Review: Endangered Species, by Gene Wolfe

Review: Endangered Species, by Gene Wolfe

by Rich Horton

Gene Wolfe (1931-2019) was without question one of the greatest SF writers of all time. And he was notably excellent at pretty much any length -- he wrote great short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels, novel series -- and even an extended series of series of novels. And he kept writing short fiction even after he had great success with his novels. By my count he ended up with eight "primary" story collections, and about as many that variously shuffled the stories, or included only a few shorter pieces, or were otherwise offbeat. The consensus view might be that his first collection, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980), is his best -- and I probably would agree, but all the collections are worthwhile. I had occasion to reread his 1989 collection Endangered Species, I was delighted throughout.

The collection, not surprisingly, focuses on stories published in the '80s, but extends back to stories from very early in Wolfe's career, in the late '60s, and has some '70s pieces as well. Wolfe was a master at the novella length, but only one of these stories is a novella -- "Silhouette", which closes the book. There are several novelettes, but this book is really dominated by short stories. In a way, this was a revelation -- I've so long adored Wolfe's novellas and long novelettes that this made me realize that his best short stories are quite as brilliant.

Speaking generally, all the stories here show off the elegance of Wolfe's prose. Most of them are mysterious in some way or another -- the very property captured by the adjective "Wolfean". They display Kipling's influence in the way Wolfe tells you just enough to make the story comprehensible -- but no more. They are sometimes impish, sometimes romantic, sometimes just plain cool. A surprising number of the stories can be called horror -- this is a very important part of Wolfe's repertoire, but I don't know that it's emphasized much.

The longest story here is the novella "Silhouette", a dark story about a starship reaching a potentially colonizable planet, and the internal battle over what to do. Other longish stories include "The Rose and the Nightingale (and What Came of It)", an Arabic-flavored story about a beggar boy who agrees to help a storyteller retrieve a treasure from inside a Pasha's garden -- it's nicely told, with the expected twists, and a romantic flavor, but it's more conventional than I expect from Wolfe. "The Other Dead Man" is one of his better, and creepier, stories, in which a spaceship is severely damaged and the Captain is fatally injured, but the medical bay is programmed to resuscitate him at all costs. This moves slickly to the inevitable horrific conclusion. "The Detective of Dreams" is about a Frenchman hired to investigate who might be sending some people in a German city terrifying dreams -- the reader might recognize the content of the dreams the victims describe, from which the detective can deduce the surprising identity of the haunter.

Most of the stories are rather shorter. There a few instance of linked stories. "The Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholus" and "The Woman the Unicorn Loved" are about a professor who is part of a group devoted to protecting genetically engineered creatures who have been abandoned by their makers (in this future DNA alterations can be done with a home kit.) Many of these creatures are based on myth, and in these two stories the professor befriends women who form, let's say, closer relationships to the title creatures -- increasing the need to save them from the usual fate discarded beings receive. There is a set of four linked stories that were published in one of Roger Elwood's more interesting projects, Continuum, a set of four anthologies each containing installments of a longer project that continued through the books. Wolfe's stories are "The Dark of the June", "The Death of Hyle", "From the Notebooks of Dr. Stein", and "Thag". They tell of a future in which people can choose to be uploaded into a virtual existence, and the first one is about a man whose wife has died and whose daughter is contemplated upload. As the stories continue, things get stranger, with what seems like time travel, and a malevolent creature called Thag. Interesting work. 

Three stories are related to Wolfe's Solar Cycle. "The Map" and "The Cat" are set in Severian's time. "The Map" is one of the best stories in the book, as a man hires a boat to travel down the river Gyoll to a deserted part of the city, near the Old Citadel familiar from The Book of the New Sun. The boat's captain Eata (one of Severian's fellow apprentices, though by this time Severian is the Autarch) lets the man out but waits to pick him up -- and when he does we learn a little lesson about the map the man carries, and an ironic bit more about what Eata knows of maps. "The Cat" is a story told during Severian's reign about events decades prior, about an exultant girl and the strange cat she had, and what happened to her when she got in trouble with an older man. The other Solar Cycle story is "The God and His Man", a short fable apparently from the Brown Book that Severian encounters. In this story, the God of a certain world summons a Man whom he sets a task -- to live among the different people on his world and learn how they differ from each other and in what ways they are cruel. What the Man learns, in the end, may not be precisely to the God's benefit.

Of the other short stories, I'll mention a few particular favorites. "The Cabin on the Coast" opens the book, and it's a lovely dark story of a man and a woman in love -- but the man is the son of a prominent politician, who is not happy that his son wants to marry this woman. Then the woman disappears -- and the man is convinced a mysterious boat he sees off the coast has something to do with it. Can he go there and get her back? The ending is perhaps what readers expect -- but still very nicely turned. "Our Neighbour by David Copperhead" purports to be a story told by the title character during his period as a journalist, in which he observes a man lurking about his neighbour's house, and learns the man's story -- he's investigating what the neighbour does in the house, at the request of a woman who feels that her daughter may have been somehow mistreated there. And the man ends up learning about the neighnour, who is a scientist involved with phrenology and mesmerism -- and whose investigations lead him to a mordant moral discovery. "The War Beneath the Tree" is a long-time favorite of mine, about a group of a young boy's toys who come to "life" on Christmas Eve. And they stage a battle -- for a reason, which the boy learns. And in that reason is buried a delightful stinger. "The HORARS of War" is an affecting story of a journalist "embedded" in a group of robot soldiers fighting a Vietnam like war against an unnamed Enemy. The journalist must impersonate the robot soldiers, which means sharing their battles -- and perhaps their fate? The story twists a little on its way to a moving conclusion. "Suzanne Delage" is another longtime favorite -- a simple story in a sense, in which the narrator tells of the title woman, with whom he went to high school but never really knew, and had lost track with. Until a commonplace but odd encounter brings her to mind. 

I could go on. Not all of the stories are masterworks -- a few are clever but trivial, and a couple don't quite work. But there is always something intriguing there. And, really -- instead of the stories I discuss above perhaps I should have mentioned "Lukora", or "The Last Thrilling Wonder Story", or "Kevin Malone", or "In the House of Gingerbread", or "All the Hues of Hell". And each reader will have their own favorites anyway -- so just read them!