Gene Wolfe 1931 – 2019

Articles from Master Ultan’s scholars

• Gene Wolfe and The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction
• Posthistory 201
• Place Names in Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of the Mist
• The Feast of Saint Katharine (with a “K”)
• Proving Veil’s Hypothesis: Variance Reduction Techniques, Larval Life Cycles on an East Wind, and Shadow Children Riding Mars(c)hmen in The Fifth Head of Cerberus
• Gene Wolfe’s time at Plant Engineering
• The Religious Implications of Gene Wolfe’s The Book Of The New Sun
• Japanese Lexicon for The Book of the New Sun
• The Book of Gold… returns to Ultan’s Library
• The Death of Catherine the Weal and Other Stories (1992)
• Lions and Tigers and Bears . . . of the New Sun
• Desanctifying Victor Trenchard: some notes on Peter Wright’s “Confounding the Skin and the Mask”
• Confounding the Skin and the Mask: Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus and the Politics of Ambiguity
• Torture and confession in Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun
• The Reader as Augur: Beginnings and Endings in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the Long Sun
• Five Steps towards Briah: Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the Long Sun
• Some Greek Themes in Gene Wolfe’s Latro novels

Reviews from Master Ultan’s shelves

• Micro-Wolfenomics: Joan Gordon reviews ‘Gene Wolfe’s First Four Novels: A Chapter Guide’ by Michael Andre-Driussi
• A Curiously Conflicted Book: Craig Brewer reviews ‘Interlibrary Loan’
• A Weird Mystery: James Wynn considers Gene Wolfe’s ‘A Borrowed Man’
• Review: Gene Wolfe’s ‘Operation ARES’
• Standing on the Shoulders of Giants – A Review of Michael Andre-Driussi’s ‘The Book of the New Sun: A Chapter Guide’
• Mapping a Masterwork: A Critical Review of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun
• The Fifth Head of Cerberus reviewed
• Strange Travelers reviewed
• Harmonies and Mysteries: a review of Gene Wolfe’s On Blue’s Waters

Conversing with acolytes

• Everything has to be true somehow
  Wolfe scholar Marc Aramini talks to Ultan’s Library about the progress of his massive critical review of all Wolfe’s published fiction, his approach to unlocking that author’s meanings, and the current state of Wolfe studies.
• An Homage to my Honorary Grandfather
  Just shy of eighteen, I met Gene Wolfe. My father introduced us, and then we all went out… Read more: An Homage to my Honorary Grandfather
• What would it be like…
  What would it be like for you as an aspiring author to have Gene Wolfe as your mentor?… Read more: What would it be like…
• Me & Gene – by Stephen Palmer
  Master Ultan asked Book of the New Sun enthusiast and SF writer Stephen Palmer how he first came across Wolfe’s… Read more: Me & Gene – by Stephen Palmer
• Shadows of the New Sun: an interview with Judi Rohrig
  “There has never been a story that I have worked on harder or have sweated over more because how do you pay homage to a man like Gene? As long as he likes the story that’s all I care about.”
• Shadows of the New Sun: Nancy Kress
  On Gene Wolfe:
  “… this is the science fiction writer that other science fiction writers aspire—or should aspire—to be”
• Shadows of the New Sun: Marc Aramini
  This August Tor will publish Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe. In the first of a series of interviews with some of the contributors, we spoke to Marc Aramini about his story and what Gene Wolfe means to him.
• An interview with artist Bruce Pennington
  “As clearly as if he were in that chamber of tears with us, I saw the young journeyman striding along, his fuligin cloak billowing behind him and the dark cross of Terminus Est rising above his left shoulder.”
• “The Lupine Scholar” – an interview with Michael Andre-Driussi
  Scott Wowra talks to Ultan contributor (and Gene Wolfe expert) Michael Andre-Driussi.
• “Tell me about the Lexicon Urthus”: an interview with Michael Andre-Driussi
  Delighted by the recent publication of a new edition of the Lexicon Urthus, Master Ultan tracks down Wolfe scholar Michael Andre-Driussi to find out how he came to write this invaluable reference work.

Reading Gene Wolfe is dangerous work… It’s a knife-throwing act, and like all good knife-throwing acts, you may lose fingers, toes, earlobes or eyes in the process. Gene doesn’t mind. Gene is throwing the knives.

Neil Gaiman, How to read Gene Wolfe (2002)

Here my pen shall halt, reader, though I do not. I have carried you from gate to gate – from the locked and fog-shrouded gate of the necropolis of Nessus to that cloud-racked gate we call the sky, the gate that shall lead me, as I hope, beyond the nearer stars.

My pen halts, though I do not. Reader, you will walk no more with me. It is time we both take up our lives.

Gene Wolfe, The Citadel of the Autarch (1982)