Latest:
- Gene Wolfe and The Pocket Book of Science-FictionWolfe said that Wollheim’s 1943 anthology was his gateway to discovering the science fiction pulps. Here, Michael Andre-Driussi explores one of Wolfe’s earliest influences.
- Micro-Wolfenomics: Joan Gordon reviews ‘Gene Wolfe’s First Four Novels: A Chapter Guide’ by Michael Andre-DriussiThere are two kinds of Wolfeian criticism: macro and micro. Michael Andre-Driussi offers the micro, noting all the small details, word meanings and origins, specific allusions, patterns and inconsistencies in plot, time-lines, and so on, things very useful to us broad-stroke people.
- A Curiously Conflicted Book: Craig Brewer reviews ‘Interlibrary Loan’This final work is not simply a coda to Wolfe’s career but an integral part of its working out of some of his most central concerns.
- A Weird Mystery: James Wynn considers Gene Wolfe’s ‘A Borrowed Man’As a detective novel, this is not a puzzle. It’s a finger-trap.
- Review: Gene Wolfe’s ‘Operation ARES’A review by Martin Crookall of Gene Wolfe’s problematic and rarely discussed first novel.
- Standing on the Shoulders of Giants – A Review of Michael Andre-Driussi’s ‘The Book of the New Sun: A Chapter Guide’“While Andre-Driussi acknowledges the complexity and allusiveness of Wolfe’s work, his writing has always seemed to me the most objectively grounded and easiest to digest … of all the writers and analysts currently exploring Wolfe’s work.
Articles from Master Ultan’s scholars
Reviews from Master Ultan’s shelves
Conversing with acolytes
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)