NYRSF Issue 351 Editorial: Losses and Setbacks

Gene Wolfe died back in April. I don’t think it’s a secret that Wolfe was one of our favorite writers—my own and also NYRSF’s. Wolfe’s work, elusive and allusive and bursting with creativity, is the white fountain at the center of the substantial science fiction that this magazine was founded to celebrate.

He started writing fiction in 1956 after returning from the Korean War, with his first published story in 1965, when he was 34. In the 53 years following, he published 33 volumes of novels, with another one coming posthumously, and about a dozen collections comprising about two-thirds of his 600+ shorter stories. (In typical Wolfean fashion, even a simple question like “How many novels did he write?” can be endlessly debated, because several of his major works can be viewed as multivolume series or as single novels in multiple volumes. His collections overlap, re-presenting and recontexualizing the stories within.)

Wolfe’s work was widely loved in the field, though there were those who were convinced that stories as peculiar and challenging as Wolfe’s couldn’t possibly be popular. David Hartwell—who edited Wolfe’s novels from 1980 until Hartwell’s death in 2016—used to tell of a lunch meeting he had with Judy-Lynn Del Rey in the early 1980s. When Hartwell told her that The Shadow of the Torturer had sold 200,000 copies, she furiously insisted that Hartwell was lying, unable to believe such an idiosyncratic work could have found such a wide audience. It’s unclear whether she ever came to believe him.

Wolfe was active in the sf community, a guest or guest of honor at conventions small and large, usually accompanied by his delightful wife, Rosemary; one of the essays in his 1982 collection Castle of the Otter, “The Rewards of Authorship,” tells of his joy at seeing costumers dressed as his characters and of his annoyance at the convention where he said he would do anything to help them out except go out for ice, so of course.... He was capable of enormous kindness and humor, and his quick wit was always on display. Wolfe worked out the plot (and approximate wordcount) of Urth of the New Sun in a matter of minutes from a single suggestion during a lunch with David G. Hartwell and John Douglas. Hartwell said you could see the spreadsheet forming in the air above his head. He also could be prickly; he said in various personal writings and interviews that Rosemary was the only thing that helped him escape the rage and trauma of the war, and sometimes that anger showed itself.

On a personal level: I was underemployed for several years following the 9/11 attacks. One of the piecework jobs I performed during that period was writing jacket and catalog copy for Hartwell. Getting to write the jacket for Wolfe’s The Wizard—getting paid to read Gene Wolfe and tell people why he was so great—was a real victory condition for my life.

We don’t intend to run a memorial issue for Wolfe; there are hundreds of memorials short and long online, though I’m glad that we have an essay next issue by Joan Gordon discussing one of Wolfe’s last major novellas, and we always welcome pieces on him and his work.

I will leave this portion with an excerpt from an interview with Wolfe by Neil Gaiman from 2002 (published in Hanging with the Dream King by Joseph McCabe, Fantagraphics 2004):

We don’t always have to be this. There can be something else. We can stop doing the thing that we’re doing. Moms Mabley had a great line in some movie or other—she said, “You keep on doing what you been doing and you’re gonna keep on gettin’ what you been gettin’.” And we don’t have to keep on doing what we’ve been doing. We can do something else if we don’t like what we’re gettin’. I think a lot of the purpose of fiction ought to be to tell people that.

On the subject of memorial issues, I have been remiss in not pointing out a correction in our Gardner Dozois memorial (#349): Sheila Williams’s remembrance was original to the memorial volume and did not also appear in Asimov’s. The current version on Weightless Books has been updated to reflect this. Our apologies for the error.

Finally, since people have been asking: I ran into a stretch of bad health in early 2019 that has seriously bunged up our schedule. (I’m doing much better, thank you.) Issue 352 should follow soon after this one. Bowing to reality, I know that we’re not likely to get back up to monthly release any time soon, so with issue 350 I officially changed our release schedule (in the magazine’s indicia) to “most months.” By that I mean that I’m aiming for 8 issues a year on a not-completely predictable schedule. Because of the delays in 351, I suspect we’ll be closer to 6 issues for 2019 (as we had in 2018) but let’s see where we end up!

Accordingly, we are now offering 6-issue subscriptions as well as 12-issue through Weightless. Thank you all for your continuing support, and thank you for inviting us in to your lives so many times each year.

—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors