Review: upcoming Wolfe anthology

Dan Rabin · 01 Apr 2007, 22:34 · from 2007-April.txt.gz

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From: wolfe-lists at danrabin.com (Dan Rabin)
Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2007 15:34:50 -0700
Subject: (urth) Review: upcoming Wolfe anthology
Message-ID: <p06240800c235d60dd468@[209.157.132.35]>

I just thought the folks on this list might be interested in the 
following review of mine that was just accepted by the online jounral 
_SF Silicon Valley_ concerning Wolfe's upcoming anthology.

   -- Dan Rabin

-----------------------

Long-time fans of Gene Wolfe's shorter fiction will remember with 
delight a trio of thematically-unrelated stories having similar 
titles: "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories", "The Death of 
Dr. Island", and "The Doctor of Death Island".  The three works, all 
collected in _The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other 
Stories_, were joined in a long-unavailable volume appropriately 
entitled _The Wolfe Archipelago_ by a fourth permutated title: "Death 
of the Island Doctor".

Scholars of high-school algebra among Wolfe's readers have often 
noted, however, that the words "island", "doctor", and "death" can be 
permuted in _six_ ways, not merely four.  Some, assuming the author's 
apparent omission to be intentional, have ascribed the absence of the 
orderings island-death-doctor and doctor-island-death to deep 
principles developed by Christian Kabbalists (yes, there have been 
some!) based on reordering the names of the Persons of the Trinity. 
Other critics have preferred to infer that the ever-fertile 
imagination of Gene Wolfe had just moved on, or that he gave the 
missing titles to stories that were rejected (either by editors, or 
by comparison with the author's own notoriously high standards).

Now, at last, Wolfe himself supplies the missing pieces of the 
puzzle.  His new collection _Isolating Insulation, Doctor Death in 
Purr-Mutation!_ not only delivers the two entirely new novelettes 
"Island of the Death Doctor" and "The Doctor's Island Death", but 
also indulges the author's bent for frame stories by including new 
versions of the pre-existing four works as is "edited" jointly by the 
engaging felines Mani (from _The Wizard Knight_) and G. Gordon Kitty 
(from _Castleview_).

These editorial changes constitute the "purr-mutations" of the title, 
as Wolfe deadpans in his brief introductory remarks in his own 
literary persona.  The changes, however, are minor in themselves: 
most notable is the subsitution of felines for primates in "The Death 
of Dr. Island".  As so often with this tricksy author, deeper 
meanings emerge from an accumulation of hints, here hidden in Gordon 
and Mani's commentaries on the six stories.

THe commentaries, each written in one of the cats' first-person 
voice, are all dated within a two-week period in the spring of an 
unspecified year.  The last commentary, in the voice of G. Gordon 
Kitty, casually mentions "going over to my owner's in-laws for 
Passover" before trailing off into an agitated and incoherent tirade. 
The Gene Wolfe voice then returns in an afterword to say that, 
however distasteful it may appear to the reader, the last piece is 
included in the hopes of assisting the authorities in solving the 
recent bloody killing of an ordinary Jewish family at their Seder in 
a suburb of Chicago.

Readers are left on their own to reflect that the Passover Seder, 
which occurs on a fixed date according to the lunar calendar used in 
Judaism, always takes place on the full moon, and that a plausible 
explanation for the carnage alluded to is that old Wolfean favorite, 
lycanthropy (or the feline equivalent) on the part of G. Gordon 
Kitty.  "Purr-mutation" indeed.

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