The commercial success of The Book of the New Sunallowed Wolfe to resign from his editorial post at Plant Engineeringand devote himself to full time writing in 1983. In the following year, he published three small press collections: The Wolfe Archipelago, the punningly titled Plan[e]t Engineering (which included ‘Books in The Book of the New Sun’) and Bibliomen: Twenty Characters Waiting for a Book, a series of fictional biographies. His novel Free Live Freealso appeared as a limited edition in 1984. They were all overshadowed by the continued success of The Book of the New Sun. Resisting the temptation to question Wolfe exclusively on his tetralogy, Nancy Kress and Calvin Rich discuss Wolfe's broader concerns as a writer in an interview that first appeared in Australian Science Fiction Reviewin November 1985.

NK: There are a number of readers, and especially critics, who would say that if life is your concern, fantasy and science fiction are removed from the mainstream. What leads you to write fantasy and science fiction, rather than mainstream literature?

GW: I don't agree with those people. They assume that the ephemera of today are somehow permanent and important, that we will always have yellow buses and fire plugs. What is permanent and important is the creations of the human mind (of which buses and fire plugs are only very minor creations) and the physical world. The first involves fantasy; the second, science fiction, when you put it into a literary context. I don't think that reality can be defined as a knife edge in time. And, of course, if you actually study physics, you discover that the time-knife edge does not, in fact, exist. If you cut time finer and finer, there is no such thing as this present instant. There is only the future and the past.

NK: You stated something similar in an article that you wrote on fantasy; in it you said that the landscape of fantasy is not the landscape of myth, but the landscape of the future. How did you mean that?

GW: Well, I think that it's quite obvious that the human race is increasing in its power to alter the world in the directions that it desires.