Compleate Wolfe

Rostrum, You asked about the most efficient way to get all of Wolfe's short stories and novellas. I'm not sure I understand, exactly--are you worried about overlapping stories in different collections? There isn't that much overlap (so far, at least), I don't think. The things that have not been collected at all, obviously you have to find the magazines they appeared in. The things that have not appeared in print, like "Talk of Mandrakes," clearly you have to find a manuscript somewhere! <g> (Seriously, folks, I myself asked about this "phantom title" after I saw it listed in URTH-MAN EXTRAORDINARY and Gene Wolfe tells me it is real, and he sold it, and the magazine folded before they published it. But as we all know, he might be bluffing! I, for one, deerly hope to see this storied story in the next collection of tall tails.) The things that have appeared only in Cheap Street editions, well. You either buy it now or continue to have patience and pray that some white knight like Bryan Cholfin comes along to provide you with a less expensive copy. Otherwise, the most efficient way is probably a combination of MX Bookfinder and Amazon.com! (Or did I miss the point entirely?) =mantis=

Oh. I don't own any of the Wolfe story collections yet, and I'd remembered that Castle of Days, for instance, had all the stories from Wolfe's Book of Days, so I imagined that there might be other similar overlaps. This site lists the following collections of Wolfe's short works: http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb-bin/exact_author.cgi?Gene_Wolfe The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980) Gene Wolfe's Book of Days (1981) Plan[e]t Engineering (1984) For Rosemary (1988) - Poetry collection. Storeys from the Old Hotel (1988) Endangered Species (1989) Castle of Days (1992) Young Wolfe (1992) Bibliomen (1995) Are all these pretty much non-overlapping except for the Book of Days? Are there any other collections that have more than one Wolfe story, or would I have to basically hunt them down one at a time from here? -Rostrum

I believe that most of the Cheap Street material has been made available in less expensive forms: Bibliomen is available in a new edition from Broken Mirrors Press; Empires of Foliage and Flowers was reprinted in Crank #1 and again in the recent The Best of Crank!, from Tor; Of the pamphlets, two ("At the Point of Capricorn" and "The Boy Who Hooked the Sun") were reprinted in the Gene Wolfe issue of Weird Tales, Spring 1988. I hadn't realized how many Cheap Street Wolfes there were! "The Arimaspian Legacy" and "Slow Children at Play", novellas, have not been reprinted, nor has "The Old Woman Whose Rolling Pin is the Sun" according to the sources I consulted. Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney at crossover.com Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/nyrsf.html