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I have always been in awe of people with an equal aptitude for the practical, the numerical and the mathematical as well as for skillful flights of fancy. Gene Wolfe is a mechanical engineer by training, but a man who, at least as exemplified by this book, is the fantasy/science fiction equivalent of a Faulkner.

On the face of it, it is almost impossible to classify Peace as a book of fantasy. So much of it is rooted so squarely, and so beautifully, in small-town mid-America, that it could simply be a book of Literature with a capital L. It might well be the ultimate book to hand to someone who dismisses all speculative fiction as a child of a lesser literary god. It is possible to have a science fiction book be lyrical, philosophical, intricate, possessed of both enough depth to drown in and enough wit to do so while smiling. Peace is such a book.

It is full of wonderful snatched flights of whimsy and of fancy -- the porcelain teapot adorned with the faces of its previous owners, and which, when filled up, will break; the transformation of an every day neat and tidy store into an Antique Bookshop, with gold leaf lettering on the door which instantly "goes from bright newness to an antique patina that might have graced the Great Chalice of Antioch"; the aboriginal people who, ten thousand years ago, crossed the Bering Straits into what would become America and "...eventually settled at Indianola, Indianapolis, Indian Lake, and various other places at which point they were forced to become Indians in order to justify the place names."

This is a writer's book, in a way. It is brimming with the kind of language which will find an echo in anyone who's ever written a word, as well as with insights into how the writer thinks, how he is born, how he is made, how he changes the world.

The protagonist of Peace, (while not himself a writer) is a creature of brooding creativity of which he himself may be almost unaware but which enables him to give the book its fantastical edge. It allows him to live in a house which is infinitely larger inside than out, and whose many rooms reflect not so much the genius of an architect but rather the living memories inside his own mind. He moves freely between the future and the past, talking as an adult to people long dead whom he knew as a boy -- even asking advice from an old doctor as to what he should do when he gets his stroke many years in the future.

The reader is never quite sure who this man is, or where precisely he came from, or what exactly he is trying to do -- but there is a little of all of us in him, and one way or another he takes up every reader and carries them all through into his timeless realm with him.

Writers have been described as lying professionally for a living -- the better the lie, the greater the writer's laurels. Gene Wolfe himself has one of his characters say,

"...To you, I am a fraud... To myself I am an artist, shaping the past instead of the future. I write, yes. My hand moves across the paper carrying my pen, and there are words and I try to tell myself they have all come from me.... the world shapes itself, I find, very fast, to what I write. Or I write more than I know -- perhaps all of us who do what I do."

Alma A. Hromic, addicted (in random order) to coffee, chocolate and books, has a constant and chronic problem of "too many books, not enough bookshelves". When not collecting more books and avidly reading them (with a cup of coffee at hand), she keeps busy writing her own. Her latest fantasy work, a two-volume series entitled Changer of Days, was published by HarperCollins.