Monday, May 13, 2013

My hero / Gene Wolf by Neil Gaiman


Gene Wolfe by Murray Ewing


My hero: 

Gene Wolf 

by Neil Gaiman 

'Whatever I imagined the author of those glittering, dangerous stories to have been, I was not expecting the genial gentleman I met'


Neil Gaiman

Friday 13 May 2011


I was 22 when I met Gene Wolfe. The last volume in The Book of the New Sun, The Citadel of the Autarch, had just been published, and I had been reading his fiction since my teens.

I was as impressed and delighted by the Book of the New Sun as I was intimidated by it. Wolfe's use of language, the grand sweep of his story, the way he used science fiction to illuminate ideas and people and to stretch my mind in ways it had never been stretched before, the way he played with memory and gave us a perfectly reliable unreliable narrator – all these things thrilled me. (Years later, Michael Dirda of the Washington Post would call it "The greatest fantasy novel written by an American," and he would be right.)

I was a young journalist, and I asked for and was given an interview with Wolfe. I do not know what I expected, but whatever I imagined the author of those glittering, dangerous stories to have been, I was not expecting the genial gentleman I met. He was a former potato crisp engineer and magazine editor, and he reminded me of a sweeter-natured, rotunder Sergeant Bilko. Oddly, perhaps, given the difference in our ages and temperaments, we became friends. And now, almost 30 years later, we are still friends and I am still a fan.

I've met too many of my heroes, and these days I avoid meeting the few I have left, because the easiest way to stop having heroes is to meet them, or worse, have dinner with them. But Gene Wolfe remains a hero to me. He's just turned 80, looks after his wife Rosemary, and is still writing deep, complex, brilliant fiction that slips between genres. He's my hero because he keeps trying new ways of writing and because he remains as kind and as patient with me as he was when I was almost a boy. He's the finest living male American writer of SF and fantasy – possibly the finest living American writer. Most people haven't heard of him. And that doesn't bother Gene in the slightest. He just gets on with writing the next book.


THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016


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