New Wolfe stories

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.

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.

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

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).

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. ᚹ

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

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". ᚹ

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."