners, they were forward observers. They had infiltrated our lines and were sending information back to the Chinese artillery.”

I should have known this, as he called them FOs in the letter he wrote to his mom about the incident, but I hadn’t understood the acronym. In any case, two Chinese soldiers were killed by the Americans who discovered them—killed with flamethrowers. Gene wrote about this to his mom, even though most of his letters to her were designed to amuse and reassure. But this time he was compelled to write the following:

“June 10. I went out to Porkchop today. We had a bad day on Porkchop—two killed and seven wounded … A little later they found two Chinese FOs on Hill 200. (Not Chinese 200, which is in front of Arsenal, but US 200, which is in back of Porkchop.) They were killed with a flame-thrower. A whole bunch of guys on Porkchop were looking on and taking pictures; bet it will be the most photographed flame-thrower operation in history.… Your loving son, Gene”

The next day he wrote to her again:

“June 11. Just writing to be writing; I’ve got nothing special to say.… I think I’ll draw you a map to show where Porkchop is. The hill called Buffalo on my map was referred to in my last letter as 200. The name has been changed recently to avoid confusion with Chinese 200. It was on Buffalo that I saw the two Chinese F.O.’s burned to death. Love, Gene”

* * *

56 years later, the day after he emailed to correct me about the status of the Chinese men, he emailed me again:

“Dear Stan, thank you again. I can never thank you enough for that introduction. I’m with you on reading aloud—very much so. As a small boy I was sick a good deal (you mentioned that, I know) and my mother read to me for hours. That may be the best training a writer can get. Hug David for me. Gene”

* * *

This extra note made me happy. Indeed no words written to me about my writing have ever made me happier. I wanted to please Gene with that introduction (as I do with this one!), and I had been reading his work for forty years at that point, without ever writing down any of my thoughts about it. That introduction was a chance to talk about his work as a reader.

This time, I want to write about the man as I knew him. I feel this will be more useful for his future readers than anything I could add to my earlier introduction about his fiction. People centuries from now will want to know what he was like, so someone now should be collecting reminiscences, while it can still be done. I have books of such collections about Beethoven, Byron, Coleridge, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce Cary. For a devoted reader, they’re a pleasure. This is my contribution to that hoped-for collection about Gene.

* * *

So—back to Gene’s war experience, and its aftermath. He clearly suffered later from what we now call PTSD. His stories “The Changeling” and “The HORARS of War” provide fictional testimony to this condition, as do many of his novels, and some sentences in his autobiographical essay for Contemporary Authors. Once he told me that he was taking St. John’s wort in the hope of stopping some bad nightmares. And consider this poem of his from the 1980s, included in a chapbook from Kerosina Press called For Rosemary:


Copyright © 2023 by The Literary Estate of Gene Wolfe

Introduction copyright © 2023 by Kim Stanley Robinson