Gene Wolfe, who died last week at the age of 87, imagined vast, strange worlds in his fiction – and revealed them in flickering glimpses. His stories were slow revelations, indirect and incomplete. Readers learned the significance of their accumulating hints per speculum in aenigmate: through a glass, darkly.
Wolfe, a veteran of the Korean War, earned his living as an engineer and was an engineering trade journal editor until his mid-50s. For many years he wrote science fiction and fantasy in his spare time – an hour here, two hours there. He regularly sold short stories from 1965 onwards, and in 1971 he was nominated for a Nebula Award for The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories – the first of nine Hugo Award nominations, 20 Nebula Award nominations (two wins) and 14 World Fantasy Award nominations (five wins). The following year he published the novella The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which catapulted him into the front rank of American science-fiction writers. He wrote more than 30 novels and 200 short stories.
