# Swanwick on Wolfe

*The Urth list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 03 Nov 1999*

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### Nicholas Gevers
*03 Nov 1999, 11:25*

In the course of an interview I've been conducting
with him, Michael Swanwick has some interesting things
to say about Wolfe:
1) "he is, I honestly believe, the finest writer in
the English language alive today."
2) On how 5HC helped inspire Swanwick's Nebula-winning
novel STATIONS OF THE TIDE:
MS: "It would be hard to exaggerate the impact THE
FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS, and particularly the title
novella, had on me when I first read it. Not just the
extraordinary beauty of the prose but the wit and
economy of Wolfe's solutions to any number of
technical problems. If I didn't know Gene was an
engineer, I think I'd be able to guess from that work.
It has the same lean elegance that really first-rate
engineering has.

"So there's definitely a debt. As I was writing, in
fact, I thought of the bureaucrat [the novel's
protagonist] as looking like Gene Wolfe. Gardner
Dozois once compared Gene to Dashiell Hammett's
Continental Op, a man so ordinary-looking that if you
looked away for an instant he could disappear into a
crowd without a trace. I wanted that sense of someone
who's unremarkable superficially and yet, inside, he's
... Gene Wolfe!"



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### Marc Coleman
*03 Nov 1999, 13:21 · follows Nicholas Gevers*

I'd highly recommend Stations Of The Tide to anyone who has not read it.
																		marc

> At 11:25 AM 11/3/1999 -0800, you wrote:
> In the course of an interview I've been conducting
> with him, Michael Swanwick has some interesting things
> to say about Wolfe:
> 1) "he is, I honestly believe, the finest writer in
> the English language alive today."
> 2) On how 5HC helped inspire Swanwick's Nebula-winning
> novel STATIONS OF THE TIDE:
> MS: "It would be hard to exaggerate the impact THE
> FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS, and particularly the title
> novella, had on me when I first read it. Not just the
> extraordinary beauty of the prose but the wit and
> economy of Wolfe's solutions to any number of
> technical problems. If I didn't know Gene was an
> engineer, I think I'd be able to guess from that work.
> It has the same lean elegance that really first-rate
> engineering has.
> 
> "So there's definitely a debt. As I was writing, in
> fact, I thought of the bureaucrat [the novel's
> protagonist] as looking like Gene Wolfe. Gardner
> Dozois once compared Gene to Dashiell Hammett's
> Continental Op, a man so ordinary-looking that if you
> looked away for an instant he could disappear into a
> crowd without a trace. I wanted that sense of someone
> who's unremarkable superficially and yet, inside, he's
> ... Gene Wolfe!"
> 
> 
> 
> =====
> 
> __________________________________________________
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