Gene Wolfe Spinirian 3 interview

# AN INTERVIEW WITH GENE WOLFE

By Dave Panchyk

Transcribed by Linda Grass

Gene Wolfe is one of the most versatile speculative fiction writers I know. Both his fantasy and science fiction have won major awards, and seeing Wolfe in person and hearing him speak drives home just how good a storyteller he is. I found myself spellbound listening to his stories about working on a newspaper in a manufacturing plant—certainly the kind of thing that would be deadly boring if related by almost anyone else.

I was fortunate enough to snag him for an interview in May '88 at Keycon 5 in Winnipeg. The hour, unfortunately, was late, which resulted in some disjointed syntax and uncompleted sentences on both our parts (though, I'll confess, much more on mine than on Mr. Wolfe's). I've edited our interview down so that everything makes sense, without (I hope) losing anything important.

DP: It's dark imagery that I really liked about the *Book of the New Sun*.

GW: So did I, frankly. So did I. What I was saying in the interview about Jurgen being the guy who stabs the ruler in the back, which is the opening scene in the book, and I like to deal with those people. I think they're a lot more interesting than the guy with the white hat because we know that he's going to do conventionally good thing. The rest of us may do the conventionally good thing, or the unconventionally good thing, which is often even better, or some perfectly abhorable thing or just flunk out on the whole thing. And it's all these potentials.

DP: Yes, that’s the thing. Severian isn’t a white hat nor is be the greyish black hat of Moorcock's Elric, who's got a conscience, has pangs of guilt and emotion, but he's still hacking and slaying around him. Severian is the first sort of self-aware antihero almost. It's like his memory makes him different.

GW: Well, very much so. Yes. He’s a man who's completely unable to escape his past. Severian tries to do what is right but because of his background and his rather narrow technical education, he has very strange ideas sometimes of what is right. You've read Huckleberry Finn. Everybody's read Huck Finn...

DP: Actually, I haven't.

GW: Okay, there’s a great scene in which Huckleberry Finn and Nigger Jim, who is a slave, run away on the raft.  Nigger Jim’s wife has been sold someplace and he wants to get to a free country from which he can maybe earn enough money to buy her back and buy his children back. And Huck Finn is trying to get away from an alcoholic father who beats him. And so they're on the raft floating down the Mississippi, probably the most famous locale in American literature or U.S. literature, and Huck Finn goes through this great crisis of conscience.

He says: This black man belongs to a man who wants him back and he is stealing himself. That’s theft. And this man is worth at least $500, and I'm helping him do it, and I have to
do the decent Christian thing and take him back to the man that owns him if I possibly can. And he agonizes about this quite a bit and finally he cashed in his lot with the devil. He says to hell with it, I'm not going to take him back. I don't care what they say, I'm not going to do it. You know, he's opted for sin. He's joined the forces of evil.

DP: It's almost like that with Severian. He not so much rationalizes, he just does. And he's, again, a product of his past and his training and he seems often the coldly rational person, but he is still a person.

GW: Much like, if you read the Sherlock Holmes stories real fast when you're young and naive, you see that Sherlock Holmes is a completely cold and rational person. If you read them again slowly when you've done a little more
living, you realize that this is all a mask, and he is a man who is gripped by the most intense emotions and he is fighting it off by saying, I am a thinking machine; these things cannot manipulate me as a puppet, because he is racked by pride, frustrated love, all of these things. He meets the one woman, the one woman that he's really crazy about, beautiful and with a marvelous intellect and everything, and she’s a criminal.

DP: Didn’t she outwit him? Yes. The Torturers’ Guild, the colour that’s darker than black, the city that’s been lost to time and forgets its own past, things like the dueling with the averns, the flowers instead of the swords, it’s that that really gives the flavour, and I don’t think without Severian’s memory we have that because basically everything’s built brick by brick.

You were saying what should happen with fantasy is something totally new being done with it and I think that’s what you've done. I mean, it’s being compared with Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast.

GW: Gormenghast. Yes, Gormenghast, which is terrific.

DP: And it’s a bit more ponderous to read.

GW: It’s got some very bad bits in it, to be perfectly honest. The school stuff is really bad, but overall, a tremendous book.

DP: There's something to be said about the language you used in it. It’s more complex but it’s not alienated. It’s not calling a rabbit a sneep.

GW: No, it’s not making up new stuff. It’s finding old and impressive words that can be used where I needed them, and sometimes I went bananas trying to find one. You know, sure, in some cases I would remember, "catapract." This is a term from the Byzantyne Empire for a soldier who wore complete armour. Byzantyne have cavalrymen which is what he was.

I had read enough history that bang, boy, there it is; that's just what we need here. But there were other times when I said, boy we need a really obscure, difficult, beautiful word that we can throw in here, and I have no idea what that word is going to be. And I had to start looking. And I looked a whole lot.

DP: I think the dictionary provided all the perfect words that fit in, again, with the imagery. Just a word like “lictor,” that sort of ...

GW: That term is strictly a Latin term, and "it’s the man who ties". But that’s ... can I tell you a little bit where this comes from?

DP: Sure.

GW: The Latin system of justice, each judge was the boss of his own little police force. He had these men. And they went out and if they found somebody who was a law-breaker, in their opinion, they took him in and accused him before their superior, the judge who tried him. And the chief of these policemen, the magistrate's boss, was called the lictor because when they caught the man, he was the one who bound his hands behind his back.

DP: You said that people were doing books on *The Book of the New Sun*, John Klute and ......?

GW: John Klute is doing one and I don't know, I've been racking my brain for who's doing the other one. You were the one that asked me if I'd ever gone to the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts.

Somebody in connection with that because there was a college professor from Rhodes University, in South Africa who came by to talk to me after the conference was over this year. And he was going to work with these people and get an article that he'd written, a glossary from *The Book of the New Sun*, into their book. But I can't remember who it was he was working with, but somebody was going after a critical book.

GW: Well it really had a pretty simple beginning. I decided to write a book about a torturer, and the reason that I decided that was that I went to a panel on costuming at some science fiction convention. And it occurred to me that nobody had ever done one of my characters as a masquerade costume, as far as I knew. So I didn’t like that, and I thought, well, what have I got that would be good, and I realized I didn't have anything that would be that good.

So I listened to these costumers who were all expert people, Sandra and people of her skill, and I thought, well, I'll write a torturer: black cape, black trousers, bare chest, black boots—all this stuff that you can get anyplace—mask, which helps if you're silly looking, sword, because all costumers love swords. Here he is. Here is this torturer. Okay, I'll do a story about him, and as I told you, I was going to a little novelette for a book, and then I'll have a character that can be done as a masquerade costume.

And I started thinking, well, where did he come from? How did he get to be this? Did he walk into an employment office and they said we need a torturer or what was it? And I came up with this rationale for a self-perpetuating guild of torturers. It would take the children, the small children of their victims, the small male children of their victims, and train them as their own replacements. And once I had done that, I saw that what I wanted to do was not start with the man but start with the boy, and show that, and it all went out from that.

I love to do it as a first-person narrative, and I wanted to do it with lots and lots of detail and my original scheme was that after he became a master of the guild, he would write his memoirs. And what in turn happened was, he would start as an apprentice, he would become a journeyman torturer, he would disgrace himself as he did by permitting Thecla to kill herself, he would be exiled, he would gain power over the guild, come back and force them to accept him as a master torturer, and then he would write this account of how he did it.

So I thought, well, when you do this, when a man is talking about things that are 5, 10, 15, 20 years in his background, it's going to seem awfully hokey if he can describe all this detail unless he has a eidetic memory. So he has that eidetic memory, and indeed, that eidetic memory is going to compel him to set down his story. He's got all his past stored.

You've read Funes Memorious by Jorge Luis Borges, I'm sure, which is a story about a man with an eidetic memory. He's possessed by it in a somewhat different way, but the same thing applies.

So here we are, and I started writing the story and I got, you know, up to a novelette and everyone said, are you started, so I said well it's a novel. And I wrote another novel and again I had hardly started with it so I said, it’s a trilogy. Trilogy it’s going to be. And I wrote it as a trilogy except that the last book was about 50 percent longer than either of the first two. The first two were about the same. And so we decided that I would cut the last book in two and build up the two parts.

And I really like the “loyal to the group of 17” story about as well as anything I've ever done, but all those stories were put in there with the idea of adding meat to the stew because there were more guests than we originally expected.

DP: I haven't read The Urth of the New Sun yet. What now for Severian? Do we start including the cacogens in a larger role, or ....?

GW: *The Urth of the New Sun* starts towards a spaceship which is going to take Severian outside of our universe, which is Briah, and into the next higher universe which is Yesod.

DP: Oh, I see, some Kaballah.

GW: Yes. Yes, that stuff is all stolen out of the Kaballah. And he will be tried supposedly by the Hierocramates, the tough people of the day, and they will determine whether or not Urth deserves a new sun. And if it does, it will be given a whole hole which will go into the core of the present sun as an actual astrological body, and reverse the collapse of the star which takes its place in the earth's solar system.

And he goes there and has a whole 150 pages or so of adventures aboard the ship, and he finally gets to Yesod and he has adventures there, and then he succeeds—I'll ruin the story for you, yes he succeeds—and he is told that he will be put aboard the ship that had brought him there and it will return him to Urth, which it does. But it returns him to an Urth that is far in the past of the time in which he grew up, his normal time, and he discovers and the reader discovers, that he is in fact the conciliator, the now semi-legendary figure. And of course, eventually he gets returned to his own time.

DP: That's a lot to tie into the one book.

GW: It's a thick book. What's necessary is you have to move this astral body, the white hole, from the limits of the universe to the Sol, the sun of our solar system. And you can't do that by magic. This is a real astral body and it has to go. And so what they do is put him back at a time far enough that when he gets up to the time that he remembers, the body will be about to erupt. See how it all works out.

You know the thing with Snoopy, where he’s writing the novel?

DP: Yes.

GW: And he says: "The king's profligacy was bankrupting the country. A pirate ship appeared upon the horizon. A shot rang out." And he looks over at the reader and he says, "In the last chapter, I'm going to tie this all together."

DP: So is *Urth of the New Sun* going to be the last? I mean certainly there weren't any loose ends really to be tied up?

GW: Well, that depends on who you talk to. Here's how this whole book came about. When I turned in The Citadel of the Autarch to David Hartwell as my editor, David said, Gene, you did not bring The New Sun. You promised that in the book, that it's an implied promise in the book that the loose end will be brought in, and he said, well you didn’t do it. And I said, it’s not an implied promise in the book. What the book is about, which is what Severian tells you in Chapter 1 of The Shadow of the Torturer, he says, I'm going to tell you how I, the ragged apprentice torturer boy, ended up as the autarch of the commonwealth. That's what I'm writing, and that’s what he's written. At the end of The Citadel of the Autarch, he is sitting at the desk writing this account of what he did. And the fabled arrival of the New Sun is one of those things, you know.

And David said, no, I think that you ought to add an extra chapter in which he brings the new sun. And I said, you know, that’s an awful lot to put in one chapter, David. And so we agreed, if I would write a fifth book, it would deal with that. And he would publish the fourth book, The Citadel of the Autarch, the way I wrote it, without demanding the changes.

So I set out to write the fifth book, and I got it about half-finished and the whole terrible thing with Pocket Books blew up. This would be about mid-1983 when Pocket Books, which had at that time the best fantasy science fiction program in the world, said, we’re going out of that business; we're not going to do that anymore.

They fired David Hartwell, who as the head of their science fiction department; John Douglas who was his assistant jumped over to Avon Books; they kept Don Meaningpanich, who was a junior editor in the department to kind of finish up and close things out; and they said that the Scott Meredith literary agency was going to be packager for them. Scott Meredith would buy science fiction novels. He would deliver the packaged novels to Pocket which would publish them and would pay him a fee for doing this.

Well this is as blatant a conflict of interest as anybody has ever tried to put over because Scott Meredith was supposedly representing clients to a publisher. Now he was going to really be the publisher. He was going to say: okay you're my client, so I'm going to buy your novel, *Spacebusters*, and I'm going to take 10 percent of what I pay you for that and I'm going to package it; I'm going to deliver it to Pocket Books, and I’m going to take my fee from Pocket Books.

And the Science-Fiction Writers of America and the independent literary agents of America said, if you put this thing in operation, we're taking you to court. As soon as the thing starts, we're going to file suit. And, at this point, these idiots, frankly, got some lawyers to look at it, and they said, you're going to be wiped out. There's no way you're going to win this. This is clear conflict of interest.

It's like, if you decide to sue me for something that I have done and a lawyer says okay, I'll represent both of you. That'll cut the cost. Okay? I'll be David’s lawyer and handle it from his end, and I'll be your lawyer, Gene, and I'll defend you. You can’t do that under law. You're going to jail for trying this sort of thing.

So what happened then was that they said well we're going to out of the science fiction business altogether and they set up Baen Books. Baen at that time was the science-fiction editor of Ace and—no, actually he was the science-fiction editor of Tor—and they let him start his own little publishing company and we will distribute the books but we won't publish any more science fiction.

So David Hartwell, who is probably the best science-fiction editor in the world, he has that reputation here, was now working for Tor Books, and he came in and offered me a two-book contract, the two books to be *Free Live Free* and *The Urth of the New Sun*. He knew I had the contract. So I said fine, and I signed the contract. Everything was happy and he went back to New York and was talking to people about how he’d done the contract. Word of it got out.

My agent got a call from Pocket Books, said this novelist is under option to us, i.e., you can’t do that. We’re going to take you to court. And we said, you no longer publish science fiction; you said that. And they said, we don’t care. This novel is under option to us, and you know, we have the right to go back into the field if we want. You cannot sell this novel to anyone else.

So I had to set the damn thing aside for like, 18 months or two years, or something like that, half-finished, write another novel, which was *Soldier of the Mist*, to fulfill my contract with Tor. See we scratched out ... we put a player later to be named, you know, how they do in baseball? Said a novel later to be titled in there. So I wrote another novel, gave it to them, and finally when I had that out of the way, I was able to take *Urth of the New Sun* out of my safe, which is where I’d been keeping the manuscript and finish it off, and of course we had to send it to damn Pocket Books, and say here it is, now you have 90 days to exercise your option or not. And they kept it for about 60 days and said, we're not going to exercise the option, and sent it back, and I sold it to Tor.

You know, I guess all businesses are crazy. All of them I've ever been concerned with are crazy. But I’ve never known of another case when a company had a top line in the world and said, we’re not going to make that product, or, we don’t like it. And this is what Pocket Books did.


DP: Strange. This Scott Meredith business, that’s .........

GW: Well, you know, it was a blatantly illegal way of doing things. Maybe in some country in Africa or South America, you could have gotten away with that, but you couldn’t in the U.S. or Canada or Britain or France or Germany or any place like that. They all have laws against this kind of thing because it’s a license to steal.

DP: So—last question—did *The Book of the New Sun*, *Soldier in the Mist* sort of pigeonhole you in some people's eyes, like, publishers?

GW: Oh sure.

DP: I noticed in *Liavek*, you know, here you are and you know, you're publishing the year’s best fantasy stories and they want you to do this story for *Liavek*. You don’t think it will restrict your chances of expanding out again?

GW: It always does. It always does. People want to pigeonhole you. The industry wants to pigeonhole. Actors have exactly the same damn thing. You know, the only way to avoid it is not to act or not to write anything. If I had written a mystery, I would have been pigeonholed in that. And if I had written realistic or descriptive fiction, as we sometimes call it, mainstream, whatever you want to call it, I would be pigeonholed as being that.

If I think of something that I think is going to be a very good story, and I don’t have anything I’m working on at the moment, then I write that, and I try and sell it. You know, send it to my agent. Say, here Virginia, try and sell it.

DP: You are a full-time writer?

GW: Yes. I worked for Plant Engineering, which I talked about a little bit there, for 11 years, and had a terrible time making myself quit. I was working for a man I liked. I had worked for him most of the 11 years; I worked 10 out of the 11 years for Leo Spector, and he was our editor, the top guy on the editorial side, and I had an office just about as big as this room, with a walnut desk in it, secretary, and a bookcase, and I pulled a 250, I think, dollar a month, no-questions-asked, expense account.

You know, if I decided I had to fly to New York, I went out to O’Hare and got a ticket, or actually I got a ticket from a travel agency there, caught a flight to New York, went and checked in a hotel, pursued the story that I thought I should, and came back. And if I had overspent the expense account, that just meant that I had less money next month.

And it was a damned hard job to quit. I was, frankly, being badly overpaid. I know that we had—what was it?—eight senior editors, I guess, on the book. I was one of those senior editors, and I had reason to believe that I was probably one of the highest paid of those senior editors. Another editor found a copy of salary schedules, which was supposed to be very secret, and he found one that had been ... Somebody had been trying to Xerox for some meeting, and had gotten a bad Xerox. It was legible but not good enough and they had thrown it away. And he pulled it out of the wastebasket. And he wouldn’t show it to me but he told me I was making a lot more money than he was, and he was a good editor in the company. And it was damn tough to go in and say 'thank you for taking me on'; I've had a swell time at this job'; I’m overpaid, and I’m quitting. It wasn’t easy.

And it was a job that I could get into. I came in at 8:30 in the morning. By lunch I had done all the work that I needed to do for them, and after lunch, I could sit around at the office and read *Fortune*, and *Business Week*, and answer the phone if somebody called in with a question or something. If we had trouble in layout or something, the layout person would come in and say, you know, we need a two-line kill on this, then I would go back to reading *Fortune* or whatever. Write letters to fanzines, write my agent about the writing I was doing and so on.

And I realized after I'd been there maybe nine ... eight, nine years, that what I had here really was a profitable but really very time-consuming hobby of what was supposed to be my full-time job: being the senior editor on *Financeering* magazine. And I waffled around and waffled around for about a year longer than I should've, and finally I went and said, well I want to write my books, and I'm quitting. And what they did actually was say, you're not quitting; you're retiring. And they gave me the gold watch and the dinner. There's the gold watch, inscription on the back.

DP: As Judith Merrill says, "Less well paid, but more honest."