Bernard Wolfe

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Bernard Wolfe is an American writer born in New Haven, Connecticut August 28, 1915. He was educated at Yale University and then worked in the United States Merchant Marine during the 1930s. During World War II he was employed as a military correspondent by a number of science magazines, and then in 1946 he began to write fiction. He died of a heart attack, October 27, 1985, in Calabasas, California.

Wolfe worked briefly as secretary and bodyguard to Leon Trotsky during the latter's exile in Mexico. (Wolfe was not on duty when Trotsky was murdered.) After Trotsky's death, Wolfe remained devoted both to Trotsky's personal legacy and his political creed. The protagonist of Wolfe's 1959 novel The Great Prince Died is a very thinly-disguised portrait of Trotsky, depicted admiringly.

Although he has written several plays (most for television), it is principally for his 1952 science fiction novel Limbo that he is best remembered. Penguin Books republished this work in a slightly abridged form in 1961, and claimed that it was "the first book of science-fiction (sic) to project the present-day concept of 'cybernetics' to its logical conclusion".^[1] Taken from this viewpoint, Limbo is an early example of the New Wave movement in science fiction, and could even be argued to be a precocious predecessor of the cyberpunk literature of the 1980s.

Limbo takes place largely in the future year 1990: for that reason, its British editions are titled Limbo '90.

Much more light-hearted than Limbo is Wolfe's 1960 fantasy story, "The Never Ending Penny", originally published in Playboy. This recounts the travails of a Mexican peasant, literally with only one penny to his name, who is magically given an infinite amount of money ... but only one cent at a time. Each time he reaches into his pocket and takes out his one and only penny, an exact duplicate penny materializes in his pocket to replace the one he has taken out. By repeatedly unpocketing the coin, he is able to acquire large sums of money ... all in identical pennies.