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Dyer, Thoraiya

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

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(?   -    ) Australian veterinarian, competitive archer, and author of over fifty speculative fiction stories.

Dyer's first published story, "Night Heron's Curse" in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine for November 2008, was a fantasy that drew on Indigenous Australian culture. Subsequent stories moved between sf and fantasy. Her collection Asymmetry (coll 2013) contains four unlinked stories, of which the Werewolf tale "After Hours" displays the influence of Dyer's veterinary training.

In dozens of stories, Dyer has shown herself skilled at quickly making and discarding fascinating little worlds. Recurring themes include a near-future Earth devastated by unfettered use of geoengineering technologies to control Climate Change as well as, more idiosyncratically, the importance of healthy gut bacteria. Both subjects were on display in "The Wisdom of Ants" (December 2012 Clarkesworld). This story, which won the Australian Ditmar and Aurealis awards, portrays a future Aboriginal culture forced to adapt to an Australia first ravaged by genetically modified ants (see Genetic Engineering) and then blighted by pesticides that poisoned the soil while failing to dislodge the ants. What may seem to foreign readers an implausible cycle of ecological self-harm has many true-life parallels in Australian history.

More recently Dyer published Crossroads of Canopy (2017) – another Ditmar winner – and followed it up with Echoes of Understorey (2018) and Tides of the Titans (2019), forming the Titan's Forest trilogy, a secondary-world fantasy set in treetop kingdoms.

Thoraiya rhymes with Himalaya, and Dyer with fire. [JN]

Thoraiya Dyer

born

works

series

Titan's Forest

individual titles

  • Asymmetry (Yokine, Western Australia: Twelfth Planet Press, 2013) [coll: pb/Amanda Rainey]

links

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