Lively, Adam
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1961- ) UK author, son of Penelope Lively (1931- ) [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], in whose first novel, Blue Fruit (1988), an eighteenth-century traveller in the Far East takes ship back to an Alternate World version of twentieth-century America, though the new world makes little impression on him (see Mainstream Writers of SF), as his letters demonstrate. The Burnt House (1989) contains many references to sf, but is not in fact a tale of the fantastic. A more recent novel, also epistolary, Sing the Body Electric: A Novel in Five Movements (1993), is set in the year 2064, but eschews any normal sf entailments in its vision of a Utopia/theme park where, within its nineteenth-century ambience, a blocked composer (see Music) searches for relief; the Invention of a sound machine that generates music from neural signals impacts on the protagonist. [JC]
Adam Lively
born Swansea, Wales: 20 January 1961
works
- Blue Fruit (London: Simon and Schuster, 1988) [hb/John Kemp]
- The Burnt House (London: Simon and Schuster, 1989) [hb/John Kemp]
- Sing the Body Electric: A Novel in Five Movements (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993) [hb/]
nonfiction
- Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998) [nonfiction: hb/David Hiscock]
links
previous versions of this entry