Recently, while conducting an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, I asked him his opinion concerning Gene Wolfe's contribution to SF. This was his response:
KSR: Well it would be hard to particularize, he has contributed so much. In short, greatness. He is similar to the great modernist masters of the first half of the century, people like Stevens or Proust or Woolf, in that he has a very powerful personal vision, and great moral complexity and intensity, expressed in beautiful prose and surreal imagery, in many superb stories and novels. We in the sf community can point to his work as evidence that science fiction is capable of achieving all that modernism ever hoped for literature, and then some, in that he plots better than most of the modernists.
As for specifically science fictional contributions, the working knowledge of technology and society given to him by his editing job at PLANT ENGINEERING allowed him to be sophisticated and authoritative when he introduced scientific elements into his work. At the same time there is a dreamlike quality to much of his writing, in its boldness and strangeness, and seeming inevitability. This combination of gifts allowed him the greatest achievement in science fantasy, in his Sun masterpieces.
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