Wolfe's interview with Elliott Swanson, first published in Interzone(Autumn 1986), follows the mass-market publication of Free Live Freein 1985. Here, in part, Wolfe indicates the differences between the Ziesing small press edition and the American and British editions of his complex, transtemporally plotted novel.

When future scholars look back in some academic quest to determine the point where science fiction made the jump to literature, one of the writers they'll have to contend with is Gene Wolfe. Born in 1931, he has recently abandoned the editing of a technical magazine for full-time fiction writing. His first stories were published in the 1960s, but it was not until the appearance of the first volume of The Book of the New Sun(The Shadow of the Torturer) in 1980 that twenty years of writing turned into an ‘overnight success’.

ES: Many writers with scientific backgrounds stick mainly to ‘hard’ sf. As an ex-engineer, how did you dodge the stereotype?

GW: Actually, I have written a certain amount of hard science fiction. I think that someone like myself who has done a good deal of practical engineering has an appreciation of the difficulties of the thing. I don't find myself very comfortable with characters who build time machines in their basements or whip out super-powered lasers from broken frying pans. I don't believeit can be done. I did manage to learn that things that should work in theory don't always work in practice, and that most of an engineer's really difficult problems are with people and politics.

ES: The numbing effect of technology seems to be a recurring theme in your writing. How do you see technology affecting our short-term future?

GW: Fundamentally, as we let it. Technology is a tool, not a god or a devil. Radio and television could have been the greatest things since the printing press; but we want elevator music, propaganda, and sales pitches, so that's what we're getting, for the most part. Creating and using technology requires a great deal of training and education, but the public is being sold on the idea that technology does away with the need for education – why learn to spell when you can get a spelling-checker for your word processor?