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    Home Fires
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    Home Fires
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    Home Fires
    Ebook381 pages4 hours

    Home Fires

    By Gene Wolfe

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Gene Wolfe takes us to a future North America at once familiar and utterly strange. A young man and woman, Skip and Chelle, fall in love in college and marry, but she is enlisted in the military, there is a war on, and she must serve her tour of duty before they can settle down. But the military is fighting a war with aliens in distant solar systems, and her months in the service will be years in relative time on Earth. Chelle returns to recuperate from severe injuries, after months of service, still a young woman but not necessarily the same person—while Skip is in his forties and a wealthy businessman, but eager for her return.

    Still in love (somewhat to his surprise and delight), they go on a Caribbean cruise to resume their marriage. Their vacation rapidly becomes a complex series of challenges, not the least of which are spies, aliens, and battles with pirates who capture the ship for ransom. There is no writer in SF like Gene Wolfe and no SF novel like Home Fires.


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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 18, 2011
    ISBN9781429991582
    Unavailable
    Home Fires
    Author

    Gene Wolfe

    Gene Wolfe (1931-2019) was the Nebula Award-winning author of The Book of the New Sun tetralogy in the Solar Cycle, as well as the World Fantasy Award winners The Shadow of the Torturer and Soldier of Sidon. He was also a prolific writer of distinguished short fiction, which has been collected in such award-winning volumes as Storeys from the Old Hotel and The Best of Gene Wolfe. A recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award, and six Locus Awards, among many other honors, Wolfe was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2007, and named Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2012.

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    Reviews for Home Fires

    3/5

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    • 4/5
      This one has many of Wolfe's hallmarks: a clever protagonist who figures things out without telling us all his thoughts; a setting that is revealed gradually, with no infodumps or other tricks to tell us what is different; themes of memory, identity, loyalty, and courage; loose ends that are not all wrapped up. The story line is thinner than in Wolfe's best books, and the characters, beyond the three primary ones, do not have the distinctive voices and dialects that we see in, say, The Book of the Long Sun. Wolfe sucked me in with the initial premise, a middle-aged man meeting his young bride, who was his age before travelling to and from the interstellar war. We quickly learn of reanimation, in which a brain scan of a person who has died is copied into the brain of a volunteer. We learn of other new technologies, as well as political alliances, gradually and casually; they are spoken of as between individuals who are familiar with them. The main plot concerns the hijacking of the cruise that the man and his bride take. Second-grade Wolfe is better than a lot of writing that's available, but I wonder if we'll get another great book from him.
    • 2/5
      A disappointment from a stellar writer. The premise is intriguing, and there are great ideas in there, but Wolfe doesn't do much with them. The book opens with the return of a soldier from an interstellar war; the relativistic travel involved means she returns, a young woman after a two-year stint, to a lover who has aged decades in her absence. Wolfe's usual subtle incluing is in force here; this is a post-oil future, as we learn from the offhand notes about elevators and the discussion of sails on a huge cruise ship. The technology is oddly off in ways that aren't explained by this situation, particularly communications, which isn't ever explained. Wolfe plays it straight; the characters don't mention anything that they wouldn't mention to someone from their world, there is no "As you know, Bob" here. Since this is, despite its flaws, a Wolfe novel, themes of memory and identity pervade the book, with brain scans and wipes (partial or total) pervading the book.The weakest part of the novel is its plot; after their reunion, Chelle (the veteran) and Skip (her partner) go off on a cruise, which is attacked by hijackers. And that's pretty much it. The characters all sound the same, speaking in very careful, educated sentences at all times. They all have Wolfe's own voice (and he is capable of writing otherwise).
    • 2/5
      I picked up a copy of the signed and numbered PS Publishing edition of this novel for much cheapness a couple of years ago, although not being an especially big fan of Wolfe’s fiction I’ve no real idea why I did so. His The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a classic work of sf, The Book of the New Sun is a remarkable work but its sensibilities have not aged well, and everything else he has written I’ve found more or less meh. Except his short fiction – that I really don’t like at all, bar one or two stories. But Wolfe has a reputation for tricksiness and cleverness, as if the two things are the same, and his profile within genre remains extremely high, even if few people seem to read him these days. Home Fires does nothing to change my current opinion of Wolfe. It’s set a century or so hence. Skip Grison is a wealthy lawyer in his fifties. Twenty-something years before, he contracted (civil partnership) with Chelle Sea Blue (yes, really), who then left Earth to fight the Os. She is due to return home. Although she has been away decades, it has only been a handful of years for her. He is worried for their partnership, although he still loves her dearly. As a present for her return, Skip arranges for Chelle’s mother to be resurrected – ie, a brain scan of her is imprinted onto the mind of a volunteer. Skip and Chelle then go on a cruise on a sailing ship (the cover art depicts a motor cruise liner with masts and sails badly photoshopped on top, which is annoying). Things happen aboard the sailing ship – hijackers seize it, attempts are made on the life of Shelle’s mother, Wolfe plays his usual wordgames with the reader… But it all seems a bit, well, a bit feeble. Some of the puzzles presented in the narrative are easy enough to solve, and are indeed explained, but don’t seem to add much to the story. Those which are left unexplained, add even less. I can live with the mix-n-match worldbuilding, and while the old-fashioned sexual politics are uncomfortable they don’t actually overwhelm the narrative, but… it all feels like a pointless exercise. It doesn’t feel like a story, it feels like half a puzzle with no reward for solving it. I had expected some intellectual gratification from identifying the puzzles and then solving them, or failing to solve them, but to be honest I didn’t really care. Home Fires reads like a forgettable sf novel with a heavy reputation it doesn’t deserve hanging over it. Avoidable.
    • 5/5
      On Home Fires by Gene Wolfeby Robin Wyatt DunnGene Wolfe is a subtle trickster. His latest novel, Home Fires, written in his 80s, is of course another masterwork, but why? In this case, it’s the spirit of the thing, a long and slow and cool trajectory towards a warm future that is not clichéd or claptrap. Chelle Sea Blue, warmed by her suitor (and ex-husband’s) decision to enlist in JAG to win her heart (and then return to her, after a relativistic interstellar journey, many years older), kisses him goodbye but she is not maudlin, not saccharine, not full of joy. She assumes, as suits pretty women her age, that men will do most anything for her, and she is casual at her suitor’s embracing of death.Of course, she is a veteran too. Her identity has been blurred by some unknowable process of body/mind reconstruction (an unknowability typical of Wolfe ― Wittgenstein and Stanislaw Lem would be very appreciative of Wolfe’s style because they share similar concerns), she has a right arm not her own, and so we can guess that she does not need to mourn his departure, she has come through war already and doesn’t have the time to do more.In a few lines at the end, Wolfe captures this complicated woman, this strange and eerie solution to a quandary of love, and, again, the quiet and inexorable spirit that flows throughout the book.If great works of literature are made by following Hemingway-esque advice and chipping away unnecessary bits until only the essence remains, Home fires qualifies because of the spirit of the book, a spirit that you might say is its mood combined with its minimalist construction.Unusual for Wolfe, the carefully horrifying pressure of the beyond is not in Home Fires, there is no ‘Woldercan’ like in Evil Guest to make us dream of nightmares in Wolfe-ville. Much of the novel takes place on a cruise ship, and if only journeys on cruise ships were like a journey through the mind of Gene Wolfe, called so rightly the greatest living writer in the English language (by Michael Swanwick), if only we could dream together of the warm future Wolfe sees, while on a big corporate cruise ship.Although the images of an evil corporate future are there in this novel (post-nationality, terrorism, etc), it does not tear away at our soul, it does not make us want to shoot ourselves in the head. Home Fires made me realize that these possible futures are not of necessity soul-destroying; they are worlds into which we can fit, if we are lucky, our ancient human desires for peace and tranquility and sex and love, all at once.Unusual too for Wolfe, in Home Fires¸ like in an intimate Cro-Magnon cave, sex is closer to the surface. Usually Wolfe flits over intercourse, cramping it and containing it, but here Wolfe demonstrates his affection for and understanding of women’s sexuality and their cat-like habits of sampling various local penises. And Wolfe shows us his hero, a man who sacrificed his own youth waiting (on a ‘contract marriage’ basis a la Heinlein but without Heinlein’s smarmy knowing winks on the subject) for Chelle Sea Blue The Veteran to return from war on her relativistic troop ship, and who now must accept that his young bride will cheat on him, and cheat on him again, and apologize, and then cheat some more.And yet this hero learns too about his abilities as a man: in short and sweet Wolfe prose, he leaps and lands on his feet, gun in hand and fires and kills in a moment, because he must, and thus discovers that this is something he can do.Why is Wolfe the greatest living writer in English? What does he do now, at the end of his life and the height of his career, that no other writer can?One, he isn’t afraid to write works of literature that are science fiction books. Snobs love to decry SF (or sci-fi, hey who cares what we call it), because they fear its immanence. They fear how already present it is in our souls now in the 21st Century. Science fiction, other than that it must have at least one “speculative” element, has no other requirements. Unlike literary fiction, which we have come to expect to be in the tradition of realism, science fiction can do anything at all.In this wide open space where we can go absolutely anywhere, Wolfe reminds us why fantasy is so much holder than realism: it satisfies thousands of human needs that Joyce or Faulkner, for all of their beauty, never can. Yet in this wide open space Wolfe is a conservative.Wolfe gives us the chase and the glory and the war and the sex and the death and the ambition and the horror and the pain and the fury and the satisfaction we crave from life, that we crave from genre fiction, that we crave from art, but he does it carefully.Carefully, Wolfe uses his tried and true technique of abruptly cutting from action to exposition, refusing often to give us blood on stage but only reportage a la ancient Athens. Carefully, Wolfe shows us how our fears (government collapse, the end of nationalism, female sexuality) need not condemn us to nihilism and despair and holy rage. Instead we can deal with them, like tired New Yorkers, swallowing our pride and soldiering on quietly or loudly, hoping for better and expecting worse but remembering, always, that the sky is wide and far and unknowable.
    • 3/5
      Coudn't get through this for some reason. Stopped one third of the way in
    • 3/5
      Noooot sure what I think of this one. In style and format it's very much what I expect from Gene Wolfe, having read a novel (or two?) and quite a few of his short stories, but I felt like there was something lacking. Not emotional involvement as such -- I haven't tended to have that with his writing. But, nonetheless, maybe some kind of vital spark?

      Obviously Wolfe's a genius with narrators and the way he can spin a story round and round on itself is amazing, but Home Fires wasn't as good as I was hoping. Maybe a case of "not for me", maybe a case of having got my hopes up too much.

      Still enjoyed it and read it pretty much in one go.
    • 4/5
      Once again, Gene Wolfe tells a good story with interesting characters and events. Once again, he is exploring questions of identity, memory, relationship. When I finished this book, I thought the ending was surprisingly clear and definitive; a few hours later, I'm not so sure. Read it if you like this sort of thing. Oh, and it's a love story.
    • 2/5
      A lazy, dull book. The characters all sound exactly the same (there's a cast list at the back so we can tell them apart) and talk like computers. With its flat, boring writing, lack of an feel of character, and story that's like solving a Rubik's cube (and about as engaging) the book feels like it was written in the 1960s. The plot is twist on twist, but we don't care. Very disappointing after all the great work Gene Wolfe has done. I have to wonder if he's lost his way.
    • 3/5
      One word to sum up this book: disappointing. Perhaps I came it with my expectations raised too high. I had heard of Gene Wolfe from a number of sources, First Things ran an article on him, and a sci fi blog I used to read was named after one of Gene's ideas. When I saw this book on the newish rack at Bookmans, I grabbed it quickly. Here at last was my opportunity to experience an author who has been desciribed as "too difficult, and too religious".The book hooked me immediately. No ambling prologue introducing the characters and the setting, we are just dumped into the action, in media res. Everything moves quickly, I wanted to keep turning the pages because I knew a new twist was coming soon. And there were many, many twists. It was difficult to keep track of everything that happened, I felt much like Skip must have, bewildered but fascinated. The setting is dystopian, but you can imagine getting there from here without too much trouble. I liked the lawyerly perspective; some of my best friends are lawyers.Yet, for all that, I got to the end and I didn't like it. Maybe it is because Skip and Chelle are such horrible people. Really everyone is in this grayest of dystopias. Skip strikes me as the best of a bad lot, and that isn't saying much. If I wanted to read about this kind of thing, I could just turn to the news. I suppose my tastes in fiction are thoroughly bourgeois. I really do want evil to be vanquished and love to win out in the end.I like my scifi hard, and moderately didactic. If, like Wolfe, the author is known to be thoughtfully religious, I like to see how that plays out in the way the story is written. Those things are not present here. I feel that Wolfe wrote the kind of book that critics like, and readers hate. This book is full of artful ambiguity and clever literary devices that will delight bitter and penurious English majors. As a writer, Wolfe is probably better than Pournelle or Powers, in the technical ways such things are understood. But this book failed its primary purpose: to entertain. The story is depressing, and not all that fun to read. The book was challenging in a good way, and thought provoking, but I doubt that I will ever read it again.
    • 3/5
      Skip Grison has been a lawyer for almost twenty years and is wealthy and successful. Returning soldier Chelle Sea Blue, Skip’s contracta (a neologism indicating the female partner in a civil union), has been away from the planet for a matter of months, fighting the alien species known only as the Os, but due to the relativistic effects of time travel is now twenty years younger than Skip. As Skip prepares for Chelle’s return, wondering what she will make of her youthful sweetheart turned middle-aged man, he chooses to download her dead mother Vanessa’s electronically recorded personality into a new body as a gift to Chelle. He also books the two of them onto a luxurious Caribean cruise. Chelle, however, is quite literally a new person as well. Having been severely injured during her tour of duty, she was patched up with donor body parts and may well harbor a split personality. As the three of them attempt to put their lives back together and find a balance between old and new, darker happenings…including a hijacking, a bomb, mercenaries, and several attempted or accomplished murders…hint that someone, or something, isn’t done with Chelle. Or possibly they want Vanessa. Or Skip. Or something else altogether. Genre-bending elements such as the multiple red herrings, fast-paced plot, layer upon layer of psychological and narrative complexity, and mistaken or hidden identities make this a good choice for those who don’t usually read science fiction. This title should have broad appeal for anyone who enjoys untying a knotty plot.
    • 1/5
      Famous for his "Book of the New Sun" series, Gene Wolfe's latest book, "Home Fires" is similar to that series in that it's something that really seems to defy description. However, the lack of words this book generates comes from the fact that there's essentially no plot whatsoever to talk about. When reading the product description for Home Fires, it gives the impression that this is a story of a love that transcends space and time. Sadly, that seems to be far from the case as there really seems nothing at the core of this story that really ties everything together. Instead, the majority of the book seems to be more about that one sentence at the end of the description regarding "challenges [...] of which are spies, aliens, and battles". Contrary to expectations, that in itself might have made an interesting read, but instead all the events occur at a 'stream of consciousness' pace that seems to lead readers somewhere, but leaves one high, dry, and puzzled instead. Granted, Wolfe is famous for the surreal nature of his stories, where events seem to be experience, not understood. But it just doesn't seem to work here, as everything is built up (a la Lost) only to have it fall to the wayside.One gets the impression that this book just came of happenstance because Gene Wolfe had an old script laying around that normally wouldn't get published if written by a new author. Is it any coincidence that his name takes almost half the cover, while every blurb on the cover is about the author himself, not of the story?While not terrible or awful, I would say readers expecting another classic would be in for a major disappointment.