SF Signal: SCiFi Chat Transcript

SCiFi Chat Transcript - Gene Wolfe

Last Tuesday, SciFi.com held a chat with Gene Wolfe. Here's the transcript. Wolfe is one of my favorite authors and here he's plugging his new book, The Knight.

This one is a straight fantasy story, so eh on that. But, I really likes his Book of the New Sun and Book of the Long Sun series (I need to get the Book of the Short Sun), which are in the sci-fantasy department, so I may give this one a go. Wolfe has a unique writing style. Dense, lyrical and multi-layered. If you have the time to devote to one of his books, you'll be rewarded with a deep, intelligent story.

I really likes his bookies too.

In all seriousness, the two I read were good - if a bit, I dunno, too obscure or hard to decipher. I think of his books much like I felt about Canterbury Tales - its a good story, but strange side things got introduced that were never quite explained.

Posted by Scott on Sunday January 18, 2004 at 7:49 PM

I felt the same way after first reading The Book of the New Sun. However, a lot of things that happen is explained, if not overtly. You have to read carefully to figure it out. For instance, Severian is an orphan, I believe, or at least, he doesn't remember who his parents are. But, he actually encounters both during his books. Its not spelled out in 20 point font, but its there.

Wolfe's writing styly is dense and obscure, which servers to help give more than one layer of meaning to the stories. If you are familiar with old timey words, you can usually figure out what something is from its name, for instance, hierodule. It helps to have a lot of unbroken time to read his stuff. The Book of the Long Sun was a bit easier to read, up until the last book. I haven't yet read the Book of the Short Sun, but from what I've read, its back to the dense writing style.

Posted by jp on Sunday January 18, 2004 at 10:32 PM