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McMullen, Sean

Entry updated 10 July 2023. Tagged: Author.

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(1948-    ) Australian author whose first professional sf sale was "The Pharaoh's Airship" in Omega Science Digest for July/August 1986. Some of the best of his craftsmanlike stories, several of them involving Time Travel, appear in Call to the Edge (coll 1992), a notable example being "The Colours of the Masters" (March 1988 F&SF), in which a nineteenth-century Automaton, the Steampunkish clockwork "pianospectrum", is discovered to have recorded the playing of Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt; further collections, beginning with Walking to the Moon (coll 2007), followed in due course. Voices in the Light (fixup 1994) and the Ditmar Award-winning Mirrorsun Rising (1995), the two assembled and rewritten as Souls in the Great Machine (1999), begin the Greatwinter sequence, an exceedingly complex Ruined Earth narrative set 1700 years after a devastating nuclear World War Three, in a densely imagined Australia broken into many individual states linked by heliograph and wind-driven trains (see Transportation). The first Greatwinter had been generated by the Holocaust centuries earlier; but a new freezing-down is now threatened. The main story involves the gradual perfection of a kind of Computer (here called the Calculor) whose components are slaved human calculators, along with an equally gradual movement towards the comprehension of the "Call" – the title story of McMullen's first collection is here worked into sequence – which periodically entraps humans and large animals into a fatal trek southwards to the ravening sea. Later volumes of the sequence shift their grounds: The Miocene Arrow (2000) carries the narrative to a balkanized America, where Aliens immune to the Call threaten to end the human race; Eyes of the Calculor (2001) is set again in Australia. A second sf series – the Moonworlds sequence comprising Voyage of the Shadowmoon (2002), Glass Dragons (2004), Voidfarer (2006) and The Time Engine (2008) – is adventure fantasy set in a world far more deeply manipulated by transformative magics than usually found in multi-volume fantasy sequences.

McMullen first singleton of real interest, The Centurion's Empire (1998), follows its eponymous hero from Roman times (first century CE) to the Near Future, via a series of Suspended Animation hibernations followed by Sleeper Awakes revelations. A much later singleton, Generation Nemesis (2022), depicts with very considerable energy the Near Future world of 2045, after Climate Change, which may have been modulated by Homo species if we had focused our energies in time, has begun terribly to have the consequences upon human life that had long been predicted. Focusing unrelentingly on this species guilt, the narrative, where the children of survivors of earlier generations are put on trial for climate crimes (and are usually executed), is conveyed with a cold exorbitance. The rage of the young, in particular those born to parents alive in 2000, when it was not too late, is made clear.

In all his work, though particularly in his sf, McMullen's chaste chill control of narrative devices, and his reticence about too deeply exploring the psyches of his main figures, imparts to what might seem to be no more than enjoyable tales of adventure a sense of solid significance; in a manner more recently intensified by Adam Roberts, he is an author of Thought Experiments. Generation Genesis (see above) seems to mark a new dedication. McMullen's best work as a bibliographical and critical scholar of the fantastic in Australia is found in Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction (1999) with Russell Blackford and Van Ikin, which remains useful, and in Fantastical Worlds at the World's Edge: A History of New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy (2020 ebook) with Simon Litten. [PN/JC]

see also: Music.

Sean Christopher McMullen

born Sale, Victoria: 21 December 1948

works

series

Greatwinter

Moonworlds

Before the Storm

  • Before the Storm (Ormond, Victoria: Hybrid Publishers/Ford Street Publishing, 2007) [pb/Grant Gittus]
  • Changing Yesterday (Ormond, Victoria: Hybrid Publishers/Ford Street Publishing, 2011) [pb/Grant Gittus]

The Warlock's Child

  • The Burning Sea (Ormond, Victoria: Hybrid Publishers/Ford Street Publishing, 2015) with Paul Collins [The Warlock's Child: pb/Grant Gittus and Marc McBride]
  • Dragonfall Mountain(Ormond, Victoria: Hybrid Publishers/Ford Street Publishing, 2015) with Paul Collins [The Warlock's Child: pb/Grant Gittus and Marc McBride]
  • The Iron Claw (Ormond, Victoria: Hybrid Publishers/Ford Street Publishing, 2016) with Paul Collins [The Warlock's Child: pb/Marc McBride]
  • Trial by Dragons (Ormond, Victoria: Hybrid Publishers/Ford Street Publishing, 2016) with Paul Collins [The Warlock's Child: pb/Marc McBride]
  • Voyage to Morticas (Ormond, Victoria: Hybrid Publishers/Ford Street Publishing, 2016) with Paul Collins [The Warlock's Child: pb/Marc McBride]
  • The Guardians (Ormond, Victoria: Hybrid Publishers/Ford Street Publishing, 2016) with Paul Collins [The Warlock's Child: pb/Marc McBride]

individual titles

collections

nonfiction

links

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