I was 22 when I met Gene Wolfe. The last volume in The Book of the New Sun, The Citadel of the Autarch, had just been published, and I had been reading his fiction since my teens.

I was as impressed and delighted by the Book of the New Sun as I was intimidated by it. Wolfe's use of language, the grand sweep of his story, the way he used science fiction to illuminate ideas and people and to stretch my mind in ways it had never been stretched before, the way he played with memory and gave us a perfectly reliable unreliable narrator – all these things thrilled me. (Years later, Michael Dirda of the Washington Post would call it "The greatest fantasy novel written by an American," and he would be right.)

I was a young journalist, and I asked for and was given an interview with Wolfe. I do not know what I expected, but whatever I imagined the author of those glittering, dangerous stories to have been, I was not expecting the genial gentleman I met. He was a former potato crisp engineer and magazine editor, and he reminded me of a sweeter-natured, rotunder Sergeant Bilko. Oddly, perhaps, given the difference in our ages and temperaments, we became friends. And now, almost 30 years later, we are still friends and I am still a fan.

I've met too many of my heroes, and these days I avoid meeting the few I have left, because the easiest way to stop having heroes is to meet them, or worse, have dinner with them. But Gene Wolfe remains a hero to me. He's just turned 80, looks after his wife Rosemary, and is still writing deep, complex, brilliant fiction that slips between genres. He's my hero because he keeps trying new ways of writing and because he remains as kind and as patient with me as he was when I was almost a boy. He's the finest living male American writer of SF and fantasy – possibly the finest living American writer. Most people haven't heard of him. And that doesn't bother Gene in the slightest. He just gets on with writing the next book.