Spelling with Gene Wolfe
A few weeks ago Gene Wolfe helped me win a spelling bee!
Well, to be more precise—I was on a team that, with Gene Wolfe’s aid, won a spelling bee. And, as my editor would be the first to tell you, I was the dead weight on the team. Madeline Miller and her husband Nathaniel Drake did Atlas’s share of the lifting; I contributed in the sense that the person lounging at Atlas’s feet eating grapes and occasionally making remarks like, “welp, that sure does look heavy” contributes to the whole sky-upholding business.
The event in question was the 25th Annual First Literacy Corporate Spelling Bee, a charity spelling competition held every year to sponsor First Literacy, a Boston-area adult literacy and education charity that does excellent work. Madeline, Nat, and I were all on a team of local authors sponsored by State Street—we wanted to prove our worth.
Some background: Nat and I bonded over reading Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series several months before. For those of you who don’t know, BotNS has a number of virtues, including but not limited to its, shall we say, eccentric vocabulary. Wolfe builds a strange and intoxicating far-future world in surprisingly short books in part by referring to common but futuristic objects in the World of the New Sun with words that are technically English, but so obscure few readers will ever have seen them before. We recognize the words as words, but we don’t often know their referents, which leaves Wolfe room to pour new meaning into them without the standard SFF language problem in which a word like, say, steed is overburdened with alternative meanings because you want to use it to refer to telepathic flying horses or whatever but it’s also just a word that means mount, so maybe you change that initial s to a capital letter, but that’s a touch inelegant, so… Etc.
By far the most accessible example I can think of in Book of the New Sun is destrier, which as many of you probably know is a term for a medieval warhorse. Unless you’re a serious horse person, though, or a serious medieval person, you probably don’t know offhand (no Wikipedia! that’s cheating.) what a destrier’s characteristics were. So, as you read Book of the New Sun you slowly assemble the attributes of Wolfe’s destriers from context: they’re something like twenty hands high, have razor sharp fangs, armor plating, and canter at around 70 miles per hour.
The spelling bee worked in rounds: six teams to a round, with the six champions competing in a final round of six. Unlike in a standard microphone-and-spotlight spelling bee, all teams were challenged at once: each team wrote the challenge wordout on a whiteboard, then held it up for judging. Each team had two “hit points” (I know, this was a very forgiving bee)—you could miss a single word without being eliminated. When it was time for words to scored, their proper spelling was revealed via PowerPoint presentation, so the audience could tell which teams had succeeded and which failed. (Cue Chopped! snare drum.)
After each round, the unused words flashed by as the PowerPoint advanced to the next round. So, curious, we watched, trying to get a sense of what words might be forthcoming. And there, flashing past after the third or fourth round, we saw, in foot-high letters: felucca. As in the type of boat, which pops up regularly in Book of the New Sun, including in this passage (from Urth of the New Sun): “Feluccas and caravels with all sail set appeared to ride at anchor in the midchannel.” Gene Wolfe strikes again!
Nat and I applauded fiercely. The rest of the audience no doubt thought we were insane. But still: a Gene Wolfe word! In the wild! Never in a million years—not even in a spelling bee—had we expected to see that.
We won our round, and progressed to the final. Whereupon, four words in, we were confronted with the following challenge.
It sounded like: “Ooo-lon. A type of Polish cavalry. Oooo-lon.”
Nat put it together first. His eyes went wide as silver dollars and he wrote on our slate:
uhlan
As in: “I remembered the uhlan who had appeared dead until I touched his lips with the Claw, and who now seemed to me to belong to the remote past; and I remembered the man-ape, with his stump of arm, and the way Jonas’s burns had faded when I ran the Claw along their length.” (The Sword of the Lictor.) One of BotNS character Sevarian’s earliest miracles, and one of the myriad types of soldiers referenced in the battle scenes of Citadel of the Autarch. Uhlan.
We didn’t win on that word—but we were the only team other than the perennial spelling bee champions from IBM (who I must believe are Wolfe fans as well, or else Final Fantasy Tactics people) to spell it correctly, and IBM had misspelled an earlier word—which meant we were the only team on the board with both hit points remaining. We won soon after, due to attrition.
Attrition, and Gene Wolfe.
So, Mr. Wolfe, who I’ve never yet met but one day hope to: my hat is off, sir. My hat is off to you and your wacky, weird, and wonderful thesaurus.
