Review of “House of Ancestors” (1968)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2025.
Read in the collection Endangered Species (1989).
A man visits a new museum of evolutionary biology, shaped like a DNA molecule where each atom—built out of glass fibre—is an exhibit.
The premise of this novelette is too weak by far, verging on fabulism for a monomythical symbolic purpose that Wolfe pulls out of his ass in the last chapter. I assume the story is meant as a jocular realization through SF of the Native American concept of a “house of ancestors” keyed into a bit of novelistic character development, but it does come not off the ground.