Buckley-Archer, Linda
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1958- ) UK scriptwriter for BBC Radio and Television, and author of the Young Adult Gideon Trilogy beginning with Gideon the Cutpurse (2006), where sf devices – Antigravity and a Time Machine – are utilized in the frame story and throughout, initially to transport its young protagonists to 1763 London. Here they meet Gideon, their machine is stolen by his secret-sharer brother the Tar Man, who ends up in the twenty-first century, and they are trapped. Further volumes introduce their parents, who plunge into the wrong decade; as the plots thicken, hints of Alternate Histories become relevant, and a Changewar threatens. A singleton, The Many Lives of John Stone (2015), whose long-lived eponym survives 350 years from the era of Versailles (see Immortality), reconfigures some structural elements of the Gideon books, but Stone's relationship with a contemporary adolescent, who has been reading his centuries of journal-keeping, dominates the tale. [JC]
Linda Buckley-Archer
born Sussex: 1958
works
series
The Gideon Trilogy
- Gideon the Cutpurse (London: Simon and Schuster, 2006) [Gideon Trilogy: hb/Blacksheep]
- The Time Travelers (New York: Turtleback Books, 2007) [vt of the above: Gideon Trilogy: hb/James Jean]
- The Tar Man (London: Simon and Schuster, 2007) [Gideon Trilogy: hb/Blacksheep]
- The Time Thief (New York: Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2008) [vt of the above: Gideon Trilogy: hb/James Jean]
- Time Quake (London: Simon and Schuster, 2009) [Gideon Trilogy: hb/Paul Young]
- The Time Quake (New York: Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2009) [vt of the above: Gideon Trilogy: hb/James Jean]
- The Complete Gideon Trilogy (New York: Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2014) [omni of the above three under their vts: Gideon Trilogy: hb/James Jean]
- The Time Quake (New York: Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2009) [vt of the above: Gideon Trilogy: hb/James Jean]
individual titles
- The Many Lives of John Stone (New York: Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2015) [hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry