Fuller, Claire
Entry updated 24 April 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1967- ) UK sculptor and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "All Clear in the Anderton House" in After the Fall: Tales of the Apocalypse (anth 2014) edited anonymously. Her first four novels share a sense of dread that the ground may not hold, either in their protagonists' fragile lives, or in planetary terms, somewhere down the line. This aura may be most explicit in the first of these, Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), whose young protagonist is effectively imprisoned (see Keep; Prison) in a solitary part of the world by her father, a premature survivalist: she escapes but he has not been, it may be, entirely foolish.
Fuller is of direct sf interest for The Memory of Animals (2023), set in a Dystopian Near Future London in the midst of coping with one Pandemic when a far more virulent plague threatens civilization. The protagonist, given an experimental vaccine in isolation, re-enters a deserted London, travelling through Last Man cityscapes strongly evocative of 28 Days Later (2002); her eventual but carceral alliance with other survivors, and her vivid memories of working with octopuses trapped in an aquarium, jostle into a sober vision of what life may be like at the verge of the End of the World. [JC]
Claire Fuller
born Oxfordshire: 9 February 1967
works (highly selected)
- Our Endless Numbered Days (Portland, Oregon: Tin House Books, 2015) [hb/]
- The Memory of Animals (London: Penguin Random House/Fig Tree, 2023) [hb/Nathaniel Smith]
links
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