Glass, Matthew
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
Pseudonym of Australian-born doctor and author (1954- ), in medical practice in the UK for several years, whose first novel, Ultimatum (2009), is set mostly in a Near Future America where, by 2032, Climate Change has begun radically to affect coastal areas, with an estimated 25,000,000 citizens forced to retreat from the rising seas. These dire circumstances are soon submerged in Political revelations, as the incoming Democratic president is told by his right-wing Republican predecessor that exponential feedback loops (standard science in the novel's year of publication, though scoffingly denied by real-life Republicans at that time and later) have perhaps fatally intensified the rate of climate change, which now constitutes an ultimatum to humans inhabiting the planet.
Glass's second novel, End Game (2012; vt Trigger Point 2012), focuses much more directly on tangled conflicts between America and China, with the actions of an amoral entrepreneur threatening to bring about something approaching World War Three. Fishbowl (2016) somewhat less apocalyptically predicts a very Near Future internet/Media Landscape scenario in which the eponymous platform transforms its uses into terminally de-selfed fungibles: but in the year of its publication, this was not an innovation.
Citizens Against the MX: Public Languages in the Nuclear Age (1993), is a nonfiction analysis of the American government's unsuccessful attempt to locate a "peacemaker" MX missile based in the Great Basin region centring on Nevada and Utah. [JC]
"Matthew Glass"
born Australia: 20 December 1954
works
- Ultimatum (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009) [hb/Chip Kidd]
- End Game (London: Corvus, 2012) [hb/]
- Trigger Point (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012) [vt of the above: hb/]
- Fishbowl (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016) [pb/]
nonfiction
- Citizens Against the MX: Public Languages in the Nuclear Age (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1993) [nonfiction: hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry