About The Author
Gene Wolfe was born in 1931 in New York but raised in Texas. He Served in the Korean War and afterwards studied mechanical engineering. Apart from The Fifth Head of Cerberus, his major work is the four-volume Book of the New Sun. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes him as 'quite possible the most important author in the SF field today'.
In 1972 Gene Wolfe became editor of an engineering periodical. His first story ('The Dead Man') appeared in 1965, after he had already been writing for some time. During the 60s and the 70s Wolfe wrote a large number of short stories, many of which were published in Damon Knight's Orbit anthologies. In 1973 'The Death of Doctor Island', part of a quartet of stories later collected as The Wolfe Archipelago in 1983, won a Nebula award. His first novel (Operation Ares) was published in 1970, but was heavily cut by the publisher. His second novel was The Fifth Head of Cerberus, published in 1972. In 1980, he started to publish a long sequence of novels called The Book of The New Sun, beginning with The Shadow of the Torturer (1980). The final book in the sequence was The Citadel of the Autarch (1983), although there followed a sequel in 1987 (The Urth of the New Sun). Of these books, The Shadow of the Torturer won a World Fantasy Award and The Claw of the Conciliator (1981) won a Nebula. He wrote several more novels before starting on a new sequence in 1993 called The Book of The Long Sun. |
