lthough Gene Wolfe is most famous for his novels, from The Fifth Head of Cerberus and the four books of The Book of the New Sun to last year's The Wizard Knight (currently a finalist for the World Fantasy Award), he is an equally accomplished and prolific writer of short fiction. The 25 stories in Starwater Strains date in some cases to the 1980s, but 15 of them have been published within the past five years. All offer to readers familiar only with Wolfe's novels an excellent introduction to his short fiction.
The two novellas that open and close the book, "Viewpoint" and "Golden City Far" (the latter also a finalist for this year's World Fantasy Award), exemplify the impressively broad range of Wolfe's short fiction. "Viewpoint" is straight-up science fiction, a grim extrapolation of "reality television" in which a man, implanted with a television camera and watched by a national audience, attempts to hold on to $100,000 and survive as he makes his way through the streets of a future in which a malevolent government owns both your money and your life. In "Golden City Far," a teenage boy's recurrent dreams of a fantasy landscape gradually merge with the "real world" of high school, to the confusion of teachers and psychiatrists and the amazement of the girl who loves him.
In between are 23 stories the variety of which defies ready classification. They include brief but elegant explorations of myth ("The Boy Who Hooked the Sun," "The Arimaspian Legacy"), detailed character studies of individuals confronted with the explosion of the fantastic into their everyday lives ("Try and Kill It," "Hunter Lake," "Pulp Cover"), far-future science fiction ("Petting Zoo," "Castaway"), supernatural horror ("Black Shoes," "Lord of the Land"), odd-angle variations on such classic SF scenarios as surviving the end of the world ("Mute") and planetary colonization ("The Shields of Mars"), thoughtful explorations of religion ("In Glory Like Their Star," "The Seraph from Its Sepulcher"), and even a tall tale about a sentient pickup truck ("Rattler," a collaboration with Brian Hopkins).
Many voices, all convincing
If there is any overall connection to be found in Wolfe's stories, it is their unique ability to be both unsettling and reassuring. Many of these stories, whether fantasy or SF, are extremely dark, unrelenting in their matter-of-fact presentation of unexpected and, more often than not, uncontrollable assaults on the reality of the unsuspecting characters.
However, when one reads a Gene Wolfe story, as when one watches a film directed by Robert Altman, one knows one is in good hands, that the author (like the director) knows exactly what he is doing at all times. This is particularly notable in the striking variety of narrative devices Wolfe uses: the classic framing devices of "Black Shoes" and "The Dog of the Drops," the epistolary format of "The Fat Magician," first-person narrators both educated ("Pulp Cover") and not ("Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon?"). No author approaches his or her material with more confidence and skill than Gene Wolfe.
The best of this strong assembly—the two novellas, the enigmatic "Castaway," "The Shields of Mars," "Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon?" (a delightful evocation of Wolfe's great contemporary, the late R.A. Lafferty) and the pitch-perfect "Pulp Cover"—are among the best contemporary short SF has to offer. Those who have yet to discover Gene Wolfe's short fiction can turn to Starwater Strains with confidence and delight.
