Zumas, Leni
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1972- ) US academic and author whose first book, Farewell Navigator: Stories (coll 2008), contains relatively few outright examples of Fantastika but (see Postmodernism and SF) often admixes an almost suburban mundanity with prescient flashes of the exorbitance of the world. Her first novel The Listeners (2012) slightly less successfully conflates elements of Horror in SF with the disintegrating psyche of a rock star in crisis, with the conventions of the latter mode controlling the mix. Zumas is of specific sf interest for Red Clocks (2018), set in a Dystopian Near Future America where the overwhelming power of Christian fundamentalism (see Religion; Women in SF) has led to the sexual repression of women. Necessary echoes of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) have been noted, though the Oregon world here depicted, though unremarkably tied to the central premise, is marginally less prison-like: a "Pink Wall" has been built, all the same, to prevent females from escaping to Canada. [JC]
Leni Zumas
born Washington, District of Columbia: 1972
works
- The Listeners (Portland, Oregon: Tin House Books, 2012) [pb/]
- Red Clocks (New York: Little, Brown, 2018) [hb/Lauren Harms]
collections
- Farewell Navigator: Stories (New York: Grove Press/Open City Books, 2008) [coll: pb/]
links
previous versions of this entry