JOHN CLUTE has called him "quite possibly the most important" author in the contemporary sf field. Ursula K. Le Guin has called him "our Melville." Michael Swanwick has called him the greatest living writer in the English language. Who is this mild-mannered man named Gene Wolfe, and how has he won these accolades?

Through a lot of hard work, it turns out.

Gene Wolfe came to writing after returning home from the Korean War (1954), completing his college education at the University of Houston, and getting married in 19561.

Looking for a way to supplement his salary as an engineer at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, the twenty-six-year-old newlywed began writing stories in whatever free time he could find.

His first sale came eight years later, in 1965.

To put this into perspective, at that point he had three children (of an eventual four), with the eldest already in second grade. That's a long time in "parent years."

His first novel was published in 1970, and since then he has written twenty-three more, some of them singletons, most of them set in one of several series (The Book of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun, The Book of the Short Sun, The Wizard Knight, and the Soldier series). His novels have won awards: the Nebula, World Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards, British awards, among others. Although he is primarily a novelist, Gene Wolfe has never abandoned the writing of shorter works and he has seen more than 210 of them published.

His stories cover a broad spectrum of science fiction and fantasy, ranging from high-brow literary puzzles to low-brow tabloid realism, with several odd tangents in between. He has a knack for taking a genre staple and turning it on its head. For example, an early space adventure titled "Alien Stones" (collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories) in which the starship's empath thinks like a child and the rugged captain can solve the first-contact mystery only by thinking like an engineer, seems like a topsy-turvy version of Star Trek.

There's some Horror, there's some Mystery, and there's some Humor. Looking across it all, certain trends become apparent in each of four decades: the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, and the present.

This is a trick question, but an easy one.
—Number Five

In 1972 Wolfe left Procter & Gamble to become a senior editor at Plant Engineering, a trade journal located in Barrington, Illinois (a job he would stay with until he became a full-time writer in 1984). That year also saw the publication of The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972). Set on the distant twin-worlds of Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix, these three novellas appear to be sequels sharing a common location, timeframe, and characters. Yet below this surface the reality is shifting from story to story.

The first novella, titled "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," is the memoir of an established citizen looking back with a certain Proustian tone—it is the coming-of-age story of a young man searching for identity in a baroque world of clones, shape-shifting aliens, and hybrids. His planet, Sainte Croix, while the more developed of the twin worlds, is still something of a backwater. The general technology is nineteeth century, complete with slavery, and yet his scientist father uses profits from his brothel to conduct experiments in genetic engineering.

The second novella is "'A Story,' by John V. Marsch," written by an anthropologist from Earth who is a minor character in the first novella. The story reads like an anthropological reconstruction of the shape-shifting aliens and their world, Sainte Anne, as it existed before the humans came. It is a gripping coming-of-age story about a young man in a stone-age tribal society who visits other tribes who seem at times to be as fantastic as fairies, goblins, and trolls. There is an implied tension between the anthropology and the recreation of a lost culture so strange as to seem a total fantasy—that is, between science and fiction. How much of the story is real, and "real" to what degree? How much of the story is a projection of the anthropologist's life and/or dreams?

The third novella, enigmatically titled "V.R.T.," reveals that the "John V. Marsch" who wrote the previous story is a political prisoner held by a corrupt and authoritarian regime. He might be insane. He might not be a real anthropologist. He might not even be from Earth. The text itself is a hodgepodge of taped interrogations, snippets from his journal, scribbled notes, and the everyday distractions of the officer reviewing his case.

These novellas together form a dazzling, multifaceted whole that is much more than the sum of its parts. It was considered Wolfe's major work until the arrival of The Book of the New Sun.

Wolfe wrote a second linked-story series (starting before The Fifth Head of Cerberus, yet finishing after it), this time revolving in a freewheeling style around three words: Island, Doctor, and Death. (These three stories are collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. A fourth one appeared in the eighties, but that's another decade.)

In "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" (1970), a lonely young boy lives with his mother at an isolated house on the coast, a house sometimes surrounded by water at high tide. His mother has two suitors: one a man her own age who drives a sports car, and the other an older physician. The woman is addicted to drugs, but the boy is addicted to genre fiction to a degree that might be worse: he identifies with the first suitor as a flashy, heroic character and thinks of the other man as "Doctor Death." As reality begins to break down, the story partakes of the "psychological thriller" or "magical realism" schools of fiction, depending upon reader interpretation.

Some years later came "The Death of Doctor Island" (1978), in which a psychologically disturbed teenage boy seems to be on a tropical island, but the place is actually an orbital mental institution run by a computer, and there are other patients who are, perhaps, more important. This time the boy is inside of a love triangle, rather than just observing. What follows is a tug of war between reality and illusion in the gray area between torture and treatment, through what might be high tech "magic" performed by Doctor Island or simply the boy's hallucinations.

The third story is "The Doctor of Death Island" (1978). Its hero is Alan Alvard, inventor of speaking books, who is in prison for killing his business partner to keep control of his singular invention. He works as an orderly in the prison hospital where there is an old doctor with a terminal ward at the seventh floor—Alvard thinks of this ward as Death Island, the tip of a submerged mountain that is the rest of the hospital, and has recurring nightmares about the doctor coming for him.

Two years into his sentence, Alvard develops stomach cancer, so he is put into experimental cryogenic suspension. Forty years later he is awakened and cured, only to find himself in a future where everybody has immortality and he is still serving a life sentence. He discovers that the government has stolen his patents in the interests of its own security (a different sort of "national security"), but in his secret and methodical way he devises an elaborate plan for escape that involves bringing fictitious characters of Charles Dickens to life. The love triangle is tangled, complicated, and submerged, yet still at the mysterious heart of the story. Here the mature hero is active in fighting for his escape from the "Island," but at the cost of making him less sympathetic than the boys of the previous stories.

Wolfe was known in the seventies for such highly structured literary tricks. He hasn't stopped, really, since he does that with novels, but in shorter works after the seventies he often uses art to conceal art.

Neal and Ted held her, and Jan put the sword through her belly—so she'd live long enough to know what was happening.
—Ming

"Silhouette" (1975, collected in Endangered Species) presents a starship in orbit around an Earth-like planet after a very long search from a ruined Earth. The captain wants to declare it ready for human colonization as soon as possible, and she is intolerant of dissenting opinion. Officer Johann has misgivings about the world, but he also seems to be in some sort of dream-like first-contact with something down on the surface, a non-corporeal being that is a shadow and uses darkness. When hints of his strange condition spread through the ship, secret cults emerge from hiding in the hope of starting a new religion. The story takes on a frightening and ambiguous demonology within the context of a Star Trek-like space adventure.

"When I Was Ming the Merciless" (1976, collected in Endangered Species) is one side of a dialogue between a college student and his jailors. The contrast between the whimsical title and the opening scene is stark, and while a monologue might seem "distancing," in this example it actually destroys distance.

"Redbeard" (1984, collected in Storeys from the Old Hotel) is a conversational story about a local man with a bad reputation in rural Illinois. This haunting tale touches on fairy tales at points and zigs when you think it will zag.

"Lord of the Land" (1990, collected in Starwater Strains) gives us Dr. Sam Cooper, an "Indy Jones" of folklore, visiting rural Tennessee to investigate a local legend about an unusual monster called a "soul-sucker" that a trio of shooters hit at twilight. Dr. Cooper spends the night at his informant's old farmhouse and discovers a Faulknerian dynamic to the family, but as the night deepens he is drawn across time and place to face the sort of cosmic horror that would make Lovecraft proud.

While horror has always had a place in Wolfe's work, during this period a visceral horror burst out, expanding the range and engaging the reader in new ways.

I'd like to eat the hippos.
—Rex

"The Ziggurat" (1995, collected in Strange Travelers) has a retired engineer going through an ugly divorce. Like a Hemingway hero he has been holed up in a remote cabin for several months, where his progress at taming a coyote has prevented him from committing suicide with a rifle. He feels used up and on the verge of being discarded, but when his wife arrives, expecting him to sign the divorce papers, he rises up with a new determination to refuse the divorce and save the marriage. When she tries to leave in her car she is assaulted by a bunch of boy-sized aggressors who make off with one of the children. The hero sets out to find her in the falling snow, and down by the lake he meets the fey alien creatures that have abducted her. It is solid science fiction, with elements of horror and fantasy, and traces of tabloid realism.

"Petting Zoo" (1997, collected in Strange Travelers) is perhaps Wolfe's most humorous story. A man stands in line at a children's zoo to get a ride on a most unnatural creature—a genetically re-engineered Tyrannosaurus Rex, with purple skin. Built by a boy, once, long ago. This story somehow expresses the manic energy of a "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip merged with a welcome jab against Barney the dinosaur, and has always seemed to me to be a perfect candidate for a Pixar animated short.

"The Walking Sticks" (1999, collected in Innocents Aboard) is tabloid-realism written in a folksy confessional style. (But art conceals art: it is really a crypto-literary story!) The working-class narrator receives a large crate sent from England to his ex-wife, whose current location is unknown. He and his new wife open the crate to find a cabinet filled with a collection of twenty-two unique canes. They are haunted, it seems, and at times they go out on their own to commit mayhem and murder.

Following the rising tide of horror in Wolfe's work during the eighties, the nineties marked an upsurge of powerful emotions from the heart as well as from the spleen.

Tom flourished his stick, hearing Nero roar behind him and knowing that if even one other cat became involved it was all over.
—"On a Vacant Face a Briuse"

"Hunter Lake" (2003, collected in Starwater Strains) is a dream that teeters on the verge of nightmare. The dreamer is Ettie, a woman who returns to a time and place when she was a teen living with her mother Susan. Susan wants to visit the haunted Hunter Lake so she can write a magazine article, but Ettie has premonitions (or perhaps memories) about the lake and she drags her feet. Following the logic of dreams, different eras are collapsed into a strange "present time." The story is a ghost story, a girls' mystery, a spirit quest, and a puzzler touching on mothers and daughters.

Strange Birds (2006), published by Dreamhaven, is a chapbook of two stories inspired by the haunting art of Lisa Snellings-Clark. The first story, "On a Vacant Face a Bruise," is an interstellar circus story that might be in the same universe as Urth and addresses the archetypal dream of "running away to join the circus." It shares affinities with "The Toy Theater" (1971, collected in The Island of Doctor Death…) and "No Planets Strike" (1997, collected in Strange Travelers), and I wonder if I'm alone in detecting a bit of Fellini's La Strada in there as well.

The other story, "Sob in the Silence," is the creepiest story Wolfe has written to date, and that is really saying something.

We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last.
—Severian

But don't read him just because he is "good for you," read him because he is the best in the world, or, even better, because you like to.