Bell, Madison Smartt
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1957- ) US author, most of whose work has been nonfantastic. His second novel Waiting for the End of the World (1985) is, however, an exercise in intermittently postmodern Fantastika (see Postmodernism and SF); its protagonist, who speaks with the devil, plans to explode a nuclear weapon in New York, but instead of accomplishing this goal achieves a personal Transcendence through spontaneous combustion, successfully willing his body to explode. The protagonist of Behind the Moon (2017) – having undergone a rite of passage deep Underground, where she has communed with supernaturally-evocative cave paintings (see Prehistoric SF) – finds herself entering a kind of Parallel World, where she consummates her life. [JC]
Madison Smartt Bell
born Nashville, Tennessee: 1 August 1957
works (highly selected)
- Waiting for the End of the World (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1985) [hb/David Shannon]
- Behind the Moon (San Francisco, California: City Lights Publishers, 2017) [hb/]
links
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