Modcult

Lovecraft Meets Bladerunner

Gene Wolfe’s newest novel, An Evil Guest is now available for preorder, and set to be released on September 16th.

I linked Neil Gaiman’s review of a draft a while back, but the Amazon page has some more information.

It seems Wolfe indulges himself in a bit of a genre stew– mixing noir’s private detectives, Broadway glitter, sorcerers, iPods, cold war intrigue, and Cthulhu, itself.

From Caitlín R. Kiernan’s blurb:

The distinctions we draw between past, present, and future are discriminations among illusions. This paraphrase of Einstein stands as a sort of thesis statement for this deliriously anachronistic novel, which, though seemingly set near or at the end of the 21st century, feels more like a wild confabulation of the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, with a bit of the ’80s sprinkled here and there, and just a dash of the first decade of our new millennium.

Even as Wolfe warps time and space, he also warps and dismisses the too often indulged expectations of genre readers. There is no slavish devotion to dull futurism, but a swaggering, romantic, unabashedly unlikely tomorrowland.

Really, really poor cover choice though. Luckily, the UK edition appears to have a more tasteful design, thankfully avoiding the goth-vampire-meets-fairy-romance cover of the US version.

An Evil Guest

While searching for information on a specific Gene Wolfe short story (Easter Sunday), I came across a Neil Gaiman post musing on Wolfe’s upcoming novel, An Evil Guest. It’s set in the near future, though apparently has a 1930’s atmosphere, with several Lovecraft references.

Says Gaiman:

It’s a pulp thriller – and that’s a compliment, because Wolfe knows from pulp thrillers (he wrote a wonderful pastiche of one in “The Island of Dr Death and Other Stories”) and because here he’s creating a strange sort of genre meltdown, a 21st century pulp adventure thriller with SF and horror elements that nobody else could possibly have written.