Larry McCaffery meets with Gene Wolfe at his home in Barrington, Illinois in June of 1985. For the first eleven minutes, as the discussion ranges around the film version of Dune and moves towards Wolfe’s fiction, there is a lot of outdoor noise. After the 11 minute mark, the interview moves indoors and Wolfe begins by discussing his theory that science fiction has always been around and will always be around and that it is realistic fiction that is the fad that will fade away. Wolfe notes the fantastical in works such as Homer, Shakespeare and the Greek myths. Wolf explains how he came to be a science fiction writer, starting with reading Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon in the comic pages and how he came across the Pocket Book of Science Fiction. Wolfe discusses the books he read as a child before discussing his time in the Korean War and the influence it had on his fiction. Wolfe explains his history as a writer, before and after publication. While the discussion ranges across other science fiction writers and a variety of Wolfe’s works, it continually returns to Wolfe’s recent novel cycle, The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe discusses his intentions with the book, his ideas, his goals and a potential future follow-up. An edited version of all but the first eleven minutes of the interview appears on pages 233 to 256 of Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers, ed. Larry McCaffery, 1990, University of Illinois Press.
