Christie, Michael
Entry updated 8 April 2024. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) Canadian professional skateboarder and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Stinking Creep" (July 1999 Three-Lobed Burning Eye), set in a coercively sanitized Near Future Vancouver. His second novel Greenwood (2019) focuses on nonfantastic dramas of enforced migration of the original Greenwood family, whose latest member may have inherited Greenwood Island, home of the last stand of climax vegetation on the planet; these narratives are ringed by a frame story set in Near Future 2038, after Climate Change has exposed trees elsewhere to a planetwide fungus, which destroys them. The historical sections of the tale gain resonance through specific references to John Steinbeck (1902-1968), author of The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Sharpening the Satirical vision of 2038 as a near-final stage in the suicide of Homo sapiens are scenes in which the wealthy – complete with their own private medical staffs, as in the real world – spend their leisure time in Keeps close to a surviving old-growth forest. The tale is set in Canada, and evokes the inimical Canadian Wilderness analyzed by, among others, Margaret Atwood in her nonfiction Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972). [JC]
Michael Christie
born Thunder Bay, Ontario
works (selected)
- Greenwood (Toronto, Ontario: McClelland and Stewart, 2019) [hb/public domain images]
links
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