Interlibrary Loan

by Gene Wolfe

Overview

Interlibrary Loan is the brilliant follow-up to A Borrowed Man: the final work of fiction from multi-award winner and national literary treasure Gene Wolfe

Hundreds of years in the future our civilization is shrunk down but we go on. There is advanced technology, there are robots.

And there are clones.

E. A. Smithe is a borrowed person, his personality an uploaded recording of a deceased mystery writer. Smithe is a piece of property, not a legal human.

As such, Smithe can be loaned to other branches. Which he is. Along with two fellow reclones, a cookbook and romance writer, they are shipped to Polly’s Cove, where Smithe meets a little girl who wants to save her mother, a father who is dead but perhaps not.

And another E.A. Smithe… who definitely is.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250242365
Publisher:	Tom Doherty Associates
Publication date:	06/30/2020
Series:	Borrowed Man Series , #2
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	257,267
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

GENE WOLFE (1931-2019) was a winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, multiple winner of the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award, as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Prix-Tour Apollo. In 2007, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. In 2013, he received the SFWA Grand Master Award.

Editorial Reviews

04/13/2020

With this wily, witty work, SFWA Grand Master Wolfe (1931–2019) takes readers on a final trip to the far future world of 2015’s A Borrowed Man, in which clones of long-dead writers can be borrowed from the library. Ern A. Smithe, a library clone of a deceased mystery author, is on loan to little girl Chandra Fevre and her bedridden mother, Adah, who hope for his help in deciphering a treasure map and recovering Chandra’s missing father, Dr. Fevre. Smithe, together with the clones of a cookbook author and a romance writer, moves into their haunted mansion, plans an expedition to follow the map to the mysterious Cadaver Island, and succeeds in bringing home Dr. Fevre, a scientist with grandiose dreams. But all is not as it seems, and soon Smithe has to solve Fevre’s murder. This devious, often difficult series ender pushes its Gothic aesthetic to an extreme until the plot becomes a surreal fever dream. Throughout, Wolfe raises questions about the agency of the clones, challenging whether Smithe is really any less human than his borrowers. It’s a sardonic view of human relationships on offer, leavened with a droll, punny narrative voice. Complex and clever, this last offering from Wolfe is sure to please sci-fi readers. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Wolfe, a celebrated science-fiction writer who died in 2019, stretched the genre’s boundaries in his rich and allusive work … Wolfe deploys sci-fi and gothic elements—an interplanetary portal, a sentient house that builds itself—to explore the question that lies at the heart of many of his novels: What does it mean to be human and alive?”—The New Yorker

“Wolfe fans will spend a lot of time discussing this. All the best detective stories have clues buried deep in them. You need to look back and check for the ones you missed. It’s an enigmatic final note from sci-fi’s most enigmatic author.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Ambitious, imaginative, and packed with twists and turns, Interlibrary Loan is a major achievement from a legendary writer gone too soon.”—Esquire.com

“Complex and clever, this last offering from Wolfe is sure to please sci-fi readers.”—Publishers Weekly

“A winding tale... that will have readers going back looking for details they missed the first time around. This posthumous sequel to A Borrowed Man blends a hard-boiled mystery style with a sf future.”—Library Journal


Additional praise for Gene Wolfe

“Wolfe is our Melville.”—Ursula K. Le Guin

“If any writer from within genre fiction ever merited the designation Great Author, it is surely Wolfe . . . [who] reads like Dickens, Proust, Kipling, Chesterton, Borges, and Nabokov rolled into one.”—The Washington Post Book World

“One of the literary giants of science fiction.”—The Denver Post

“Gene Wolfe is as good a writer as there is today...I feel a little bit like a musical contemporary attempting to tell people what's good about Mozart.”—The Chicago Sun-Times

“Wolfe is sf’s greatest novelist, and overall one of America’s finest.”—The Washington Post Book World

“Wolfe is a sophisticated stylist, and has more in common with writers such as Jorge Luis Borges than almost any science fiction writer both in terms of craft and themes.”—The Boston Globe

“Quite possibly the most important writer in the sf field.”—The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

From the Publisher

06/01/2020

E.A. Smithe is a reclone, imbued with the personality and memories of a dead mystery writer. Available to borrow from libraries, Smithe is sent off to the library branch of Polly's Cove, along with reclones Millie Baumgartner, a renowned cookbook author, and Rose Romain, a romance novelist. When the three arrive at Polly's Cove Public Library, Smithe is borrowed by a young girl who hopes to bring her mother back into reality, a dead father who may have been dabbling in strange dealings with Millie and Rose, and another E.A. Smithe, who turns up dead. Nothing a mystery writer cannot solve—maybe. A winding tale, essentially Smithe's train of thought as he writes the adventure in retrospect, with an abrupt ending that will have readers going back looking for details they missed the first time around. VERDICT Wolfe died in 2019 at age 87; this posthumous sequel to A Borrowed Man blends a hard-boiled mystery style with a sf future and is mostly successfully. While this can be read as a stand-alone, familiarity with the main character's background story may bring more clarity for readers.—Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton

Library Journal

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