Introduction
to
MATHOMS FROM THE TIME CLOSET
Gene Wolfe is a quiet, mostly amiable man with a sense of humor that has all the gentility of a carnivorous plant. I like and admire him more than I've ever told him. He is the author of a so-so novel, Operation Ares, and a horde of short stories that are well into the category labeled brilliant. He lives on Betty Drive in Hamilton, Ohio, the state from which I came; and when I left, Ohio got Gene, as the act of a benevolent God.
During the 1971 Nebula awards in New York, I sat in front of Gene during one of the most painful incidents it has ever been my gut-wrench to witness, and the way Gene reacted to it says much about the man.
Isaac Asimov had been pressed into service at the last moment to read the winners of the Nebulas. Gene was up in the short story category for his extravagantly excellent "The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories" from Damon Knight's ORBIT 7 (Gene has appeared nine times in the eight ORBIT collections as of this writing) (thereby attesting to Damon's perspicacity as an editor) (taught the kid everything he knows, except table manners at banquets) (he throws peanuts and peas). Isaac had not been given sufficient time to study the list, which was handwritten, and he announced Gene as the winner. Gene stood up as the SFWA officers on the platform went pale and hurriedly whispered words to Ike. Ike went pale. Then he announced he'd made an error. There was "no award" in the short story category. Gene sat back down and smiled faintly.
Around him everyone felt the rollercoaster nausea of stomachs dropping out backsides. Had it been me, I would have fainted or screamed or punched Norbert Slepyan of Scribner's, who was sitting next to me. Gene Wolfe just smiled faintly and tried to make us all feel at ease by a shrug and a gentle nod of his head.
His three short stories in this book mark a departure in my DV policies: when I started assembling stories, I said no one writer would have more than a single story in the series. One shot and that was it. But I bought "Loco Parentis" in 1968, one of my first purchases, at the Milford SF Writers Conference, and the following year when the Conference was held in Madeira Beach, Gene showed up with "Robot's Story" and "Against the Lafayette Escadrille," neither of which I could resist. So I bought all three and Gene devised an umbrella overtitle for the group, and it subsequently allowed Bernard Wolfe and James Sallis to sell me more than one. There is simply no defense against a Gene Wolfe story.
For me, his is one of the wildest and richest imaginations in the genre.
Here is what he says of himself:
"The usual middle class upbringing for kids born, as I was, in the worst of the depression. No brothers or sisters, the family moving around as my father tried to earn a living. (Mostly, he was trying to sell cash registers, God help him.) He was a man who was home only on weekends, and brought me one or two lead soldiers every time he came, until I had a corrugated board box of them so heavy I could not pick it up. If we're so much richer now, why can't you buy those lead soldiers anymore?
"My mother was from the deep south (North Carolina) descended through her mother from one of those real Scarlett O'Hara families that lost it all in the Civil War. (Oddly enough, my father's family also had roots in North Carolina, having come from there north about 1830, and I may be distantly related to Thomas Wolfe.) I remember her taking me to be shown to her parents, and how no one would explain why Grandfather kept those funny chickens that could not be let in with the regular chickens ("Or they'll kill 'em!") or the scarred white dog which had to be chained up when there were other dogs around. Grandfather had a wooden leg he kept out in front of him and was as deaf as a stump when he didn't want to hear you; I wish I could have known him better.
"Something must have happened during my school days, but I mostly remember that it was very hot. I am left-handed, and the chairs had their broad arm on the wrong side. My hands were always sweating and sticking to the paper. I remember that.
"The sports for which I showed some ability, boxing and shooting, were unimportant beside such necessities as basketball. I was good at baseball, except for the parts which involve catching or throwing the ball. In Junior High I acquired a distaste for compulsory athletics which has never deserted me.
"My father, who had little money to spare for sending a son to college (he was operating a food business or a restaurant by this time, I'm not quite sure when the change was made), obtained the promise of a senatorial appointment to West Point for me. Unfortunately by the time I graduated from High School in 1949 there had been a readjustment of the power structure, and the new man, a short-sighted fellow named L. B. Johnson, refused to honor his predecessor's commitment.
"A few years later I found myself a private in the 7th Infantry Division, attempting to excavate a foxhole with the buttons of my shirt. I had dropped out of Texas A&M, which is a land grant college and something of cross between V.M.I. and Tom Disch's CAMP CONCENTRATION but very cheap if you live in the state, and learned to my sorrow the meaning of 'student deferment.' That was the Korean Police Action—remember that?
"The G.I. bill let me return to school at the University of Houston, and I got a B.S.M.E. there in 1956, following which I flew Texas, something I sometimes regret. I still hold the job I took when I graduated—that is to say, I'm working for the same employer, but since the job is Research and Development things change almost from month to month.
"I have a wife and four children. They seem like more."