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The Best Of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective Of His Finest Short Fiction (2009)

by Gene Wolfe(Favorite Author)

4.26 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0765321351 (ISBN13: 9780765321350)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Tor Books

review 1: I read about the first half of this book. The stories weren't bad, exactly, but they all felt unfinished. You're never given enough information to understand what the characters were doing or exactly what their world is like. I suppose that's intentional and the reader is supposed to fill in the gaps, but it didn't work for me. I prefer the background of a story to be spelled out enough that the story itself makes sense, not being left to guess. The author doesn't need to spell out everything, but there needs to at least be enough of a framework to make sense.
review 2: Eh. There are still a few of these stories that pack a punch, like the Death of Doctor Island, and the Fifth Head of Cerberus, but most of them are not that interesting, and Wolfe's reactionary... more views (I doubt there's anything that happened after 1950 that he likes) and Davey and Goliath-style proselytizing drain the pleasure from the slighter tales. As others have remarked, he often can't be bothered to create characters who have more than one dimension, so it's difficult to care what happens to them up to and after the big reveal. The narrator withholding information trick also gets annoying since he uses it so often. The Book of the New Sun is still a landmark, but Wolfe has cranked out a lot of dross since then. less

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