Gene Wolfe: "Sob in the Silence," "The Hour of the Sheep" and "Six from Atlantis"

We recently read some Gene Wolfe short stories, so let's read some more.  These are from late in Wolfe's career, stories printed in curious volumes of the middle "oughts."

"Sob in the Silence" (2006)

Like "On a Vacant Face a Bruise," "Sob in the Silence" appeared in the short collection Strange Birds, which printed two stories by Wolfe "inspired by the artwork of Lisa Snellings-Clark."  "Sob in the Silence" was well received, being reprinted in I think four different anthologies since its debut by people like Stephen Jones and Ellen Datlow.  I recognize the title and so maybe I read this in a library copy of one of those anthologies while living in New York, or maybe I just saw the title but never read it.    

Today I an reading the story in Strange Birds.

The plot and themes of "Sob in the Silence," which I sort of recognize--I guess I did read it back in my Manhattan days--are ordinary crime and horror business, though the story is better written than your average murder or ghost story.  And maybe it is "edgy," what with all the dying children and female murderers.

A horror writer's college roommate, a sort of ordinary guy with an ordinary family--overweight wife, pretty college-aged daughter, young son--comes with his family to visit the writer in his new home.  These two men, apparently, meet up every year or so.  The family will stay with the writer for two days.  The writer retails to them at length the horrible crimes that have been committed at this house, including those of a woman whom my sister, a "true crime" podcast fan, would call "a family annihilator," and the bizarre atrocities of a cult, founded and led by the daughter of the annihilator, the sole survivor of Mom's massacre.  This cult  tricked kids into thinking their parents had committed suicide and used this building as an "orphanage" for the kids fooled into believing they were orphans--the cult regularly murdered some of the kids.  I guess, in the way we hear that victims of molestation go on to molest others, this daughter who witnessed child murder and was almost murdered herself as a child, took up the commission of such misdeeds herself.

The horror writer tells his visitors that there have been no signs of ghosts in the house, that he has hired multiple paranormal research teams and they have found no evidence of supernatural activities.  Events will lead us readers to wonder if the horror writer is making this up.

The horror writer plans to kidnap the college-aged girl and make her his slave.  He has developed elaborate strategies to fool the parents and authorities into thinking a stranger has broken into the house to kidnap the girl and carry her off, when she will in fact be imprisoned in a forgotten well on his property.  He runs into an obstacle when he puts his scheme into action--the young boy is in his sister's room when the horror writer arrives to seize her.  The boy was scared because he heard voices in his own room, I think ghosts of the children murdered by the cult warning him to get out of the house.  The horror writer murders his college roommate's son--it is hinted he is possessed by a ghost himself when he commits this atrocity, the ghost of the founder of the cult, and that her ghost or maybe other ghosts play a role in inspiring his whole mad scheme of kidnapping his old pal's daughter in the first place.  Said daughter is beaten unconscious and tossed down the hidden well.

Wolfe gives us scenes of the cops trying to figure out the crime--the horror writer's efforts to fool them succeed.  But the murderer has overlooked some details in making his plan to psychologically break the girl and both he and the girl end up dying horrible deaths--it may be the ghosts of the children who were murdered by the cult that deliver the coup de grace to one or both of them.

"Sob in the Silence" is good, but it doesn't feel as special as "On a Vacant Face a Bruise."

"The Hour of the Sheep" (2007)

This story first appeared in the anthology Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge, edited by Lou Anders, and would be reprinted in 2023's Wolfe collection The Wolfe at the Door.

One of the dumb little games I play by myself is guessing a story's content from its title, and today I'm guessing that this story is about a future in which people are submissive and obedient and pushed around by elites or demagogues or a computer or something.  You'll remember that Wolfe's story "Viewpoint," which appeared in the 2001 anthology Redshift, was an in-your-face political satire--maybe "The Hour of the Sheep" will be another one of those?

One of the great things about Wolfe is that while he is a super smart and knowledgeable guy who knows all about ancient history, Proust and Melville, he also shares the regular guy's fascination with stuff like swords and World War I fighter planes, and a surprisingly large portion of his vast body of work consists of descriptions of weapons and scenes in which one character provides detailed advice to another on how to succeed in hand-to-hand combat.  "The Hour of the Sheep"'s main character is the greatest swordsman in the land, a member of the court of the President-Protector, and he sits down to write a book of advice on swordsmanship.  In this future world, he could just dictate the book into the computer, but he decides to draft the book with a quill pen!

This guy's book is about self-defense, and maintaining order, on the streets and is thus about fighting criminals.  He has an elaborate metaphor, in which he splits time into different segments.  The Hour of the Sheep is when you are at home resting and vulnerable.  The Hour of the Lion is when you are out on the streets, watching for trouble.  The Hour of the Tiger is when you have spotted the enemy.  And so forth through the Hour of the Bull-the enemy attack!--to the Hour of the Wolf, the actual physical fighting.

After reading the start of the writer's book, we readers are apprised of the fact that this guy, though he has won three formal duels and forty regulated matches fought with safe weapons, has never himself been in a street fight with criminals.  The swordsman decides he can't really write about fighting in the streets with thugs if he hasn't done it himself; Wolfe gives us the impression that this guy is less interested in writing a useful book than he is in winning fame and avoiding embarrassment.

So our guy takes up his Star-Wars-style laser sword and heads to the quarter of the city where the brothels and dive bars are, hoping some muggers will attack him.  This expert fighter has apparently lived something of a sheltered life, and has never been to this part of town before.  We readers find that this world of light sabers and voice-to-text word processors is also a world in which nobody has a gun or an automobile--most people fight with clubs and knives and those who do not walk the city streets travel them on horseback or in carriages.  The swordsman finds what he is looking for, but, ironically, also serves as an object lesson on one of the first things he talks about in his book, a book which will now never be completed.

"The Hour of the Sheep" is an entertaining story that illustrates the thing all of us who have spent a lot of time reading and sitting around in educational institutions know but perhaps try to forget--that there is a huge difference between book-learning and actual living, between reading about something and experiencing it.  The swordsman, though very versed in theory and well-practiced in controlled settings, is an academic and he and his ideas don't survive contact with the real world.

One of the fun things about "The Hour of the Sheep" is that Anders prefaces his anthology with a long quote from Frederik Pohl about how science fiction is about technology and the future and then in his own introduction Anders moans that fantasy is taking over the SF publishing category and quotes Gardner Dozois saying we need science fiction to fight against superstition--people who believe in angels but not evolution, for example, or who fear cloning--and then Wolfe, probably the best writer in Anders' book, just ignores all those sentiments, maybe even deliberately undermines Anders' project.  Hilarious.

"The Hour of the Sheep" can be found in The Wolfe at the Door.

"Six from Atlantis" (2006)

Wolfe loves Robert E. Howard, and "Six from Atlantis" first saw print in the anthology Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard.  (Born in New York, Wolfe grew up and went to school in Texas.)  

"Six from Atlantis" is perhaps a distillation of the ideal man as depicted in Howard's stories, a quite short piece full of descriptions of the kinds of stuff we associate with Howard's fiction: musclemen, beautiful and dangerous women, a monster.  Maybe it is a caricature of Howard, but it feels very sincere, more an homage than a parody.

The protagonist of "Six from Atlantis" is a big strong leader, one of the last survivors of fallen Atlantis; this dude is irresistible to women but can easily resist their charms.  A selfish individualist, he has little qualms about robbing or otherwise exploiting those weaker than him, but he is not in love with money or power.  With strength and guile he outfights a giant gorilla and makes himself king of an empire.

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about this story is its attitude about women, that they are dangerous liars who use their bodies to manipulate men and love money and power above all else.  The story's killer gorilla is more admirable than its women!  And then there is the hero's rationalization for the slave trade.  I tentatively (and wrongly) predicted, that "The Hour of the Sheep" might be like "Viewpoint"--it is "Six from Atlantis" that is much more like "Viewpoint" in that it seems like it might blow liberals' minds with the social and political implications of its characters' dialogue and behavior.

In 2012, "Six from Atlantis" was reprinted in The Sword and Sorcery Anthology alongside classic stories by sword and sorcery titans like Howard, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock.

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These stories were a lot of fun to read because they are all about topics that I, with my childish mind, find endlessly fascinating--fighting for your life and dangerous sex--but written by a person who is actually a very good writer who has strong opinions and doesn't cater to his audience but expects them to be able to handle outré opinions and ambiguity.

I think I'll continue mining the internet for more of these sorts of 21st-century Wolfe stories, so stay tuned and try not to run afoul of  any dangerous women, ghosts, or killer gorillas.