I wrapped the Starwater Strains collection a month or two back. I didn't believe the cover art was real until I actually had the book in my hands. I love Endangered Species but the best stories are squirreled away at the end and there are a lot of duds to wade through. Wolfe At The Door has some bangers, but also several stories I only enjoyed reading in conversation with his other work (and some juvenalia that's only worth reading out of historical interest). I think Strains strikes the right balance of rich-but-approachable. Like in At The Door the stronger entries are strategically placed to prop up the weaker ones so there's never a losing streak, and the longer entries are bookended by shorter ones so the reader never leaves exhausted.
As usual, I'll skip the summaries and go straight to my thoughts.
Introduction
The introduction gives a short paragraph about each story, in most cases giving the original circumstances of writing, publication and sometimes the line of inspiration. Wolfe was active in the convention circuit (Severian's design was famously written to be easy to cosplay) and several of the stories in Strains were written for pamphlets and programs given out to attendees. All the blurbs have been copied onto the Wolfe Wiki and in some cases are the only information about the story on their respective pages.
Viewpoint
A solid introduction to the collection. Wolfe has a reputation as a weaver of mysteries and Straussian hidden meanings. I think that if he wants you to understand something he typically puts it right there on the page. Everything else is either supererogatory or a fan theory. The IRS helicopter assault soldier fast-roping in to deliver a schizo rant about the tyranny of the financial system is lazy writing, but it adds some Phillip K Dick style insanity that makes the end product better. It's not the last time a character in this collection will turn to the camera and read out the key themes of the story directly to the audience. Favorite.
Rattler
This one's not that great, but it's a nice contrast to the opener. It's shorter and tonally very different. It reassures you that the whole thing isn't going to be dystopian political raving.
In Glory Like Their Star
I love the parts where the alien talks about the desert. Wolfe is right up there with McCarthy when he describes a landscape. I love the aliens who talk endlessly about how arrogant and foolish the humans are and then the guy just straight up kills one of them for no reason. Just hit and runs him. There's a similar bit in Sin Eater, the first story in Finder Library volume 1. The film director talks about the primitive humans of the past, and immediately demonstrates that he's actually operating so far below their level they aren't even speaking the same language.
Calamity Warps
This one is tonally similar to Rattler but I liked it a lot better. Shadows and shadow monsters recur endlessly around these parts, from Fifth Head of Cerberus to Silhouette (my personal favorite) to Short Sun.
Graylord Man's Last Words
Like Going to the Beach from the Wolfe at the Door collection, a world where robots have to work shitty day jobs to survive. I don't think this is the first time Wolfe has given a robot maid a down home Southern Black lady Mammy-type dialect, I vaguely recall the same from War Under The Tree. Probably an unsubtle commentary on the robots being slaves.
Shields of Mars
Love it. Like Red Star Winter Orbit, the feeling when something you spent your whole life working on is discarded as worthless, then suddenly everyone loves it again. The old friends casually deploy racial slurs like they did when they were children. Wolfe's tribute to the world of Barsoom, where the green martians are irredeemable bloodthirsty backwards savages but also your best friend. Favorite.
From the Cradle
Like Peace, a series of cool short stories that offer clues about what's happening in a frame narrative. I liked the frame narrative in Peace a lot better, but the vignettes here are really cool. Is the brown book the Wonders of Urth and Sky? Is it the Book of Gold for the POV character?
Black Shoes
A glimpse into my workflow for posts like this: I go through and post my raw thoughts about each story, then go through and refine them into something readable. I go out of order based on what's most interesting and that means I hit the 90% mark with a bunch of things I'm not excited about which still need intelligent commentary. So I'm going to speak from the heart rather than try to come up with a witticism and say I didn't think Black Shoes was all that great.
In Glory Like Their Star
I love the parts where the alien talks about the desert. Wolfe is right up there with McCarthy when he describes a landscape. I love the aliens who talk endlessly about how arrogant and foolish the humans are and then the guy just straight up kills one of them for no reason. Just hit and runs him. There's a similar bit in Sin Eater, the first story in Finder Library volume 1. The film director talks about the primitive humans of the past, and immediately demonstrates that he's actually operating so far below their level they aren't even speaking the same language.
Calamity Warps
This one is tonally similar to Rattler but I liked it a lot better. Shadows and shadow monsters recur endlessly around these parts, from Fifth Head of Cerberus to Silhouette (my personal favorite) to Short Sun.
Graylord Man's Last Words
Like Going to the Beach from the Wolfe at the Door collection, a world where robots have to work shitty day jobs to survive. I don't think this is the first time Wolfe has given a robot maid a down home Southern Black lady Mammy-type dialect, I vaguely recall the same from War Under The Tree. Probably an unsubtle commentary on the robots being slaves.
Shields of Mars
Love it. Like Red Star Winter Orbit, the feeling when something you spent your whole life working on is discarded as worthless, then suddenly everyone loves it again. The old friends casually deploy racial slurs like they did when they were children. Wolfe's tribute to the world of Barsoom, where the green martians are irredeemable bloodthirsty backwards savages but also your best friend. Favorite.
From the Cradle
Like Peace, a series of cool short stories that offer clues about what's happening in a frame narrative. I liked the frame narrative in Peace a lot better, but the vignettes here are really cool. Is the brown book the Wonders of Urth and Sky? Is it the Book of Gold for the POV character?
Black Shoes
A glimpse into my workflow for posts like this: I go through and post my raw thoughts about each story, then go through and refine them into something readable. I go out of order based on what's most interesting and that means I hit the 90% mark with a bunch of things I'm not excited about which still need intelligent commentary. So I'm going to speak from the heart rather than try to come up with a witticism and say I didn't think Black Shoes was all that great.
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Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon?
This one's a mess but I like it more than I should. The main character rambles on about the evils of the overbearing police state and delivers lore dumps instead of trying to communicate the relevant information through things actually happening. But I love Wolfe's space occultism stories and this one has both Arthurian fantasy and a conspiracy plot to cover up a black knight satellite in low earth orbit.
Pulp Cover
I've said before that a lot of Wolfe's short stories are prototypes for his longer work. Bits and pieces of this one eventually ended up in An Evil Guest. The female lead's romance with the mysterious inhuman man and her eventual destitution and madness after being ravaged by the alien are basically what happens to Cassie Cassie. Beyond that, nothing about Pulp Cover held my interest.
Of Soil and Climate
A cool Jack Vance style fantasy adventure mated to a mystery story where the narrator is the culprit. What crime did he commit? He gives self serving justifications about patient confidentiality and the overbearing nanny state, but is that just an excuse to shield himself from the truth? All his adventures in the dream world are about killing men threatening his woman. But if that was his crime, was he fighting to protect her life or just out of jealousy? The pursuit of the woman through a parallel world and into insanity feels like a prototype of There Are Doors. Maybe people who disliked Doors will like this one better. It's shorter and it's got more monsters and sword battles. Favorite.
The Dog of the Drops
Your classic post apocalyptic rustic future, with rural villagers living at the edge of a crater field left by the atomic war. Wolfe wrote an essay once about the survival of genetically engineered super animals into the deep future, breeding true long after the continent spanning supply chains delivering oil and gas have collapsed. This one also recalls Laird Barron's Swift to Chase, another cool story about a cybernetic superdog in the post apocalypse. Aside from recalling all that other stuff I can't say this one really gripped me.
Mute
This one's all atmosphere. Plot-wise it might be a Peace style endlessly repeating afterlife, but the real strong point is the feeling rather than the events of the story.
Petting Zoo
My favorite character in this is the old guy who sees the cool dinosaur and didn't realize such things were possible until after it was too late for him. We've all been there and old man Wolfe knows it. He's felt that same mix of delight and sadness on seeing something new and knowing it's too late for him to do it. He wrote Forlessen as a tribute to every salaryman who works a shitty day job to feed his family his whole life and never feels like he accomplished much of anything, and I think he looked at his own life and saw how close he came to that fate. Many such cases.
Castaway
Wolfe's spin on Lem's Return From The Stars, folding in the death of nature we find across his corpus from Silhouette to the Solar Cycle. It almost reminds me a little of People of Sand and Slag, with the postuhmans or robomen finding an unmodified original guy who they don't know how to care for.
The Fat Magician
Another story, another narrator rattling off the key themes. In this case it's particularly egregious because it comes right after an incredibly effective visual demonstration of the same thing. We get the image of the gas chamber and a dozen Nazis trying to drag the body of the fat man out, then the author directly explains that the story is an allegory for the dangers of government tyranny. As annoying as it is to be shown something and then immediately told the meaning, I think we can forgive the Nebraskan. He's a professor, patiently explaining key themes to a captive audience is his job.
Mute
This one's all atmosphere. Plot-wise it might be a Peace style endlessly repeating afterlife, but the real strong point is the feeling rather than the events of the story.
Petting Zoo
My favorite character in this is the old guy who sees the cool dinosaur and didn't realize such things were possible until after it was too late for him. We've all been there and old man Wolfe knows it. He's felt that same mix of delight and sadness on seeing something new and knowing it's too late for him to do it. He wrote Forlessen as a tribute to every salaryman who works a shitty day job to feed his family his whole life and never feels like he accomplished much of anything, and I think he looked at his own life and saw how close he came to that fate. Many such cases.
Castaway
Wolfe's spin on Lem's Return From The Stars, folding in the death of nature we find across his corpus from Silhouette to the Solar Cycle. It almost reminds me a little of People of Sand and Slag, with the postuhmans or robomen finding an unmodified original guy who they don't know how to care for.
The Fat Magician
Another story, another narrator rattling off the key themes. In this case it's particularly egregious because it comes right after an incredibly effective visual demonstration of the same thing. We get the image of the gas chamber and a dozen Nazis trying to drag the body of the fat man out, then the author directly explains that the story is an allegory for the dangers of government tyranny. As annoying as it is to be shown something and then immediately told the meaning, I think we can forgive the Nebraskan. He's a professor, patiently explaining key themes to a captive audience is his job.
As to the fate of the wizard, I didn't realize it while reading but in retrospect it's obvious that the old sorcerer is himself a transvestite, disguised as the MILF who now owns the hotel. Or was the sorcerer the disguise and the woman the true identity? Did the sorcerer make a real pact with a demon to stay youthful this entire time, or have the ensuing decades just been kind to him (her?) Did the professor fuck her during the nocturnal visitations? Is that why he's going back? Favorite.
Hunter Lake
I was going to offer the same commentary on this one that I did on Black Shoes, but on reflection I like Hunter Lake better. The atmosphere is a lot stronger and it's fine to end with "it was all a dream" because it's obvious from the beginning that the POV character is reliving a prior event. So the real puzzle is figuring out what actually happened based on the distorted image flashing before the daughter's inner eye a thousand times per second. Barron had a cool story about a lake drowning in one of his collections. So did Meiville in Moments Before An Explosion. It's an evocative subject if you grew up listening to stories about the soap woman of Crescent Lake.
The Boy Who Hooked the Sun
I've read this one before and I didn't remember liking it that much, but going through it again I liked it a lot more. Like the robots in Cyriaca's story, the sun can't bring itself to exterminate humanity because it falls in love with all the little characters. Too bad for Urth the actual New Sun didn't have mercy on humanity, it just killed everyone because some asshole aliens said so. Favorite.
Try and Kill It
A humanoid bear who wears a grey baldric and shoots a bow. Is he hunting/being hunted by Chewbacca? I like the POV character's internal monologue. He's really trying to do the right thing but he finds himself momentarily overwhelmed by despair that it's already too late. Then he realizes his real problems have nothing to do with whatever's happening in his head.
Hunter Lake
I was going to offer the same commentary on this one that I did on Black Shoes, but on reflection I like Hunter Lake better. The atmosphere is a lot stronger and it's fine to end with "it was all a dream" because it's obvious from the beginning that the POV character is reliving a prior event. So the real puzzle is figuring out what actually happened based on the distorted image flashing before the daughter's inner eye a thousand times per second. Barron had a cool story about a lake drowning in one of his collections. So did Meiville in Moments Before An Explosion. It's an evocative subject if you grew up listening to stories about the soap woman of Crescent Lake.
The Boy Who Hooked the Sun
I've read this one before and I didn't remember liking it that much, but going through it again I liked it a lot more. Like the robots in Cyriaca's story, the sun can't bring itself to exterminate humanity because it falls in love with all the little characters. Too bad for Urth the actual New Sun didn't have mercy on humanity, it just killed everyone because some asshole aliens said so. Favorite.
Try and Kill It
Game in the Pope's Head
I think the reason Wolfe has a poor reputation among normies (if the care or think about him at all) is that he has a lot of dedicated shooters who try to rehabilitate his weaker stories rather than just admitting they suck. They try to "decipher" wastes of time like Susan Delage instead of leading with a recommendation people will actually like. Hell, I'm guilty of this myself. I said I "didn't get" stories in the Wolfe at the Door collection, rather than just saying I disliked them.
Not this time. Game In The Pope's Head is lame. It's like a shitty Twilight Zone episode. I have a little patience for "they were in hell the entire time!" as the framing device, I liked it well enough in Peace. But you need a story that's actually fun to read.
Empires of Foliage and Flower
I love this one. It's tempting to read it as an allegory. Wolfe sacrificed his youth in a war that everyone forgot about while it was still happening, and everyone agreed was a pointless waste of time after it ended. But what was the alternative? Just give up? And the bit about the death of the inner child, that's his fear, his hope that some part of him survived. Of all the Wonders of Urth and Sky stories this one is my Favorite.
The Arimaspian Legacy
I didn't love this one on reading but I've warmed up to it. Wolfe likes the characters to question whether they're insane or have discovered a mystical secret (There Are Doors is the classic example). Here we wonder if the guy was punished for stealing fire from the Gods, or if he just had a psychotic episode and jumped out the window.
The Seraph From its Sepulcher
Space horror stories about megastructures filled with dead aliens rule, and this is one of them. I don't know if Wolfe was a big Lem fan but I get a little Solaris out of this one. And what a cool spin on the whole Alien premise. The bugs aren't extinct, aren't even a dying race, but merely waiting for suitable prey to complete the final stage of their life cycle in host bodies. The mausoleum could be a trap for Catholic adventurers, or it could be the insects' sincere interpretation of the Christian religion that they picked up from human radio transmissions. Have faith in Him, lay down on consecrated ground and through the power of the Lord you will be granted eternal life. Favorite.
Lord of the Land
I thought this one was going to be another Rattler, and boy was I wrong. Wolfe knows a thing or two about anthropology and interviews, the way the professor never interrupts his subjects in the middle of a story (no matter how irrelevant), but patiently guides them to the stuff he's interested in. This is the best mythos story Wolfe ever wrote, much better than An Evil Guest. The part about the Duat is the best anyone's ever done it.
At the end of course the Nebraskan has to explain exactly what's happening with the monster, in case we didn't pick it up. That's his hobby and his job. The ending saves it. Favorite in the whole collection.
Golden City Far
A prototype of Wizard/Knight, with a kid from real America drawn into an Arthurian style fantasy world. Somehow creepier because the kid isn't a superpowered manchild like book 1 Abel, he gets clarity and emotional maturity along with his superhuman powers. Like they say in Sorcerer's House, there's something creepy about a guy who bides his time rather than flying off the handle when he gets mad. Or maybe it's like they say in Urth, where goodness frightens people more than evil and a thousand demons flee before a single soldier of the Increate.
Empires of Foliage and Flower
I love this one. It's tempting to read it as an allegory. Wolfe sacrificed his youth in a war that everyone forgot about while it was still happening, and everyone agreed was a pointless waste of time after it ended. But what was the alternative? Just give up? And the bit about the death of the inner child, that's his fear, his hope that some part of him survived. Of all the Wonders of Urth and Sky stories this one is my Favorite.
The Arimaspian Legacy
I didn't love this one on reading but I've warmed up to it. Wolfe likes the characters to question whether they're insane or have discovered a mystical secret (There Are Doors is the classic example). Here we wonder if the guy was punished for stealing fire from the Gods, or if he just had a psychotic episode and jumped out the window.
The Seraph From its Sepulcher
Space horror stories about megastructures filled with dead aliens rule, and this is one of them. I don't know if Wolfe was a big Lem fan but I get a little Solaris out of this one. And what a cool spin on the whole Alien premise. The bugs aren't extinct, aren't even a dying race, but merely waiting for suitable prey to complete the final stage of their life cycle in host bodies. The mausoleum could be a trap for Catholic adventurers, or it could be the insects' sincere interpretation of the Christian religion that they picked up from human radio transmissions. Have faith in Him, lay down on consecrated ground and through the power of the Lord you will be granted eternal life. Favorite.
Lord of the Land
I thought this one was going to be another Rattler, and boy was I wrong. Wolfe knows a thing or two about anthropology and interviews, the way the professor never interrupts his subjects in the middle of a story (no matter how irrelevant), but patiently guides them to the stuff he's interested in. This is the best mythos story Wolfe ever wrote, much better than An Evil Guest. The part about the Duat is the best anyone's ever done it.
At the end of course the Nebraskan has to explain exactly what's happening with the monster, in case we didn't pick it up. That's his hobby and his job. The ending saves it. Favorite in the whole collection.
Golden City Far
A prototype of Wizard/Knight, with a kid from real America drawn into an Arthurian style fantasy world. Somehow creepier because the kid isn't a superpowered manchild like book 1 Abel, he gets clarity and emotional maturity along with his superhuman powers. Like they say in Sorcerer's House, there's something creepy about a guy who bides his time rather than flying off the handle when he gets mad. Or maybe it's like they say in Urth, where goodness frightens people more than evil and a thousand demons flee before a single soldier of the Increate.
I like the bit with the school psychologists. Like the three Norns, or Freud/Plato's tripartite theory of the soul. They each offer an explanation of what's happening to the kid, but they're really offering explanations of the meaning behind the myth. Favorite.
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