There Are Doors, by Gene Wolfe

Has anyone else read this one (probably, by now... it's out in paper)? Is this a reprint of an early Wolfe, or what? It's very '50s in many of its attitudes, yet it's got what seems to be a commentary on AIDS. It's not a bad book, but it's got more the feel of an early Phillip Jose Farmer than a current Wolfe. Peter da Silva

No, it's a new book, first publishing in hardcover last year. It seems to be another one of Gene's experiments, similar to Free, Live Free. I couldn't get into it at all, even though I like his writing. Others I know loved it. A few hated it. Chuq Von Rospach

chuq at Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) says:

Indeed. It was published as a paperback either this month or last month by Tor (it was their lead item) and originally published in 1988 in hardback as Chuq says. In the next Foundation (46) Gwyneth Jones is going to write a long review on it. In 1985, three years before it was published, Wolfe said about it: ***SPOILERS*** "I have difficulty doing people who are well below my intellectual level. I've set myself this... if I can go and talk about current work, I'm trying to write a novel called There_are_Doors. The hero or central character of this novel is a mentally ill department store clerk. He doesn't read. He isn't intellectual. He watches television. He's not very well socialised, and he's not entirely different from me. But he's different from me in certain ways. And I try to handle him because it's a good exercise for me to try and handle him...He's hard to do. And I'm trying to do it, and it may well flop. But if you're not willing to take chances of failing then you can't push back the borders. "In my story this man is not sub-normal. He's normal, and that's what's wrong with him." Jeremy