Brewer, Gene
Entry updated 12 May 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1937- ) US author of the K-PAX sequence featuring a protagonist calling himself "prot" (lower case, rhyming with "boat") who claims to his psychiatrist "Gene Brewer" in the ward where he has been detained that he is a visiting Alien, 337 years old, from the planet K-PAX. Throughout the initial trilogy – which comprises K-PAX (1995), On a Beam of Light (2001; vt K-PAX II: On a Beam of Light 2001) and K-PAX III: The Worlds of Prot (2002), all assembled with an additional story as K-PAX Omnibus, Featuring Prot's Report: The Trilogy (2003) – this claim is presented as an Equipoise between delusion or scam and literal truth. The Satirical power of the sequence derives largely from the contrast between "prot"'s possibly faux-naive wonder at the violent irrationality of Earth society and his descriptions of the Utopia which he claims to have left. Brewer was associate producer as well as scriptwriter for the film version of the first instalment, K-PAX (2001) directed Iain Softley.
The equipoisal balance is abandoned in K-Pax IV: A New Visitor from the Constellation Lyra (2007), in which a gorilla-like female from planet K-PAX comes to Earth and threatens to take 10,000 humans back to her home world. In K-Pax V: The Coming of the Bullocks (2014), visitors from yet another planet declare their intention of eliminating humanity should we fail to clean up our act. [JC]
Gene R Brewer
born Muncie, Indiana: 4 July 1937
works
series
K-PAX
- K-PAX (New York: St Martin's Press, 1995) [K-PAX: hb/Bob Mannel]
- On a Beam of Light (New York: St Martin's Press, 2001) [K-PAX: hb/]
- On a Beam of Light: K-PAX II (London: Bloomsbury, 2001) [vt of the above: K-PAX: pb/Andy Vella]
- K-PAX III: The Worlds of Prot (London: Bloomsbury, 2002) [K-PAX: pb/]
- K-PAX: The Trilogy (London: Bloomsbury, 2003) [omni of the above three plus story "Prot's Report": K-PAX: pb/William Webb]
- Creating K-PAX – Or – Are You Sure You Want to Be a Writer? (Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris, 2005) [nonfiction: K-PAX: pb/]
- K-Pax IV: A New Visitor from the Constellation Lyra (Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris, 2007) [K-PAX: pb/]
- K-PAX Redux: A Play, Screenplay, and a Report (Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris, 2007) [coll: K-PAX: pb/]
- K-Pax V: The Coming of the Bullocks (Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris, 2014) [K-PAX: pb/]
links
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