Innocents Aboard

Gene Wolfe may be the single best writer in fantasy and SF today. His quotes and reviews certainly support that contention, and so does his impressive short fiction oeuvre. Innocents Aboard gathers fantasy and horror stories from the last decade that have never before been in a Wolfe collection. Highlights from the twenty-two stories include "The Tree is my Hat," adventure and horror in the South Seas, "The Night Chough," a Long Sun story, "The Walking Sticks," a darkly humorous tale of a supernatural inheritance, and "Houston, 1943," lurid adventures in a dream that has no end. This is fantastic fiction at its best.
**From Publishers Weekly
Veteran Wolfe (The Knight) doesn't just write stories. He tells wondrously imaginative tales that weave reality with dream and fit so comfortably, or with intentional discomfort, within the psyche that they surely must have dwelt there all along with the other great fables and folk tales, lore and legends that are part of our collective cultural unconscious. The 22 short works of horror and fantasy (and "magic realism" if one disdains genre labels) collected here are further proof that Wolfe ranks with the finest writers of this or any other day. Age has neither dulled nor withered the septuagenarian author: fully half these stories are from the last five years. "The Tree Is My Hat" is a haunting ghost story set on a Pacific Island replete with shark-gods and lost temples. The chilling "The Friendship Light" combines the Lovecraftian with the psychopathological. An ill child finds endless adventure and inescapable nightmare in "Houston, 1943." In "The Lost Pilgrim," a time-traveler intent on sailing with the Pilgrims finds himself on a voyage into Greek myth. Wolfe's magic is so potent that even when his highly unreliable narrators warn us we will never believe them, that they are mad or illogical, we still find it all, no matter how outlandish or surreal the premise, perfectly plausible. Wolfe is a literary treasure, as shown in these short stories as lucid as diamonds of the first water.
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From Booklist
This gathering of 22 previously uncollected fantasy and horror stories shows Wolfe as much a master of his craft as ever. Particularly noteworthy is the autobiographical "Houston, 1943," about growing up during World War II; Wolfe says there is nothing completely invented in it. On the other hand, "The Walking Sticks" is a ghost story, "The Night Chough" is set in the universe of Wolfe's Long Sun novels, and "How the Bishop Sailed to Inniskeen" superficially appears to take place in a conventional fantasy setting; invention aplenty in them. Then there are "The Sailor Who Sailed after the Sun," "Slow Children at Play," and "The Monday Man"; in none of them is it easy to tell whether Wolfe is being whimsical or not. It is easy, however, to appreciate Wolfe's versatility in choice of subjects, the depth of the knowledge he brings to bear on developing them, and the magisterial excellence of his prose. Short fiction doesn't often get better than this in the English language, let alone just in fantasy. Roland Green
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