The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction [Hardcover]

Gene Wolfe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 17, 2009

From a literary perspective, this will certainly be the best collection of the year in science fiction and fantasy. Gene Wolfe, of whom The Washington Post said, “Of all SF writers currently active none is held in higher esteem,” has selected the short fiction he considers his finest into one volume. 

There are many award winners and many that have been selected for various Year’s Best anthologies among the thirty-one stories, which include: “Petting Zoo,” “The Tree Is My Hat,” “The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories,” “The Hero as Werewolf,” “Seven American Nights,” “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” “The Detective of Dreams,” and “A Cabin on the Coast.” Gene Wolfe has produced possibly the finest and most significant body of short fiction in the SF and fantasy field in the last fifty years, and is certainly among the greatest living writers to emerge from the genres.  This is the first retrospective collection of his entire career. 

It is for the ages.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Thirty-one stories by the most distinguished creator of literary sf makes for a pretty indispensable volume. Of course, “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” and “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories”—recognized as classics for many years now—are here. So are such objects of amused contemplation (on account of their titles) well before they are read (and as amusedly enjoyed) as “The Hero as Werewolf,” “The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton” (steampunk with more than one difference), “Seven American Nights” (an account of archaeology of the future), and “Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon?” written in homage to the witty Catholic sf (and historical) novelist R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002). Each of those and the rest of these stories characteristically begin at a point from which Wolfe diverges in a number of different directions—with just how many depending, surprisingly enough, on the particular reader. By the time one has, preferably slowly, digested Wolfe’s creativity, one could be humming Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Things Are Seldom What They Seem” and rejoicingly remarking, “with Wolfe, too.” --Roland Green

Review

Praise for Gene Wolfe:

"If any writer from within genre fiction ever merited the designation Great Author, it is surely Wolfe…[who] reads like Dickens, Proust, Kipling, Chesterton, Borges, and Nabokov rolled into one.”
--The Washington Post Book World

“One of the literary giants of science fiction.”
--The Denver Post

“Gene Wolfe is as good a writer as there is today…. I feel a little bit like a musical contemporary attempting to tell people what’s good about Mozart.”
--The Chicago Sun Times

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; First Edition edition (March 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765321351
• ISBN-13: 978-0765321350
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #863,258 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gene Wolfe is winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, and many other awards. In 2007, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He lives in Barrington, Illinois.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Place to Begin or to End Up., March 29, 2009

By 

Dmitry Portnoy (Studio City, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction (Hardcover)

Some of the best, and best known, works of science fiction are neither novels nor short stories, but something in between: just long enough to fully explore an idea, yet short enough to focus on a single set of events. "The Time Machine," "Who Goes There," (a.k.a. "The Thing,") and "Flowers for Algernon," (a.k.a "Charly") are three examples of the genre adopted into movies. Others were expanded into novels or even series by their original authors: for example, Theodore Sturgeon's turning "Jefty Is Five" into "More Than Human," Isaac Asimov's linking a series of novellas into "The Foundation Trilogy," and Orson Scott Card's stretching "Ender's Game" into a cottage industry that would be the envy of Pere Dumas. I would guess more than half the science fiction novels ever published started out as something shorter (and often better.)

As far as I know, Gene Wolfe himself has done this twice: turning the bleak and brilliant "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" into a single-volume "trilogy" of interlocking mysteries, and expanding an unpublished (possibly untitled) novella into his unprecedented and unsurpassed four-volume masterpiece "The Book of the New Sun." In this, he has shown remarkable restraint. Pretty much unanimously acknowledged as the master of the novella form, Wolfe could have filled ten acclaimed careers simply expanding into novel-length the short fiction collected in this book. "The Eyeflash Miracles" could easily have been a novel, "The Cabin on the Coast" a fantasy-adventure trilogy, "Seven American Nights," what else, a seven book post-apocalyptic epic, "Forlesen," the lifetime output of a couple authors I could name.

But no, they are what they are. "The Best of Gene Wolfe" is a book of books within books, a book of seeds each of which sprouts into a sequoia, but not on the page, in your head. It saves trees by blowing minds, I guess, making this collection both a boundlessly generous feast and an exquisitely torturous tease.

Is it "The Best of Gene Wolfe?" No, the best of Gene Wolfe is still his twelve-novel (untitled) sequence of "Sun" books. ("New," "Long," and "Short," in case you don't know.) But "The Best of Gene Wolfe" is the best of the best. A paradox? Why not. It's a great place to start reading him. Or a great place to finish--then start over.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best of the best by the best, May 24, 2010

By 

J. T. Thorleifson "Sci-Fi Fanatic" (Katy, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction (Kindle Edition)

While the printing press is a marvel of mass production, the Kindle puts it to shame. As a result, the countless hours of enjoyment Gene Wolfe has provided to me over the years are completely out of proportion to the paltry sums I have paid for his books. Mr. Wolfe is certainly the finest writer of the latter half of the 20th century to grace the science fiction genre. Actually, he's probably the best writer of the last half of the 20th century, period. Nothing lasts forever, I suppose, and Mr. Wolfe's illustrious career is perhaps approaching twilight. Still, it saddens me to see a Gene Wolfe collection, even as wonderful as this, titled a retrospective.

Mr. Wolfe is a wildly prolific short story writer. In fact, he loves the form so much that he cannot refrain from inserting short stories into his full length works. So while "The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction" is a marvelous collection spanning much of his career, with award winning stories selected by the author, it's a volume or two short of being definitive.

Mr. Wolfe's work is densely alliterative, and much informed by his faith. For the church goers among us, "La Befana," "Westwind" and "The Eyeflash Miracles" are delights. Throughout his career Mr. Wolfe has displayed a fascination with forms and aberrations of memory and consciousness. Mr. Million, the unbound simulation of "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," Nicholas of "The Death of Dr. Island" and Baden of "The Tree is My Hat" are cases in point. Mr. Wolfe has a fondness for the cadences of myth and fable; "The Boy Who Hooked the Sun" is a fine example and a terrific story for young readers. (My kids enjoyed many a Gene Wolfe short story around the campfire as they grew up.) Mr. Wolfe is known for his use of first person active voice, and has made the literary device of the unreliable narrator famous. His protagonists are often impaired in some way, but nonetheless noble and likable. Sam of "Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon" is a type specimen Gene Wolfe protagonist. Mr. Wolfe evinces a genuine affection for humanity in general, and his characters in particular (even the villains). At his best, Mr. Wolfe evokes a wistful, bittersweet, almost elegiac tone in celebration of the beauty and foolishness of the human condition. "The Death of the Island Doctor" is a gem of story that chokes me up with happy tears every time I read it. Eventually all who are blessed discover that Dr. Insula had not been mistaken about the island after all.

Of course, there must be at least a second, and hopefully a third volume to complete the "retrospective." So I'll cast my votes now. As mentioned, some of Mr. Wolfe's best short fiction is embedded in his novels. I'd like to see "Melito's Story - The Cock, the Angel and the Eagle" and "Foila's Story - The Armiger's Daughter" included. Both are from "Citadel of the Autarch" and are simply marvelous fairy tales. "The Tale of the Student and His Son" from "Claw of the Conciliator" is the most wonderful transmogrification of the legend of Theseus imaginable. Finally, Mr. Wolfe has written some marvelous military short fiction. "The HORARS of War" gets my vote.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lives up to its name, July 27, 2009

By 

Jay "SarahsJay" (Douglasville, GA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction (Hardcover)

Word for word, Gene Wolfe is almost certainly the finest stylist currently active in the English language. This book demonstrates that amply. The stories here range from just a few pages to short novella length. Some have splashes of humor while others are dark and bleak throughout. What they all share though is Wolfe's unflagging imagination and ability to absorb his readers into the universe he creates for his stories, however fleeting the time the reader may spend in that universe ultimately may be. Among writers, Wolfe is an anomaly for his refusal to tell stories in a linear path, and this only adds to the awe and sense of wonder of his work, both as in this volume, in his short work and in his novel-length fiction. It's hard for me to pick a story I would consider to be my favorite or the best in the book. I would probably count Seven American Nights as the most reflective of what to expect among those included herein though. Others of note are the Island/Doctor/Death stories, Petting Zoo (probably the most elegiac of the tales), The Fifth Head of Cerberus (which will slingshot the reader directly into Wolfe's first successful long work), and The Hero as Werwolf (which goes off in a direction I was pleasantly surprised to never see coming). Overall, this is clearly the strongest representation possible of Wolfe's short fiction, but I hope it will serve only as a springboard for readers new to Wolfe into his other work. Although his work is intentionally difficult--as anyone who reads this will have to acknowledge--it is both thoughtful and rewarding, and I hope this will help catapult Wolfe into a more commercially viable place among modern-day authors. Ultimately the best thing about Wolfe's work is this: As with Robert E Howard, another great storyteller of the last century, Wolfe's best work is so powerful because he himself is in everything he writes. To those fortunate enough to come across this book and read it in the future, I can say only one more thing: You will be far from disappointed.