In the eight years between his interview with Edwards and the publication of his correspondence with Joan Gordon in Science Fiction Reviewfor Summer 1981, Wolfe had become a respected writer of speculative fiction. His shorter works had been nominated consistently for both Hugo and Nebula Awards throughout the 1970s and he won the Best Novella Nebula for ‘The Death of Doctor Island’ in 1973. Gordon's interview follows the publication of Wolfe's first collection, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories(1981), and The Shadow of the Torturer (1980), his fourth novel after Operation Ares(1968), Peace(1975) (which received the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award in 1977) and The Devil in a Forest(1976). Importantly, The Shadow of the Torturerwas the first novel to earn Wolfe a wider audience. Marketed largely as a fantasy in both the US and the UK, the first volume of The Book of the New Sunshared in the rising commercial success of popular fantasy fiction by writers including Stephen Donaldson and Terry Brooks. It is, however, a much more ambitious and literate work than any of its contemporaries, a fact recognised within the genre and evidenced by its receipt of the Howard Memorial Award and the World Fantasy Award in 1981, and the British Science Fiction Award in 1982. In the interview that follows, Joan Gordon attempts to draw out the impulses and qualities that make Wolfe's fiction unique.

One of Gene Wolfe's novellas, ‘Seven American Nights’, which appears in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, illustrates the special nature of Gene's writing. It is a mix of Oriental arabesque and sordid realism, of dreams and reality, speculation and character development, ambiguity and clarity. No one else could have done it. If I tell you the plot concerns a traveller to the future America after it has fallen, you may think of all the after-the-holocaust SF novels you have read – it is nothing like them. America here is not a charred wilderness peopled by solitary rugged individualists learning the lay of the new land. Instead it is a decaying city filled with subjected souls and haunted by the ghosts of its former strength. The metaphorical and literal worlds of ‘Seven American Nights’ are equally alive, to us and to the protagonist.