Robinson on Wolfe

Nicholas Gevers · 17 Sep 1999, 13:02 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Nicholas=20Gevers?= <vermoulian at YAHOO.COM>
Subject: (urth) Robinson on Wolfe
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1999 13:02:40
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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.

=3D=3D=3D

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