Between 1985 and the publication of Larry McCaffery's interview in Science Fiction Studiesin 1988, Wolfe published Soldier of the Mist(1986), an historical fantasy set in ancient Greece, which won a Best Fantasy Novel Award from Locus, The Urth of the New Sun(1987), a coda to The Book of the New Sun, and There Are Doors(1988), an intertextual tale of obsessive love. Here, McCaffery elicits one of the most comprehensive insights into Wolfe's preoccupations as a writer of such varied fiction.

LM: Could you discuss what sorts of things have drawn you towards writing SF? Do you find there are certain formal advantages in writing outside the realm of ‘mainstream’ fiction, maybe a freedom that allows you more room for exploring the issues you wish to develop?

GW: It's not so much a matter of ‘advantages’ as sf appealing to my natural cast of mind, to my literary imagination. The only way I know to write is to write the kind of thing I would like to read myself, and when I do that it usually winds up being classified as sf or ‘science fantasy’, which is what I call most of my work. Incidentally, I'd argue that sf represents literature's real mainstream. What we now normally consider the mainstream – socalled realistic fiction – is a small literary genre, fairly recent in origin, which is likely to be relatively short-lived. When I look back at the foundations of literature, I see literary figures who, if they were alive today, would probably be members of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Homer? He would certain belong to the SFWA. So would Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare. That tradition is literature's mainstream, and it has been what has grown out of that tradition which has been labelled sf or whatever label you want to use.

LM: That's why I began by asking if you weren't attracted to the freedom offered by sf – it's only been since the rise of the novel in the 18th century that writers have more or less tried to limit themselves to describing the ordinary world around them …

GW: It's a matter of whether you're content to focus on everyday events or whether you want to try to encompass the entire universe.