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Adams, Sean

Entry updated 19 June 2023. Tagged: Author.

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(?   -    ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Famous Detective and his Telepathy Goggles" in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet for April 2010. He is of strong sf interest for his first novel, The Heap (2020), which concentratedly depicts a collapsing Near Future America through the literal collapse of Los Verticalés, a 500-storey apartment building; this, before its fall, serves as a kind of aliquot sample of a class-ridden, wealth-obsessed Dystopian future, with the poor (known as the Windowless) occupying the centre of each floor, and the rich (the Windowed) the expansive periphery. This vertical icon of cultural Disaster evokes earlier similarly concentrated sf novels set in enormous Keeps, like Robert Silverberg's The World Inside (fixup 1971); J G Ballard's High-Rise (1975); the ability of different classes of inhabitants literally not to see one another shares characteristics with China Miéville's The City & the City (2009). After its collapse, the structure, now an entangled cavity-ridden Kipple-choked Labyrinth, more closely evokes fantasy topoi [for Babel, Edifice, Little Big see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The plot, which adheres to an almost inevitable American family-reunion model through a brother's search for his sibling in the ruins, somewhat subdues the harsher Satirical implications of the world depicted.

Adams should not be confused with the designer and nonfiction author Sean Adams. [JC]

Sean Adams

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