Gene Wolfe, 'magnificent' giant of science fiction, dies aged 87
Wolfe wrote some incredible masterpieces. The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, and some of his 1970s short stories deserve a place in 20th-century serious literature in general. The Book of the New Sun stunned me as a teenage reader, and I fondly reread the book every few years (that said, Severian’s habit of shagging everyone he meets doesn’t hold up well in this day and age, and I have seen female readers call The Book of the New Sun a risible male fantasy).However, there is no doubt that Wolfe’s powers declined over time, and homages to him inevitably focus on the works from decades ago. Besides their intricate plots, those early works had incredible prose, just as rich as Proust, Nabokov, or Faulkner. Once the 1980s came in, suddenly Wolfe’s prose became plainer, more workaday. Then, his novels increasingly started to milk the “unreliable narrator” gimmick but without much else to them. Furthermore, it is not even clear that readers are appropriately given all clues to figure out the real action and themes. I have spoken to multiple Wolfe superfans who worry that A Land Across, for example, ultimately turned out to be turgid and impenetrable, and that Wolfe’s publisher accepted it just on blind faith that readers got earlier Wolfe novels, so surely there was something to this one too.(I know the principle of de mortus nil nisi bonum and I don’t want to be too harsh about the man, but this is probably the only opportunity for a long time that the Hacker News community will get to discuss his work.)