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Duffy, Maureen

Entry updated 18 March 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1933-    ) UK author several of whose books focus on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced (as he has acknowledged clearly) Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988), and similar later works by Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and John Lanchester. Scarborough Fear (1982) as by D M Cayer is a supernatural fiction. In general Duffy's novels tend to explore marginalized figures, many of them women viewed from a Feminist angle, like Alchemy (2004), whose contemporary protagonist becomes psychically entwined in a case of seventeenth-century witchcraft; the male protagonists of The Orpheus Trail (2009) suffer similar immersions in worlds whose beat is chthonic. Of more sf interest, the protagonist of Gor Saga (1981) – televised as First Born in 1988 – is the child of a gorilla mother fertilized by human semen (see Apes as Human), who grows into articulate adulthood in an alienating UK. In Times Like These (2013), set in the Near Future up to about 2030, portrays an independent Scotland, a demoralized England, and a culture that has begun to lose its tolerance of "deviant" behaviour.

Duffy's nonfictional The Erotic World of Faery (1972) takes a Freudian view of the development of the topos of Faerie from medieval times to the present. The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn 1640-89 (1977) is an engaged study of Aphra Behn. [JC]

see also: Anthropology; Genetic Engineering; Women SF Writers.

Maureen Patricia Duffy

born Worthing, Sussex: 21 October 1933

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