Review of “Mute” (2002)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2026.
A bus takes two siblings to their father’s house.
The siblings talk about being the last people in the world, but obviously that’s not true. There’s the bus driver, who knows them. The story has to be read symbolically. I choose to read it as a Christian allegory set in a popular version of Hell where it is the voice of Yahweh that is muted, in accordance with the mythological snippet used in the title of Ted Chiang’s “Hell Is the Absence of God” (2001).