Faust, Joe Clifford
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1957- ) US copywriter and author who began publishing sf with "The Jackalope's Tale" for Wyoming Rural Electric News in 1983. His first novel, A Death of Honor (1987), is an sf mystery set in a twenty-first century moderately displaced in the direction of Cyberpunk, where a Constitutional Amendment has entitled victims of crime to pursue the perpetrators; the mystery itself is worked out with extremely satisfying care. His second novel, The Company Man (1988), enters even more familiar cyberpunk territory by featuring a protagonist who steals data for a large corporation which partially runs the decaying world, and who soon faces a moral crisis. In the Angel's Luck trilogy – Desperate Measures (1989), Precious Cargo (1990) and The Essence of Evil (1990) – Faust created a romping Space Opera whose spiralling intricacies of plot, as the freelance protagonists who run the starship Angel's Luck get into deeper and deeper waters, are recounted with the rigorous plot-control for which he has become known and with a sly sustaining humour. The later Bodekker sequence – comprising Ferman's Devils (1996) and Bodekker's Demons (1997), both assembled as Handling It: How I Got Rich and Famous, Made Media Stars Out of Common Street Scum and Almost Got the Girl (omni 1998) – is a Satire on advertising, which moves Equipoisally from sf to fantasy as young Boddeker discovers that the street gang he is exploiting in an ad campaign is in fact made up of demons ready to go on rampage. As a professing Christian, Faust has an avowed allegiance to what he has called "old-fashioned virtues"; his tales have shown no doctrinal inflections, however, and he is now inactive as a publishing author. [JC]
see also: Crime and Punishment.
Joe Clifford Faust
born Williston, North Dakota: December 1957
works
series
Angel's Luck
- Desperate Measures (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 1989) [Angel's Luck: pb/David B Mattingly]
- Precious Cargo (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 1990) [Angel's Luck: pb/David B Mattingly]
- The Essence of Evil (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 1990) [Angel's Luck: pb/David B Mattingly]
Bodekker
- Ferman's Devils (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1996) [Bodekker: pb/Bruce Jensen]
- Bodekker's Demons (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1997) [Bodekker: pb/Bruce Jensen]
- Handling It: How I Got Rich and Famous, Made Media Stars Out of Common Street Scum and Almost Got the Girl (New York: Science Fiction Book Club, 1998) [omni of the above two: hb/Bruce Jensen]
individual titles
- A Death of Honor (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 1987) [pb/David B Mattingly]
- The Company Man (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 1988) [pb/David B Mattingly]
links
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