Alrightreads: Old New Borrowed Blue

I've wanted to read more Gene Wolfe for ages, but committing to another dense tetralogy I might not be sufficiently invested in has been putting me off. Better to go with a themed smorgasbord.


Gene Wolfe, Storeys from the Old Hotel

1967-88 (collected 1988) / Ebook / 331 pages / USA

****

I prefer my Gene Wolfe brief, concentrated and to the point, even if that point is often elusive and more about atmosphere and justifying a pun title. Most of these tales, specifically chosen for their obscurity, are less than 10 pages in length, making this the perfect no-overlap companion to the longer shorts of The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. There's even a fourth doctor/death/island permutation as the author continues to stubbornly mine that seam and still finds gold.

Faves: 'Slaves of Silver,' 'Westwind,' 'To the Dark Tower Came,' 'A Solar Labyrinth,' 'On the Train.'

Worsties: 'Continuing Westward,' 'The Packerhaus Method,' 'A Criminal Proceeding,' 'The Choice of the Black Goddess.'

Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

1987 / Audiobook / 372 pages / USA

***

This was the last book I read in a year when I read a few too many books, but it was oddly one I had absolutely no memory of. Particularly strange, since I made it sound incredibly appealing.

Listening again, I can see how it blurred into the rest, but it might be my favourite of the series just for being more exotic. Twice through and I still don't really understand what's going on. I should stick to junior sci-fi.

Gene Wolfe, A Borrowed Man

2015 / Audiobook / 304 pages / USA

**

I'm all for a good convoluted excuse to blend genres, but this future noir is only appealing in style rather than substance, and not very appealing at that.

The premise of cloned authors being loaned out in a post-book society is too bizarre to be credible, and since only literate nerds are going to be reading this in the first place, it doesn't need the patronising explanations to excuse the corny in-character narration, in case we thought Gene can't write.

Gene Wolfe, On Blue's Waters

1999 / Audiobook / 384 pages / USA

**

I'm sure it has its devotees, but this wasn't my sort of thing at all, so I'm glad I didn't commit to the entire Book of the Short Sun as planned.

As a sci-fi fan, I appreciated the strange new worlds, new life and new civilisations, but downgrading from a spaceship modelled on a boat to an actual boat, and bringing in actual mythological creatures (or the Clarkeian next best thing) was too much standard fantasy for me, dismembered cyborgs excepted. The chronicler's a lot less likeable than Severian too, which is some achievement considering the other guy tortured people for a living.