Burnside, John
Entry updated 17 June 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1955-2024) Scottish poet, journalist and author, active from the mid-1980s. The protagonist of his first novel, The Dumb House (1997), narrates the tale in a voice occasionally evocative of the first-person protagonist of Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory (1984); with Mad-Scientist intensity, he describes his attempt to raise his own children entirely deprived of any external access to language (see Education in SF; Linguistics), with terrible consequences. In The Glister (2008), after a chemical plant has closed down in Innertown, mysterious illnesses afflict the inhabitants of the village, a Pollution that becomes supernaturally intense in the nearby woods [for Into the Woods see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below].
Burnside is of direct interest for Havergey (2017), a Near Future Utopia set on the eponymous Scottish Island in 2056, a few decades after a series of planet-wide Disasters, mostly in the form of plagues, has reduced the world's population by 90%. A visitor to Havergey has arrived from 2017 by Time Travel; the Time Machine that conveys him into the future is known as a TARDIS. He is then orthodoxly conducted through its Gaia-influenced ideal society (the tale is intermittently stiff-kneed, as typical of twenty-first century work by Mainstream Writers of SF). Seemingly convinced of Havergey's bona fides, he remains there for good. [JC]
John Burnside
born Dunfermline, Scotland: 19 March 1955
died Corby, Northamptonshire: 29 May 2024
works (highly selected)
- The Dumb House (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997) [hb/Carel Willink]
- The Glister (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008) [hb/]
- Havergey (Toller Fratrum, Dorset: Little Toller Books, 2017) [in the publisher's Monograph series: hb/Norman Ackroyd]
links
previous versions of this entry