Boyle, T Coraghessan
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1948- ) US author who signs his more recent work as T C Boyle; very much better known for his non-fantastic work – novels like World's End (1987) or The Road to Wellville (1993) – than for his relatively rare (and recent) sf. A Friend of the Earth (2000) is set in a 2025 Southern California devastated by Climate Change, and follows the late years of an entrepreneur turned Ecology activist, who finds himself safeguarding a small but emblematic Zoo in a precarious Keep. The Terranauts (2016) is set in an experimental late twentieth century biosphere (again see Keep) whose inhabitants attempt to survive self-sufficiently under conditions described with a near-fantastic intensity that seems almost literally predictive. Several stories to be found in After the Plague: Stories (coll 2001) are of sf interest, including the Post-Holocaust title story, which is set after a devastating Pandemic, and other Near Future tales; later examples include "Are We Not Men?" (7 November 2016 The New Yorker), about Genetic Engineering and designer babies. In Talk to Me (2021), a successful attempt to teach a chimpanzee to talk (see Apes as Human; Linguistics) backfires, though only in a sense, when the two males and the human male's female partner begin to cohabit (see Sex). [JC]
see also: Mainstream Writers of SF.
Thomas Coraghessan Boyle
born Peekskill, New York: 2 December 1948
works (highly selected)
- A Friend of the Earth (New York: Viking Books, 2000) [hb/Marty Blake]
- The Terranauts (New York: Ecco, 2016) [hb/]
- Talk to Me (New York: Ecco, 2021) [hb/]
collections
- Descent of Man (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1979) [coll: hb/Gery Hoover]
- Greasy Lake and Other Stories (New York: Viking Books, 1985) [coll: hb/]
- After the Plague: Stories (New York: Viking Books, 2001) [coll: hb/Paul Buckley]
- The Relive Box and Other Stories (New York: HarperCollins Ecco, 2017) as T C Boyle [coll: hb/Jim Tierney]
links
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