Subject: (urth) New Wolfe stories

From: Nicholas Gevers <vermoulian at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 09:20:30 +0000

There's been some mention of new Wolfe stories, so I thought I'd fill the 
details out a bit.

Four new GW tales appear in recent anthologies:

"Leif in the Wind", in Gaiman & Sarrantonio (eds.), STORIES (William Morrow, 
hardcover), pp. 220-231.

"King Rat", in Hull (ed.), GATEWAYS (Tor, hardcover), pp. 245-257. Note on Fred 
Pohl follows, pp. 257-259.

"Innocent", in Schweitzer (ed.), FULL MOON CITY (Simon & Schuster/Gallery, trade 
paperback), pp. 26-36.

"Bloodsport", in Strahan & Anders (eds.), SWORDS AND DARK MAGIC (Subterranean 
Press, hardcover), pp. 81-93.

I have a Wolfe story, "Why I Was Hanged", in inventory for a 2011 Harper Collins 
anthology, GHOSTS BY GASLIGHT.

--Nick Gevers.

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From: Milton Jackson <miltonwjackson at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:40:12 +0000

Not sure if you guys have discussed this already, but Gene Wolfe has a new
book coming out  January 18. It's called Home Fires, but I couldn't get
enough information from Amazon to know if it's a novel or an anthology. I'm
guessing novel, but as I say, I haven't gleaned enough information to be
sure.

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 5:20 AM, Nicholas Gevers <vermoulian at yahoo.com>wrote:

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From: Matthew Keeley <matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:51:57 +0000

I didn't realize the Amazon listing had shown up already, nor that the book
came out so soon. Home Fires is a novel. He talked about it at Readercon
2009 — spoke about some characters, the setting, etc.

I wrote a post to Urth on Wolfe at Readercon in July of last year; the post
is presumably in the Urth Archives for July 2009.

Here's the relevant section of my report on Wolfe's comments:

(Minor spoilers, I suppose)

When I asked what Wolfe was working on, he talked a little about Home Fires,
the
second draft of which he finished in February. Apparently it involves
an energy-poor future Earth, an interstellar war, and complications in
love arriving as a result of time dilation.

-Matt
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From: Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 04:06:55 +0000

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Matthew Keeley
> love arriving as a result of time dilation.

Hm. A future earth, an interstellar war, time travel, and love. Maybe
we're getting another entry in the AEG-verse, one which isn't so
'heavily expurgated of the overarching story' (as one MLer put it,
IIRC).

-- 
gwern

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From: James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 14:53:50 +0000

> Gwern Branwen - Hm. A future earth, an interstellar war, time travel, and love. Maybe

Funny. Unless Wolfe has changed his mind, there is a character named 
REES [phonetically represented because I don't know how it's spelled.] I 
asked him whether the similarity in this name and that of Bill Ries 
meant Home Fires was a continuation of AEG and The Tree Is My Hat. He 
replied, "I don't think the names are similar".

I responded "Really???". Then he immediately went into a story [cutting 
me off IMO] about how how he has messed up with naming in the past 
because the main character in The Other Dead Man was named Will Ries. In 
short, he didn't explicitly answer my question.

u+16b9

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From: adam at io.com <adam at io.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:48:00 +0000

> short, he didn't explicitly answer my question.

I have a Theory.

Wolfe is an Aggie.

Texas A&M and Rice University have no love lost between them.

The founder of Rice was one William Marsh Rice.

So maybe Wolfe just likes naming villains after him and associating them
somehow with water, for the Marsh effect.

Adam

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From: Nicholas Jost <nickjost at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:32:50 +0000

Subject: Re: (urth) New Wolfe stories

>somehow with water, for the Marsh effect.

Isn't Reese a "good-guy" by the end of AEG?

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From: James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:37:54 +0000

> Isn't Reese a "good-guy" by the end of AEG?

Wolfe pronounced it "rice" with the "i" held as in "rise".

Further, Wolfe described Ries as the perfect villain: "a man who falls 
just short of being a hero".

u+16b9
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From: Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 04:30:28 +0000

> love arriving as a result of time dilation.

Here's someone who has written a review:
http://mordicai.livejournal.com/1817587.html

(Must have an advance copy.)

     "Home Fires is the story of a couple torn apart by war. She ships
off to serve while he stays home to build a life for when she returns.
Of course, the war is set on a far off world, & due to the vagaries of
space-time dilatation at high speeds, she returns just a few months
older while he has aged twenty years. Their May-December romance is of
course complicated. The world the story is set in is an odd future--
like the future of Mad Men perhaps, a future of a past that skips our
current history. Or a history that, in cycles, returns to old
patterns. The man-- Skip, a lawyer-- takes his partner ("contracto,"
the civil & religious ceremonies of marriage having been split) on a
cruise to win his love-- Mastergunner Chelle-- back, along with her
mother-- more or less-- & they are swept up in the machinations of one
of Robert Louis Stevenson's Suicide Clubs, or the stratagems of spies,
or both, or neither. Shockingly, all is revealed by the end-- that is
the thing that gets me the most. Gene Wolfe has a tendency to leave
you guessing, to never spell out just what has been going on-- yet
here, he does. The inquisitive Skip's barrister background makes him
both good at ferreting out the truth & laying it out. So caught up in
the plot-- & the plotting-- was I that I totally didn't see the final
"twist" (by which I emphatically don't mean an M. Night Shyamalan
anagnorisis) coming. So obvious that I over-looked it entirely. I
think Home Fires, like many of Mister Wolfe's recent novels, is the
sort of narrative that he would have once written as a short story &
then put aside. In fleshing them out into full novels he provides
something eminently readable & very intimate. They become character
studies-- because Gene Wolfe has written enough tight novellas &
shorter works, he has room to lay out the story while paying attention
to the tucked away parcels of the characters."

-- 
gwern