Before the New Sun Dawned

1980 was a landmark year in Gene Wolfe’s writing career. For one thing, it saw the publication of The Shadow of the Torturer, the first volume in The Book of the New Sun, itself the first part of the Solar Cycle which was Wolfe’s magnum opus. It also saw the publication of The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories – that’s not a typo, one of the stories in it has the title The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories – his debut short story collection, containing the cream of his short story from 1970 to 1978.

In fact, Wolfe had been writing for quite some time prior to this; his first published story was The Dead Man, published in a 1965 issue of Sir! magazine, and the collection Young Wolfe includes early works (a good chunk of which never before published) from as far back as 1951. That said, it’s the 1970s when Wolfe can really be said to have started firing on all cylinders. Those early stories were, by and large, not widely reprinted (indeed, Young Wolfe is the only source of some of them), and Wolfe’s 1970 debut novel Operation ARES was enough of a disappointment to Wolfe retroactively that he gently discouraged reprints of it, the last edition listed on ISFDB being a 1979 German translation.

This was Wolfe being a good judge of his own work; he would admit later that Operation ARES was in part based on “doctrinaire conservative” political convictions – his words – which he no longer agreed with, and which lent a rather polemical aspect to the novel. Admittedly, the state the book ended up in was not entirely Wolfe’s fault: its last three-quarters or so was subjected to a ruthless editing process, not by Wolfe’s own hand, which made it somewhat disjointed, and which delayed its release by 3 or 4 years from the time it was originally written.

Even so, I don’t think anyone denies that there was a massive quantum leap in Wolfe’s quality of writing between penning Operation ARES in the mid-to-late 1960s and the emergence of The Fifth Head of Cerberus in 1972 and Peace in 1975. The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories represents the perfect opportunity to examine that artistic evolution in progress.

---

The collection includes three of the four stories in the so-called “Wolfe Archipelago” of tales connected by recombined titles and some common themes. Here we have The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, The Death of Dr. Island, and The Doctor of Death Island. (Later, Wolfe would complete the sequence with The Death of the Island Doctor.)

In The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, (remember, that’s the title of a story, not the collection) a young kid who’s living a rather neglected existence as his mother parties a little too hard finds solace in The Island of Doctor Death, a trashy pulp Island of Dr. Moreau ripoff – extracts from which are interspersed in the story. As the protagonist reads, the characters from the story start appearing to him – and whilst we might be tempted to think this is just a coping mechanism for dealing with the fact that he’s kind of ignored and sidelined by the adults in his life, the fact that at least one of them seems to see these people too makes things a bit murkier.

One thing they are doing – whether they are projections of his mind, helpful spirits, or just exploiting the fact that this story is just as fictional as the one hail from – is that in their own way they seem to be helping the kid navigate this environment in which things are actually much more dangerous and tenuous than he realises. Published in 1970, the story came out right when the hippy era was starting to seriously unravel, and young Babcock’s family situation certainly seems to be caught up in the spirit of the age – right when the Summer of Love was giving away into the Me Decade, and social change and progress were lost sight of in a haze of self-indulgent drug use and mystical navel-gazing.

Group sex, free love, and even freer drugs are the order of the day, and as fun as all of those can be, the fact that Babcock’s mother and her friends see nothing wrong with putting him in this environment – actively making him come down and say “hi” to everyone in the middle of their orgy – might, to some readers (particularly those who are aware of Wolfe’s religious convictions) come across as right-wing prudery, but it’s also unfortunately reminiscent of actual family environments which some kids of the era ended up having to deal with.

And we’re not talking some sort of Reefer Madness deal here – mommy’s injecting amphetamines here, she’s on a serious downward spiral and if not for young Babcock seeking help (having been nudged into it by Doctor Death and the rest of his cast), things could have ended extremely badly for her. It might not have been cool to write material expressing these sorts of concerns in 1970 – but by the end of the decade, even Philip K. Dick would conclude that whilst prohibition might be a bad idea, a subculture where the very concept of moderation is considered to be oppressive propaganda might have its downsides too.

One might expect that after such a childhood trauma, an adolescence spent in therapy is only to be expected. In The Death of Dr. Island, we follow Nicholas, a teen boy from the outer Solar System space colonies, as he is deposited on Dr. Island – an artificial island operated by an artificial intelligence, attached to the inside of a satellite orbiting Jupiter. Nicholas has problems – severe ones. Not only did he suffer severe epilepsy, to the extent that only severing the connections between his left and right brain hemispheres could alleviate it, but he also has some damn severe behavioural issues. What he admits to is violent enough; it may also be that he murdered Maya, a fellow patient from a previous hospital of his, who he claims committed suicide but certain recollections of his suggest the possibility of something more grim.

Dr. Island combines therapist and hospital into one entity, taking the form of a placid jungle island for that delicious back-to-nature twist. Based on the sort of institutions that Nicholas has been shunted between, it’s evident that the luxuries of Dr. Island are not for everyone; most patients don’t nearly this level of attention and space. In fact, this is therapy of a tier beyond that which Nicholas’ society feels he deserves – but he’s not here for his own benefit. Nor is the somewhat older teen Diane, prone to depression and catatonia. No, they’re both here as a part of the therapy for Ignatio, a much more important patient who is all screwed up after growing up in total isolation in a robot-managed facility in Brazil. As it turns out, Dr. Island’s therapeutic ideas regards Nicholas and Diane as being entirely disposable…

Hitting on a bunch of Wolfean themes – again there’s duality, this time in the disconnected hemispheres of Nicholas’ brain – The Death of Dr. Island deservedly won a Nebula Award. The omnipresent figure of Dr. Island, who speaks to the patients through manipulating their perceptions of sound, has effectively god-like power in this Edenic realm – but it is the power of a pagan god, a genius loci with limitations and boundaries, and without true benevolence.

The story can overall be seen as a criticism firstly of utilitarian ethics (Nicholas and Diane are essentially there as potential sacrifices to make Ignatio functional again) and elitism (Ignatio is important and so rather than being put in a cruddy institution like Nicholas has suffered, he gets to be put on Dr. Island and has potential murder victims to enact his murder fantasies on so he can get them out of his system).

The other moral criticism levelled by the story is directed at views of mental health based on the capacity to function in society; after all, what does that actually mean? Function to what extent, in what way, and in what sort of society? Evidently this is a society which is willing to make monstrous sacrifices to regain the services of Ignatio, after all. Dr. Island states at one point that the therapist sort of stands in for the views of society in therapy processes, and that function is all-important – also noting that whilst much therapy is directed to damaged people, there isn’t really much therapy (at least in this future) which is directed at people who damage others. (Diane seems traumatised by her interactions with her parents, for instance.)

Again, whilst Wolfe’s objection to this sort of extreme utilitarianism may be motivated in part by his religious convictions, he doesn’t lose me as a reader because there is also an acutely realised moral philosophy behind Wolfe’s writing, a philosophy based in part on the idea that you can’t write off the ill-effects of a system or society on people just because those people are not important. Unlike more simplistic types of Christian fiction which bleats that utilitarianism is bad because it’s not Christianity, Wolfe does not resort to blunt dogma but makes a philosophical attack on utilitarianism: namely, that it serves to reinforce existing social ideas of “utility”, which carry more cultural baggage than often admitted, and has monstrous results if it concludes that certain individuals or entire classes of people simply of less use to society. Likewise, from a mental health perspective, prioritising being able to “function” in society risks merely reinforcing social expectations of behaviour, especially if “functioning” is defined as being productive, working at your job, paying your taxes and so on.

Nicholas is kind of a horrid asshole at points in the story, in a way which emotionally maladjusted teenage boys often are, which also helps. It would be simplistic to depict nice people being crushed by a brutal system. Diane is nice, and suffers for it… but Nicholas ain’t that good of a kid, and whilst he is definitely unwell, his reaction to that unwellness often leads to the suffering of others. It’s one thing to say “this should not happen to nice kids”. It’s another to say “asshole kids who hurt people shouldn’t have this happen to them either”, and the latter position displays, I would argue, more of a sense of genuine moral and ethical philosophy than the former (which risks defaulting to “bad things should not happen to good people but if they happen to bad people, eh, it’s poetic justice”). Full of hidden depths and surprises, right down to the title – which is simultaneously completely accurate but not actually referring to what you think it is – The Death of Dr. Island richly deserved the Nebula.

By 1978’s The Doctor of Death Island, Wolfe had mastered his personal technique of presenting stories which give you everything you need to piece together a narrative, but leaving plenty under the surface that requires you to pay attention and use your powers of inference to piece together. The inventor of a technology which allows books to speak in the voices of the characters in an interactive manner commits murder in a business dispute; sentenced to life imprisonment, he develops cancer and wins the right to enter cryogenic preservation (because if this were denied him, it’d be a death sentence). 40 years later he is thawed out in a future world that has been shaped, partially, by the propagation of his technology – but life in jail is still life, even in an era when cell therapy has ceased the aging process…

The society of The Doctor of Death Island is not as obviously vicious as that which created Dr. Island, but there’s some serious warning signs. The prison complex is now the size of a small city, suggesting an increasingly carceral system. A system intended to enhance the process of reading has simply replaced it, with people just chatting to the audio program instead of reading the words on the page, and it’s reached the point where illiteracy is spiralling out of control. The government and billion-dollar corporations override the law on the regular and are more or less open about it.

In this last aspect, and in the fact that the technology of the story is fairly low-key and entails advances in computing, and in the way the protagonist finagles his way out of jail essentially through hacking and propagating a computer virus, this story easily qualifies as a proto-cyberpunk work. In this story and other tales in this collection, some of Wolfe’s predictions about the potentials of computing devices are so on the money that it’s a surprise to remember that the tales were written in the 1970s. He also seems to understand patent law better than most writers who try to tackle the subject. The latter is likely to have arisen from his work in industrial engineering – he was credited as a co-inventor on some Proctor & Gamble patents involving machinery used in the manufacture of Pringles. (The Pringles logo looks a lot like him, despite the fact that he grew the moustache in the 1980s, long after the logo was devised and he’d become a full-time author.) His understanding of the potential of computers at that point in time is evidence of a mind keeping up with broader developments in technology, and one of the virtues of Wolfe is how when he throws in a science fictional idea in his work, he’s often doing really interesting, thoughtful things with the science.

So much for the Wolfe Archipelago; what of the rest? Alien Stones is a 1972 bid at hard science fiction, and a comparatively interesting one; it’s a fairly well-realised “first contact” sort of story, complicated by the starship captain’s subtly acknowledged but increasingly apparent infatuation with Helen Youngmeadow, an empath whose intuitive abilities make her well-suited to draw inferences about encountered cultures but whose marriage to the ship’s other empath gets in the way somewhat.

There’s a bunch of interesting ideas Wolfe plays with here – for instance, the idea that empaths are assigned to ships as married couples because, precisely because of their empathic abilities, people tend to fall in love with them and having them already attached is believed to help avoid some of the potential conflicts arising from that, along with the way that perhaps the best evidence that the alien ship is from an alien species and not from a lost human culture is the fact that the empaths can’t quite get their heads around it whilst more hard-science methods of exploration and study yield better fruit, as you would expect from a ship constructed by entities without a human emotional frame of reference.

The possibility that the captain accidentally-on-purpose gets Mr. Youngmeadow killed by sending him off on a solo route through the ship being explored in the hope he’d meet an accident as an interesting one too, especially since the captain is outwardly a virtuous man – he keeps a Bible in the command module and thinks Biblical quotes to himself about how it’s OK to bang widows and it’ll all be sorted out in heaven later on after Youngmeadow’s death – despite kind of having this deeply unvirtuous ulterior motive.

This is not the only way in which the story exercises Wolfe’s oft returned-to theme of duality, however: the Captain, Daw, has a shadow-counterpart, Wad, a computer-generated simulated person who’s meant to log the details of the mission and ask pertinent questions so that the simulation can then be used by trainee captains in simulated tours of duty to gain a compressed sort of operational experience before they take up their own command. This, of course, raises the question of whether we’re really seeing the actual space voyage, or the simulation derived from it; perhaps Wad is the real person and Daw the simulation. If it is real, then maybe in the academy whichever students end up re-living the experiences of Wad will be able to figure out whether Daw is a murderer or not… if it isn’t, then what we’re seeing might be an edited version of the first contact incident, with Daw perhaps excising a more active role he played in Youngmeadow’s death. There’s room for interpretation, and for Wolfe to come up with such a flexible puzzle-box so early in his career is pretty impressive.

The Hero As Werwolf blends science fiction and horror in a manner not unreminiscent of I Am Legend, except without the plague angle. The hero is not an actual werewolf (or “werwolf” as the title spells it), but there is a dog-person in the story – an uplifted hound, much like the friendly Bruno in The Island of Doctor Death, who like Bruno is, in the way of dogs, a good judge of people because he has good instincts and not enough intelligence to be fooled by outward appearances, who works as a policeman.

This policeman is the product of a eugenicist society which has uplifted a tranche of humanity to the state of “masters” – masters who might or might not be actual vampires, but certainly dress the part. However, these eugenic benefits have not been distributed equally – swathes of people were left out due to being considered too genetically unhealthy, and a quiet genocide has occurred, one brought about not through overt violence but through neglect, as those who were not uplifted were increasingly sidelined. It is decades after this happened and it is implied that euthanasia awaits any humans caught by the masters – and without access to any other form of nutrition (the masters’ shops will not sell food, and many farm animals and crops seem to have suffered horrible plagues), the few remaining humans survive by murdering and eating masters.

Evoking this shocking setting in an economic 16 pages or so, Wolfe largely regales us with the story of how his protagonist finds a potential partner, learns something of the downfall of the world from her elderly father, and goes hunting with her – only to find that the latest generation of masters has certain unexpected defences available to them. How long the humans will be able to eke out their grim, murderous existence in this situation is difficult to assess.

There’s a certain reactionary fury to the story, since it’s basically siding with a hardscrabble resistance against an unacceptable societal change, but whilst Wolfe notes that he was a William F. Buckley type of doctrinaire conservative with libertarian sensibilities at the start of the 1970s (around the time he wrote Operation ARES, his debut novel), he moved away from this soon after. As such, Wolfe here presents a vision which, whilst conservative in instinct, is at least the sort of conservativism which I feel like I can have a conversation with and find a middle ground on.

In particular, whilst you could read the eugenic project of the story as an allegory for various other types of social change, the fact is that not all social programs are benevolent and not all progress is progress in an agreeable direction: the Nazis wanted a radical re-ordering of society too, after all. I think modern progressives can read this story and agree that the eugenic situation Wolfe outlines is not only disturbingly plausible in its own right, but also represents a broader danger in any technological revolution – namely, the danger that technology will be used in an unfair manner to create a class of haves and have-nots, which in realistic terms will often mean reinforcing existing power differentials.

Wolfe’s definitive break from conventional US political conservativism (after which he would note that no political clan entirely agreed with his views) is expressed clearly in Hour of Trust, in which the failure of free enterprise and small government is depicted in stark terms. The story basically revolves around an investor conference in which the American corporation United Services seeks European investment in its current business activities.

The thing is, those business activities consist of fighting a civil war against mystically-inclined radicals – a war which mainstream America is losing, in part because the US government has collapsed and various corporate interests have stepped in to run things directly. The Pentagon’s paycheques, for instance, are being paid by United Services – hence the investor presentation including a live stream from an attempt to retake Detroit.

One would think that basing the action in the story in this investor conference would be a dry and dull way to address the subject matter. However, not only is danger much closer than the United Services executives realise, but also even before that manifests Wolfe manages to make the whole process full of dread. After all, its’ in the business owners’ very distance from the realities of the work they do which Wolfe identifies the failure of big business and free enterprise to come up with a coherent response to the radicals; they are trying to lead a war they don’t really understand, and they are all looking out for the profit bottom line and their personal career prospects and so are unwilling to personally stick their necks out – which makes them vulnerable to an insurgency whose followers are entirely willing to die for the cause.

Wolfe is not exactly behind the radicals here – but he’s not behind the status quo either, and believes that extensive reconstruction of society, a shift away from the profit motive, and a social ideology beyond lassaiz-faire free enterprise is necessary if something like the insurgency depicted is not to fill the void. This is a clear step away from the libertarianism of Wolfe’s younger years; if anything, the world depicted is one where government has been cut back to an extreme extent and free enterprise has every opportunity to step into the gap – but it doesn’t, and with that void in the social foundations unfilled the whole edifice of the USA collapses. Libertarian dogma would have it that the invisible hand of the market would sort everything out, but Wolfe notes here that it’s entirely possible in the scenario he outlines that the market would simply lose confidence in America and pull out, leaving American capitalism twisting in the wind.

The novella Tracking Song is, in and of itself, a lesser Wolfe story – it’s alright, but it doesn’t feel really substantial enough to justify its length. However, it is interesting because of the techniques in it which Wolfe would later take further in other stories. In a world occupied by tribes of humanoids who it’s implied might be uplifted animals, and who have a tendency to hunt and feast on each other, an ice age persists – however, a terraforming project is soon to bring about a great thaw. (It is possible that this is a nuclear winter, which surviving technologically-advanced humans are taking extreme means to bring to an end.)

The protagonist is (perhaps) one of the terraformers, and has been left behind in the wake of the “Great Sleigh” on which they have been travelling across the land to attempt to impart important information to the tribes. Suffering amnesia, he uses a recording device he finds on his person to produce an audio diary, which is what we read. Most obviously, the concept of an amnesiac who is keeping a diary would later be the basis of the Soldier of the Mist series, whilst the whole “unreliable narrator describes a futuristic world to us which the narrator does not understand but which we can figure out” schtick is what the whole Solar Cycle is built on, but these concepts inform a good chunk of Wolfe’s other work. (The diary motif, in fact, is reused in the final story in this collection – but I shall get to that later…)

At its core, The Eyeflash Miracles is a Christian science fiction parable about an innocent little blind boy through whom God works, whose miracles are denoted by him having visions of figures and incidents from L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels. Put like that, the concepts sounds as saccharine, mawkish, and preachy as anything, but it 100% is not like that.

For one thing, Wolfe seems to be putting across a “masks of God”-type theory through this story, suggesting that Catholic Christianity is not the only source of divine truth and that spiritual insight can be found in many religions, since it’s all different ways of approaching God; hence the Indian theologian who drives a shrine in a bus across-country who encounters the characters perhaps having more insight than anyone into what’s going on with the kid, hence the child having a vision of actually being Krishna when participating in a play about the story of Krishna. Elsewhere in the collection, in The Death of Dr. Island, Wolfe drops in a line (admittedly through the imperfect lens of his unreliable protagonist’s thoughts) that when it comes to religiously observant people, what name people put on their deity actually matters much less than how they conceive of their deity.

As such, whilst the story is rooted in Wolfe’s beliefs and worldview – as Wolfe’s writing often is – one thing which never seems to have been part of Wolfe’s worldview is a sense of self-righteousness. Wolfe has many tricks as a writer, but one of his best is the way he’s able to tell very complex stories which demand a lot of the reader without coming across like he knows better than the reader – it’s not that he thinks the reader is a dope who can be scammed, it’s that he trusts that the reader is clever and can work their way through his maze. The Eyeflash Miracles even has a potential secular explanation for everything that goes down, if you want to go with that instead of (or in addition to) more religious concepts.

Another reason to not be put off by the story’s strong moral character is that whilst many authors of moralistic fiction present a simplistic situation, Wolfe presents situations which are believably complex. Powerful religious or philosophical convictions often have a simplifying effect on the way people view the world, especially when written with the zeal of the convert: the author thinks “everything would be just fine if only people thought the way I thought”. Wolfe knows that even when people are trying their best and basically agree about what they want, things are often messier than that.

Similarly, despite the fact that they are riddled with puzzles and secrets, Wolfe’s stories usually don’t fall into the trap of becoming dry, sterile puzzle-boxes precisely because of the strong characters who feel like they are responding to things in realistically complicated, conflicted ways. The enigmas and puzzles in Wolfe’s fiction add up to create a world where a whole bunch of stuff happens and nobody in the situation quite understands all of what’s going on but has to muddle through based on their preconceptions and the knowledge available to them; that does not seem like an esoteric puzzlebox, that seems like real life.

Though many of the stories here are quite substantial, others are only brief sketches. La Befana is, on the face of it, a story about an immigrant family of humans who’ve settled on a planet of six-legged, six-armed aliens; one of the locals visits the family of his human friends as a Jewish couple deal with impending childbirth in the charity hostel next door and the family’s old grandmother from Earth comes to visit. Or is it really their mother? Mr. Bananas, the father of the family, thinks his dear old mum has become old and shrivelled in the 22 Newtonian years since he last saw her; it’s possible, based on a story told by the children during the tale, that she is an impostor, and is in fact the titular La Befana who has come to greet the Christ child in its incarnation on this world, here to act as saviour for the aliens.

There’s a somewhat colonialist implication here – Christ incarnating in human form for the salvation of aliens feels like it has different implications from Christ incarnating in human form for the salvation of humans. The edge is somewhat taken off this by the fact that the alien in the story is depicted as actually being very human in its responses and thoughts, with only the physiology differing, and I suppose if you believe God made human beings specifically in his image, that doesn’t give God a lot of choices about how he incarnates in the flesh.

On the other hand, if God is omnipotent, he should be able to incarnate in whatever form he likes – and “both humans and these very non-humanoid aliens were made in God’s image” might feel like a strange, contradictory concept, but it doesn’t feel that much more implausible than, say, the Holy Trinity or other mysteries of faith. Still, the worst colonialist implications of the idea are avoided because it doesn’t seem like human beings occupy a particularly privileged or powerful position on this world – though it’s not apparent who exactly does either.

In Three Fingers one “Michael Moss” ekes out a precarious living selling Disney bootlegs – until one day the “Mickey Mafia” catch up with him in the form of the Wicked Queen, Captain Hook, and the Big Bad Wolf. Though Michael Moss (Mickey Mouse himself?) expresses the belief that they all stand as archetypes with greater cultural and historical resonance than given credit for, they all reveal themselves to be paunchy, nondescript business people when they unmask, and then try to execute Mickey with antipsychotic drugs. In this day and age of Disney absorbing an increasingly startling proportion of the creative landscape and reducing it to a tawdry business affair, with the art of storytelling giving way to an industry of content-manufacture, the story feels more relevant than ever.

Feather Tigers has an alien visiting an Earth that has been cleared of humans, trying to piece together an understanding of human cultures. A particular remote south-east Asian culture he’s studying had a concept of “feather tigers” – optical illusions in the forest which were taken as being astrally projecting tigers seeking their next meal. It’s basically an anthropological parable about how you can’t really understand someone’s point of view until you’re experiencing the same pressures as them. The Toy Theater has a spacefaring puppeteer visiting a retired master of the art to receive instruction. This he receives in both practical and moral forms. Naturally, since it’s a Wolfe story, the question of who in the story is a puppet and who is a puppeteer offers multiple interpretations.

The briefest story, Cues, is in effect Wolfe giving away one of the secrets for interpreting his work: a character in it explains how in any situation, there’s a great wealth of sensory stimuli which come to us – the titular cues – and these can be break down to those we notice and consider important enough to act on, those we notice but don’t consider important, and those we don’t even consciously notice at all.

When it comes to the information provided by a story, we can do a similar breakdown: the first category maps to the stuff which the narration explicitly mentions and to which our attention is specifically drawn, the second category amounts to material which is mentioned in passing in the narration but is of no particularly great importance – or at least no immediate importance – and the third involves stuff which is not directly mentioned in the narrative at all. The third mode is might be considered impossible – how can a storyteller tell you about something if they won’t tell you about something? – but Wolfe knows that a skilled author can provide more information than the explicit narrative directly provides through skilled use of inference.

Most storytellers primarily operate in the first mode, with the occasional dip into the second. When he’s on his A-game, Wolfe is operating in all three modes at once. This is what makes him the literary equivalent of a really artful stage magician, and makes his writing such fruitful ground for rereading and re-interpreting.

The concluding story in the collection, hailing from 1978, finds Wolfe coming into the prime of his powers. Like Tracking Song, Seven American Nights also uses the diary format, though this time the diarist is not an amnesiac. Nadan Jafferzadeh is an Iranian traveller visiting Washington DC in an era some centuries hence. The world order has shifted; Iran is one of the sophisticated, technologically advanced, culturally urbane major powers of the era, whilst America is an utter backwater.

In particular, overuse of agrichemicals and other forms of pollution have wreaked havoc within the continental United States: the interior has been near-abandoned, the population has collapsed, and the surviving populace have suffered extensive chromosomal damage arising from the pollution that has brought things to this sorry pass. Nadan describes America as a filthy, diseased hellhole residing in the shadow of past glory. Nadan, indeed, regards Americans as unclean, corrupted things one and all by the end of the tale.

(Or does he? There is a strong hint that some portions of the diary, potentially including the ending itself are forgeries; an plausible and extremely spoilerful essay on exactly where the forgery might begin may be found on the Wolfe Wiki. That said, if the ending is genuine, then this is an interesting inversion of Lovecraftian xenophobia; whilst Lovecraft worried about incursions from the exterior – the Deep One colony near Innsmouth was right off the coast, after all, and consisted of settlers transplanted from the Pacific – here the source of corruption is the self-inflicted poisoning of the continent, which is worst in the interior; the horror doesn’t creep in from Outside, it’s literally emerging from the heart of America, which put it there on purpose to make a buck.)

In short, Seven American Nights is an exercise in an Iranian character writing about America in the same way that American media writes about the Middle East in general. The picture given is not pretty, and is an important memento mori for anyone buying into the idea of American exceptionalism. The story is also a sort of test run for some techniques used to greater effect in The Book of the New Sun; along with the unreliable narration, there’s also the aspect of the story unfolding in a world which has already forgotten cultural and historical landmarks which we personally take for granted. There’s a statue in DC referred to only in the story as the Seated Man, and at one point the protagonist visits a park in the vicinity of Arlington dotted with man-sized burrows, attributed to enormous rats, which is haunted by packs of wild dogs.

The dogs bring to mind Lovecraft’s canine ghouls, and indeed the story suggests that such things have in fact arisen out of famine-era cannibalism (the cannibals, of course, ingesting all the accumulated teratogenic chemicals already absorbed by the bodies of their meals); this, and other aspects, suggests a sort of inverted Lovecraftianism. Lovecraft’s ghouls were an Arabian Nights fantasy transplanted to the US and the Dreamlands; in this world, the CHUDs of the USA are a myth propagated about America, and which a traveller in the exotic, dangerous, realm discovers to be all too true.

Within all this, Seven American Nights finds the holidaying Nadan (or is it just a holiday?) becoming infatuated with an actress and finding himself drawn into unusual matters, culminating in his disappearance. Wolfe’s puzzle-master tendency is in full force here, and a range of interpretations are possible, the forgery concept I linked to earlier being only one of many. I have some of my own thoughts, which I will put after some spoiler space below, but before I get into those, I should offer some concluding thoughts on the book itself: The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories is not only Wolfe’s first short story collection, but also by far one of the best starting points when exploring his short fiction. Though it covers an era when he was still honing his craft, he was already hitting a high level of quality at the beginning of this period, and the time span finds him making early passes at some of his most famed techniques. If you want a gentle on-ramp into reading Wolfe, I can’t think of a better one.

Right, spoiler space, then Seven American Nights theories. These will make little sense to you if you have not read the story, so if you don’t want to be spoilered, stop reading now!

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

My major objection to the forgery theory as outlined on Wolfe Wiki is the assumption that it was done by the police for murky reasons of their own, perhaps to avoid political fallout arising from the arrest and probable torture/execution of Nadan. The thing is, if the cops disappeared Nadan, why would they give his family even the scrap of a reason to think he might be in police custody somewhere, possibly provoking an international incident if Nadan’s family decided to call the authorities’ bluff over the implications of art theft and murder, when they could keep potential police involvement out of the picture entirely?

In particular, the very last entry in the diary very strongly implies that it was scribbled down in the midst of a police raid. (“I heard the word police as though it were thunder” – the cops are yelling through a megaphone from outside, perhaps, prior to moving in.) If the police wanted to get themselves off the hook and imply that Nadan just wandered off somewhere, possibly with a murder rap hanging over him, then this would be a completely self-defeating thing to include.

The theory has it that the forgery was done using the machines in the Smithsonian maintained by the curator who attends the theatre, which seems plausible. But if this is the case, why should he necessarily be working with the police? It feels like the cops in this setting should either access to more sophisticated methods of forgery, or (perhaps more likely) much cruder methods. (Indeed, they’re the sort of corrupt secret police arrangement where blank denial of all knowledge is more likely than trying to fabricate any sort of explanation.) He could just as happily work for others.

Note too what we learn about Ardis’ family business: namely, that they’re all about collecting and selling documents and maps retrieved from the interior. Befriending the chap who maintains the forgery machines at the museum would be extremely useful for someone in this line of work, if they didn’t have scruples about passing off fakes. The fact that the curator frequents the theatre suggests that connection may in fact exist. He may well attend the theatre to discuss business with Ardis; he may be the mystery guest that Ardis is consulting with backstage at the second performance of Mary Rose that Nadan attends.

Is it not possible that the forgery was done by Ardis and her family, who being in the document trade have ample reasons to know the Smithsonian curator who tends to those forgery machines, and who may wished to have fabricated evidence of Ardis’ demise in order to cover up her survival – and, potentially, her murder of the narrator? The private investigator who forwards the diary to Nadan’s family makes no mention of confirming whether or not Ardis was killed – and given the chaotic state of the nation and the secret nature of the police, any official denial from police sources about the murder would be unlikely to be taken at face value, if anyone thought to ask.

Why not just forge the diary to cover up Ardis’ true nature entirely? Perhaps because Nadan had in fact come to the attention of the secret police, just as he feared. In reading the authentic portions of the diary in preparation for the forgery, Ardis and her allies may have realised that the secret police probably already took a copy of the diary, which already included Nadan’s account of his ghoul encounter near the home of Ardis’ parents (which, in my theory, is Ardis herself, possessed of unusually good healing capabilities such that though Nadan thought the creature slain, in fact she survived the shot). Nadan didn’t realise the extent to which this incriminated Ardis’ family at the time, but with this information out there, they had to work on the basis that the secret police had some idea of Ardis’ true nature.

Fabricating her murder at the hands of Nadan would be the best way to cover her tracks. It would also entail only forging the very last entry or two in the collection, which would certainly be a help – it allows them to slip in the suggestion of a police raid, from which Nadan is never likely to be recovered, and more explicit suggestions that Ardis has been killed. It also means that the mention of the Catholic procession that Nadan encountered isn’t a police forgery, which makes sense to me – why would the police even bother with that detail?

Oh, and if you buy the “police did the forgery and framed Ardis as a ghoul” theory because you are not sure what Nadan could have possibly seen on Ardis in the light of that ignited glass of spirits which a) would have prompted the visceral reaction he recounts and b) not have a nature obvious to the touch, think on this: perhaps it was not a mutation at all, but the raygun mark between her breasts, matching perfectly the mark he notes his beam having made on the body of the ghoulish thing encountered earlier. It means another werecreature in Wolfe’s work, but Wolfe loves his werecreatures (he is the most accomplished lyncanthropic-American author in living memory, folks, the clue is in the name) and this would be thematically appropriate to the idea of inverting Lovecraft’s ghouls. Since Lovecraft, in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, depicts a human who has become a ghoul, what better inversion than a ghoul who can masquerade as a human?

Another instance relied on by Wolfe Wiki’s theory assumes that the story about pouring out some strong spirits to ignite to see Ardis by was a fabrication by the forgers, since Nadan says earlier he didn’t drink alcohol. However, if the forgers are as skilled as they are supposed to be, they would have noted that. Furthermore, Nadan seems to enjoy a walk on the wild side enough that it feels more plausible that he lied about not drinking alcohol in the earlier instance, wanting to seem a touch more respectable than it actually is. Lastly, the gambit is not at all incompatible with Nadan being genuinely teetotal: he doesn’t mention having drank any himself (they’ve come back from a party, it could have been grabbed from a side-board there with the amount missing having been drunk by other guests), after all. And even if he claimed to Ardis he wanted to have a drink to enjoy post-coitally, he was lying to her and was never planning to drink it. This aspect is simply is not the contradiction people seem to think it is.