# gene wolfe's parents *The Urth list — 3 messages, 3 voices, 06 Dec 2004* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### turin *06 Dec 2004, 22:47* did gene wolfe lose his parents at an early age. on his blog william gibson writes Gene Wolfe once said that being an only child whose parents are dead is like being the sole survivor of drowned Atlantis. There was a whole civilization there, an entire continent, but it's gone. And you alone remember. That's my story too, my father having died when I was six, my mother when I was eighteen. Brian Aldiss believes that if you look at the life of any novelist, you'll find an early traumatic break, and mine seems no exception. Does anyone know where this is form or who he is talking about? --- ### Tony Ellis *07 Dec 2004, 11:22 · in reply to turin* Turin wrote > did gene wolfe lose his parents at an early age. on his blog > william gibson writes > > > Gene Wolfe once said that being an only child whose parents > are dead is like being the sole survivor of drowned Atlantis. > There was a whole civilization there, an entire continent, > but it's gone. And you alone remember. > Does anyone know where this is form or who he is talking > about? In the essay 'Where I get my ideas from' collected in Castle of the Otter, Wolfe writes (movingly, for me): The horrible thing has happened. Father and Mother are dead... Where is the little house where Boots stretched before the gas fire, where Mother sat crocheting... Where is lost Atlantis? Lost in the dust. And only I am left to tell you. It sounds as if Gibson was thinking of this - although Wolfe might have used the same image elsewhere. --- ### mournings glory *07 Dec 2004, 12:36 · in reply to turin* > did gene wolfe lose his parents at an early age. No. Wolfe was 42 when his father died in 1973; 46 when his mother passed over in 1977. msg ---