See, Carolyn
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Critic.
(1934-2016) US academic, critic and author, most of whose fiction was nonfantastic and most of which, including her two sf novels, is set in Los Angeles (see California). Golden Days (1986), which shifts into the Near Future only in its closing chapters, portrays the doomed private lives of a range of characters as crises, seemingly beyond their ken, escalate into World War Three. The last part of the novel carries a few surviving, rather self-righteous women from early sections into a nightmarish Holocaust landscape, where they begin to create a new post-phallocentric Ecologically-sound world (see Feminism; Gaia; Utopia; Women in SF). There Will Never Be Another You (2006) perhaps less powerfully depicts a world in the grips of an unending War, again just beyond the ken of the various characters portrayed; this time round, the final devastation comes in the form of a deadly epidemic, which seems about to ravage the cast and the city, and perhaps the world.
Of See's nonfiction, "The Mirrored Ball in the Hollywood Dance Hall: the English Expatriates", her portion of Literary Exiles & Refugees in Los Angeles (coll/anth 1988 chap) with Ehrhard Bahr, interestingly discusses various figures, including Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh, and their responses to California. [JC]
Carolyn Penelope See
born Pasadena, California: 13 January 1934
died Santa Monica, California: 13 July 2016
works (selected)
- Golden Days (New York: McGraw-Hill Company, 1986) [hb/Fred Marcellino]
- There Will Never Be Another You (New York: Random House, 2006) [hb/Robbin Schiff]
nonfiction
- Literary Exiles & Refugees in Los Angeles (Los Angeles, California: University of California/William Andrew Clark Memorial Library, 1988) with Ehrhard Bahr [nonfiction: chap: coll/anth: contents first presented 14 April 1984 Clark Library: pb/nonpictorial]
about the author
- Albert E Stone. Literary Aftershocks: American Writers, Readers, and the Bomb (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994) [nonfiction: pp89-94: hb/Jody L Ouellette]
links
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