Gene Wolfe (1931– ) is an award-winning US writer of science fiction and fantasy who was born in New York City and had polio as a child. He attended Texas A&M University before being drafted to serve in the military during the Korean War. He later graduated from the University of Houston and worked as an industrial engineer—which culminated in his helping create the machine that makes Pringles potato chips. The cartoon face on the side of the Pringles package is purportedly a rendering of Wolfe’s face. Wolfe then turned to fiction, at which he proved to have a unique talent; in addition to the brilliant, complex The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), Wolfe’s signature creation is The Book of the New Sun, a tetralogy (1980–83). This far-future series has received substantial acclaim and awards consideration, while redefining the antihero within science fiction. Wolfe has won the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the August Derleth Award several times. He also is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and has received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.
Although not a bestselling author, Wolfe is highly regarded by critics and fellow writers, and considered by many to be one of the best living science fiction authors. Indeed, he has sometimes been called the best living American writer regardless of genre. In a sympathetic profile on the New Yorker website (April 24, 2015), Peter Berbegal wrote of Wolfe, “His stories and novels are rich with riddles, mysteries, and sleights of textual hand. His working lexicon is vast, and his plots are unspooled by narrators who deliberately confuse or are confused—or both…His science fiction is neither operatic nor scientifically accurate; his fantasy works are not full of clanging swords and wizardly knowledge.” The critic and author John Clute has written about Wolfe’s fiction, “From the first, and with a prolific output that has not ebbed for more than four decades, he has created texts [that]—almost uniquely—marry modernism and SF, rather than putting them into rhetorical opposition; his ultimate importance to world literature derives from the success of that marriage.” The award-winning science fiction author Michael Swanwick has said, with perhaps some hyperbole: “Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today!” Among others, writers Neil Gaiman and Patrick O’Leary have credited Wolfe for inspiration.
Wolfe wrote of his views of fiction, “My definition of a great story has nothing to do with ‘a varied and interesting background.’ It is: One that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure.” “All the Hues of Hell” first appeared in the anthology Universe in 1987. For a Gene Wolfe story, it is fairly straightforward science fiction. Yet it contains hidden depths.