Gene Rodman Wolfe was born in Brooklyn, the son of Roy Emerson and Mary Olivia Ayres Wolfe. Most of his growing up, however, took place in Houston, and his roots are in the South, especially North Carolina, which accounts in part for the tone of...

"With the publication of his tetralogy The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe has entered the ranks of the major contemporary writers of science fiction," Pamela Sargent asserted in Twentieth-Century Science Fiction Writers. The series takes place far in...

[Gene Wolfe's The Devil in a Forest] may or may not be a fantasy; there is a passing reference to something that may have been a supernatural incident in objective fact, rather than simply something that haunted the troubled sleep of Mark, the weaver's apprentice…. In any event, this tale of a catastrophic few days in a Medieval English hamlet is told so beautifully, and gathers power at such a nicely controlled pace, that there is no getting out of it once you get into it.

Operation Ares by Gene Wolfe … is going to do the author's reputation a disservice someday. I know what Mr. Wolfe can do when he sets his mind to it; Ares is far below his best. It is a convincing, quiet, low-keyed, intelligent book which somehow fades out into nothing. The characters are surprisingly decent; time after time there are touches of good observation and well-textured realism, but in the end Mr. Wolfe doesn't really seem to care. The book uses an interesting technique of pre...

In The Citadel of the Autarch, Wolfe's hero indeed comes to the end of his narrative, though neither his life or career…. Severian, as Autarch, sees himself as "an ancient buzzing with antiquity as a corpse with flies," and the description is apt as well for the narrative, in which Wolfe reveals a cyclical theory of time and space, not incompatible with Plato's, and the myth of the New Sun is at last adumbrated. Wolfe's achievement, though, is nothing less than the ...