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Boudinot, Ryan

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

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(1972-    ) US author, born in the US Virgin Islands, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Civilization" for McSweeney's #14 in 2004, set in a savagely Satirized Near Future America where teenagers are forced to ritually murder their parents; also of interest was "Cardiology" in Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy Volume III (anth 2008) edited by Kevin Brockmeier and Matthew Cheney. The Littlest Hitler: Stories (coll 2006) assembles tales, mostly set in the present, but through distorting lenses (see Fabulation); Misconception (2009) is nonfantastic. Blueprints of the Afterlife (2012) is set in a Near Future America poisonously transfigured by a domino-effect succession of Disasters, Ecological rape and a full spectrum of the consequences of Climate Change. The surviving world exists in a kind of limbo, where it is difficult to distinguish the old earth from Virtual Reality. This constructed reality (there may be a Godgame being played from the skies) is seen Satirically: Manhattan, which has been destroyed (see New York), is replicated on an Island in Puget Sound, Washington; people (as they do not quite do in 2012) rent their bodies to Big Pharma, growing drugs and organs for food money; phalanxes of Clones theatrically mime the intimate moments of those who seem to remain real. The gonzo incessancy of the tale is reminiscent of the work of Philip K Dick from a previous generation, and of more recent authors like Chuck Palahniuk or Gary Shteyngart. An underlying humaneness, however, distinguished Boudinot from his models. [JC]

Ryan Boudinot

born St Croix, US Virgin Islands: 6 November 1972

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