Adrian, Chris
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1970- ) US medical doctor and author who began publishing short fiction in 1997, some of it of interest as demonstrations of his instinct for Equipoise; much of this material has been assembled as A Better Angel: Stories (coll 2008). His first novel, Gob's Grief (2000), similarly shifts among genres; set during the American Civil War, it follow's its protagonist's search for his dead identical twin – he is one of several characters who become too intimate with their Doppelgangers – through ghastly scenes of battle and later in New York, sometimes in the company of Walt Whitman (1819-1892), whose poetic afflatus powers the vast machine Gob had manufactured on Steampunk lines to bring back or reinvoke the dead (see Identity), and sometimes attended by inhuman figures evocative of the works of H P Lovecraft (see Horror in SF). His second novel, The Children's Hospital (2006), also flickers amongst genres, sometimes uneasily, in its depiction of the fate of the eponymous hospital, which has been constructed as an ark-like Keep capable of remaining afloat on a world-inundating flood (see End of the World); while an indeterminate plague Pandemic reduces the remaining adults to ash, the children are miraculously cured. The Great Night (2011) is an Urban Fantasy (in the sense described in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below, which see also for Faerie and Underliers below) set Underground, beneath Buena Vista Park in San Francisco (see California), a land of Faerie inhabited by the chthonic figures portrayed in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (performed circa 1595; 1600), Underlier figures who commandingly interact with contemporary mortals in our world. The New World (2015) with Eli Horowitz explores problematics of Identity through the eyes of a man whose head is in Cryonic storage, and who is (or who is not) awake; the Hypertext version was created by Horowitz. [JC]
Chris Adrian
born Washington, District of Columbia: 7 November 1970
works
- Gob's Grief (New York: Broadway Books, 2000) [hb/Debra Lill]
- The Children's Hospital (San Francisco, California: McSweeney's Books, 2006) [hb/uncredited]
- A Better Angel: Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) [coll: hb/]
- The Great Night (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) [hb/Marc Yankus]
- The New World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) with Eli Horowitz [hb/]
links
- Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- The Encyclopedia of Fantasy: Faerie; Underliers; Urban Fantasy.
- Picture Gallery
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