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 Southern Gothic sometimes appearing in his science-fiction settings. Dropping out of Texas A & M University, Wolfe was drafted into the Korean War, after which he returned to finish his B.S. in mechanical engineering at the University of Houston (1956). For sixteen years he worked as a project engineer for Procter and Gamble until 1972, when he became senior engineering editor for the trade journal Plant Engineering, a position he still holds. Meanwhile he began writing in the mid-1960s and sold his first science-fiction story, "Mountains Like Mice" (1966), to Worlds of If. About this time he became acquainted with and received editorial help from...