Gene Wolfe To Be Honored At Nebula Awards

New submitter hguorbray writes "One of my favorite Sci-Fi authors of all time, Gene Wolfe, will be honored with the Damon Night Grand Master award at the Nebula Awards weekend in San Jose this weekend. This Thursday night he will be doing a reading and Q&A along with Connie Willis (author of the Doomsday Book, Blackout/All Clear, etc.) at the San Jose Hilton. There will be a mass book signing event Friday including these authors and many others presented by San Francisco's Borderlands Books." Here are this year's Nebula Award nominees. The awards will be presented at a ceremony starting 7pm ET on Saturday.

Comments

Quoth Neil Gaiman

[zbobet2012]

He's the finest living male American writer of SF and fantasy – possibly the finest living American writer. Most people haven't heard of him. And that doesn't bother Gene in the slightest. He just gets on with writing the next book.

If you have not read him, do it. The Book of the New Sun is a literary masterpiece independent of genre. But he wasn't a one hit wonder, Home Fires (his latest) is amazing. Gene Wolfe is the kind of author that puts most pieces of "literary" fiction to shame. He not only deserves this award, but a Pulitzer too. To bad literary community can not remove its collective head from its ass. Cheers to him and I can't wait for the next book.

Re:Quoth Neil Gaiman

[CRCulver]

Nope just SF, Gene Wolfe has never written in the fantasy genre although some of his books appear to be.

Peace is a fantasy work (the workings of the plot are based on magic and the supernatural, not technology). Most would have the same opinion about There are Doors and Castleview. Wolfe has indeed written fantasy.

He's a great writer

[danbuter]

Wolfe is a better writer than 99% of everyone who's been published in fiction, including most literature authors. Since he writes science fiction though, most University professors would never recommend him. It's too bad that their prejudice places a whole field of fiction in the "unworthy" category.

Re:He's a great writer

[careysub]

As Peter S. Beagle, and others, have observed in essays - the prejudice against fantastic literature in academia and "serious" criticism is an anomaly that arose in the early 20th Century, and is largely confined to the U.S. Throughout almost all of history literature based heavily on fantastic elements was the norm, and was commonly accepted even after "realistic" literature became a mainstream phenomenon.

The prejudice is very ethnocentric. "Magic realism" from Latin America is lionized, but the literary equivalent by an English speaking writer is ignored or worse. The very influential critic Edmund Wilson, prominent beginning around 1920, is the apparent source of this prejudice - he despised Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft - really all recent or contemporary fantastic literature being written in English (if it was old enough, Swift for example, it might get a pass).

Sometimes a mainstream author will turn out a bland effort in this direction which gets praise, but no one seriously writing in the fantastic literature vein ever does.