The Venerable Wolfe, part 1

Vatican, AD 2200. First, there was Saint Chesterton. Then Tolkien. Now, a determined Devil’s Advocate races to block the canonization of the most infamous author of all: the Venerable Gene Wolfe.

Written by Andrew Gillsmith

Edited by Yuval Kordov

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If the Santarixarum Tower conformed to poetic rather than practical design, the offices of the Devil’s Advocate would have been located on its lowest level as opposed to its highest, and Severian’s domain would be as lightless and cold and silent as Dante’s Ninth Circle. But the Santarixarum, like all such towers in the Eternal City, was built upside down, extending God-only-knew how far beneath the Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints. 

Its administrative offices were clustered close to the surface–higher, in other words, than the various levels that were dedicated to the saints themselves. On this day, those offices were disagreeably hot, owing to an HVAC system that was either beyond its functional lifespan or, more likely, possessed. Severian had written the Governor General about it on several occasions without receiving a response. A pleasant but fleeting thought crossed his mind: the image of the man frozen in ice up to his waist.

Severian pressed a small button on his desk, dimming the simulated sunlight in his office to a  silver moonglow. It did nothing to lower the temperature, but it did make the heat more bearable, somehow, if only because it distracted him from a particularly vexatious case: the canonization of classic science fiction author, Gene Wolfe.

He sighed and wiped a bead of sweat from his brow. In some respects, The Venerable Wolfe had already passed the most difficult test on the path to sainthood. It was universally agreed that he had lived a life of heroic virtue. The fact that he had labored for half a century at an American packaged goods company without once threatening violence was sufficient evidence of this, but it was backed up by countless interviews with friends, family members, colleagues, and schoolmates, none of whom had a single negative word to say about the man. He was praised by all who knew him for his generosity, his compassion, his patience, and his unyielding temperance. This, of course, only made Severian more suspicious. It boggled the mind that a writer, of all creatures under the sun, could exhibit such charity.

But to be a saint required evidence of more than mere holiness. In fact, it required miracles–at least two of them. Wolfe’s first miracle had been a doozie: the conversion, practically overnight, of millions upon millions of science fiction fans. Any revival on such a vast scale would be impressive, of course, but Wolfe’s achievement was even greater for the fact that science fiction fans were known to be degenerates of the worst sort. It all started with the Peoria Worldcon of 2176. Science fiction conventions normally kicked off with the gluttonous consumption of pepperoni pizza and high fructose corn syrup before devolving into depraved bacchanals that would make a Roman emperor blush. But in Peoria, Wolfe’s hometown and the site of his shrine, participants instead subsisted entirely on Pringles, the paraboloid potato chips whose canister Wolfe had invented and which bore his mustachioed image. The effect on attendees was almost Eucharistic. Not since the harrowing of Hell had so many lost souls been recovered.