Bangs, Elly
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1986- ) US playwright and author, first active as by Elliott Bangs, their first play being "Magnified and Sanctified" (first performed 2004 FringeACT Festival, Seattle), in which the ending of the Cold War leads possibly to a new apocalypse. Their first novel, The Loiterers (2011) as by Elliott Bangs, complexly describes in Young Adult terms a Near Future Dystopian America transmogrified into a single deeply Polluted continent-spanning City, whose inhabitants live in the knowledge that an illness no one understands the origin of kills anyone who reaches middle age.
Of rather greater interest, Unity (2021) depicts, even more complexly, a Near Future world some point after several Disasters – World War Three, a savage Pandemic known as the Blood Rain, Climate Change, Dystopian tyrannies – have caused planetary havoc. At this point, a Nanotechnology-fomented Grey Goo plague threatens to end all life. The numbingly comprehensive depiction of terminal assaults that marks the tale is irradiated, however, by several interweaving narratives, the central one of these describing the long trek of a young woman named Danae in search of the prepotent gestalt (see Posthuman) from which she had been severed and which, once fully empowered, may save the planet. Her bitter isolation and subsequent immersion in a golden gestalt may suggest some reason for giving her a name resembling Danaë. [JC]
Elly Bangs
born Salish Sea region, Washington: 1986
works
- The Loiterers (Scotts Valley, California: CreateSpace, 2011) as by Elliott Bangs [pb/]
- Unity (San Francisco, California: Tachyon, 2021) [pb/Elizabeth Story]
links
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