Austen, Catherine
Entry updated 3 April 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1965- ) Canadian author, almost exclusively for younger readers and the Young Adult audience, most of her work being nonfantastic; the time machine in Walking Backwards (2009) is a delusion on the part of the protagonist's grieving father. Of sf interest is All Good Children (2011), set in a Dystopian Near Future world about to enforce upon its young a Cultural Engineering treatment whose effect will be to turn them into psychic Zombies; the young protagonist and his family escape New Middletown, the town (see Zone) where they have been immured, and find a new world beyond. The reference to the seminal Middletown: A Study in American Culture (1929) by Robert S Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd is clearly meant to be registered. [JC]
Catherine Austen
born Newcastle, New Brunswick: 26 December 1965
works (highly selected)
- Walking Backwards (Victoria, British Columbia: Orca Book Publishers, 2009) [pb/]
- All Good Children (Victoria, British Columbia: Orca Book Publishers, 2011) [hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry