The Nebula Awards

Gene Wolfe Interview

Interviewed by David de Beer on December 30 2008

Tell me a little in brief about “Memorare” your Nebula nominated work. Why did you write it and what do you hope readers will take from it?

It seems to me that I hear some story ideas better than I see them.  In the southwest, particularly, memorials are erected at roadsides.  I grew up in Texas, and I could hear the prairie wind and smell the dust.  I was the lonely soul in the empty tomb, and I transferred the whole thing to space, the loneliest place (not) on earth.  I wanted readers to feel the isolation and lonely majesty of it.  I wanted them to realize, too, that God, the saints, and love can be found even there.

When you say that you hear stories better than you see them - could you clarify that a bit?

In a way I hear the characters talking, but not at the beginning.  At the beginning I hear the sounds of their voices: Severian’s deep, smooth, slightly melancholy tones; Master Gurloes’s hard, harsh, implacable vowels, his throat clearing and occasional spitting.  In An Evil Guest, Bill Reis’s voice, deep and slightly rough, often a loud whisper, persuasive and slightly sinister.  Or Cassie Casey’s enormous range: now cheerful and energetic, now the pleading of a small girl – the stubborn child, the aching sincerity.
What are more important are what might be called sound effects.  In Pirate Freedom the creaking of the timbers, the slap of the waves against the hull, the mewing of the gulls, the voices of the men on the topsail yard: “Dirty weather ...  dirty weather.” The dull boom of the sternchaser in the cabin under the quarterdeck, where Sabina shouts, “That’s the way, my braves!  Mas!  Mas!” while she twirls a slow-match.

The Commercial vs the Artistic in writing - is there a genuine difference between these two philosophies or are they artifical attributes? Are they in opposition, and if so, can they meet?

The difference seems to me very genuine.  The error is to think them antithetical.  The purely commercial writer writes for the editor.  The purely artistic writer writes for himself or herself.  I write for the reader.  As long as the editor buys it, I don’t much care what he thinks of it.  If it’s a good solid story, that’s enough for me.  But if the reader doesn’t like it, it’s a failure.

Insofar as you’re aware thereof, which themes and ideas dominate the writing of Gene Wolfe? What do you think readers take from your work they get nowhere else?

My great theme is memory.  I’m rarely aware of that as I write, but I realize it as I read.  Another theme is reality.  A good many writers are writing propaganda.  I don’t do that.  I know that not all politicians are crooked.  I know that some soldiers are brutal criminals, but also that most are not even close to that.  I have been accused of writing only good and bad women, but that is because those are the only kinds I’ve ever met.
There is nothing in my work that readers will find nowhere else, although I wish there were.  I try to serve good, honest writing.  I make the hot stuff hot and the cold stuff cold – or try to.  A great many other writers are doing the same thing.

Will you still be read in a 100 years? Does it matter? Should writers write for the present or the future?

Will I still be read in a hundred years?  I hope so.  Does it matter?  To me, yes – but I write for the present, not for the future.  Books written for the future are not likely to get there.  There are lonely men and lonely women in small towns all over the world.  I want them to read me, now, and feel a little better. 

The short story vs the novella vs the novel - what makes you decide to write an idea in one form over the other?

I don’t decide.  The idea tells me.  There are book ideas and short story ideas.  And novelette and novella ideas.  A short story can be padded out, and a novel cut down, but both are forced alterations to attain some preconceived length.  If I know I need a novella, I look around for a novella-length idea, or whatever.

Your wikipedia entry claims you might be related to Thomas Wolfe - truth or fiction?

Although I can’t prove it, I think it’s true.  We Wolfes came out of northwestern North Carolina about 1780 and settled in southeastern Ohio.  (My father took me to an old family graveyard out in the country once; the earliest stone we could find bore that date.) Thomas Wolfe was from Asheville.  That area is not thickly populated even now.  In 1900 – the year that both he and my father were born – it would have been very thinly peopled indeed.
In passing… I got a fan letter from that part of the state once, and wrote back to the fan saying that my family had left it toward the end of the Eighteenth Century.  He wrote, “I know all about it, and my family would like great-grandfather’s horse back.”

Speaking of respected - from praised to winning awards, does that have an effect? Does it add more pressure, a perceived standard of brilliance you’re expected to live up to?How do you handle the praise and the fame and the awards and still remain true to your writing, to yourself?

Of course I like to win.  It’s fun, and I enjoy it.  But it’s not important.

You’re known for creating unreliable narrators in your work - would you care to expound on the reasons why?

All real narrators are unreliable.  That is a great strength: it is realistic.  Another is that one can hint at things left hidden.  A third is that you can reveal in Chapter 19 something that was hidden in Chapter 9.  Please don’t ask for examples.

What is the story you’ve written you’re proudest of, and why?

By “story” I assume you mean a short story, novelette, or novella.  Something under novel length, in other words.  “Empires of Foliage and Flower,” perhaps, because it shows so plainly the brevity, tragedy, and comedy of life.  But if you don’t like that answer, I have others.  There are a good many stories that I’m very fond of.

How (if at all) has science fiction&fantasy evolved/ changed in the time that you’ve been working in the field? Does it still have value in the present milieu? Relevance to the future?

How has sf changed?  The giants are gone.  When I started writing, Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke were all producing.  You have to have lived in both periods to understand what an enormous difference they made.  Fantasy has lost Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.  The Harry Potter books are good, but they are YA.  Neil Gaiman is our best fantasist and is giving us wonderful books and stories.  Another giant has arrived, which may be why fantasy feels so much healthier now.
Both science fiction and fantasy have value, for the present and for the future.  It’s important that they be there – and that they be good, and thus read by as many as possible.  The interesting point is that fantasy is very, very old and SF a stripling.  The oldest known fiction is fantasy, I believe.  The first great fantasy, GILGAMESH, comes to us from the dawn of civilization.  Fantasy assures us (quite truthfully) that the universe is inconceivably wide and wild.  Once I wrote a poem about a man who lived on an island whose population believed it to be the only place.  He walks around the island, and from a lonely beach sees another island.  Fantasy is that walk.  “Things could be different,” says fantasy.  “They could be very, very different just over that hill.  Have hope.”
SF assures (quite truthfully) that they will be.  “They may be better,” says SF, “or they may be worse.  But they will not be like this.”

Gene Wolfe is a prolific and critically acclaimed author of The Book of the New Sun, An Evil Guest and The Knight. He was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1996. Michael Swanwick described him as the greatest writer in the English Language alive today.

DAVID DE BEER‘s short fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from venues such as Chizine, Alienskin and Courting Morpheus. He currently resides in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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