Schenck, Bradley W
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Artist, Author.
(? - ) US illustrator, Games designer and author, who has also written as by Morno. Along with his early work in Role Playing Game design, he published at least two stories of genre interest, beginning with "The Forest of Flame" (April 1977 The Dragon Magazine) as by Morno, with many later texts of various sorts [not listed below] for the fantasy game Arduin, and was involved for many years in early and some later stages of the evolution of computer Games (see also Videogame). His work as artist and illustrator is clearly influenced by Celtic models; of sf relevance is his "Pulp-O-Mizer" web page [see links below] which allows visitors to design and download amusing Pulp-pastiche sf covers.
Schenck is of greatest sf interest for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: A Novel of Retropolis (2017), a tale told in Pulp language and making use of pulp venues, though the central premise shaping the mise en scene is a literalizing of the kind of Transportation-fixated future promulgated mainly through the 1939 World's Fair (see New York); gear from the SF Megatext – from Antigravity to Ray Guns to Robots – is liberally strewn. This sanitized World of Tomorrow is here Satirized, though mildly, and whiffs of Steampunk add verisimilitude to the Retropolis (ie Metropolis) scene. Echoes of Fritz Lang's Metropolis are evident, but do not much shape the tale. [JC]
Bradley W Schenck
born California
works (highly selected)
- Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: A Novel of Retropolis (New York: Tor, 2017) [illus/hb/Bradley W Schenck]
links
previous versions of this entry