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Garnier, Jean-Paul L

Entry updated 11 November 2024. Tagged: Author, Editor.

(1981-    ) US editor, poet and author of mostly speculative fiction who also publishes as Jean-Paul Garnier. He is best known as the editor of Star*Line, the official print journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association (now the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association). His editorship, beginning in 2021, has been marked by consistency and dedication. Dozens of poems are selected for publication each issue out of thousands of submissions. His Wyrms and Wormholes essay series has appeared in Star*Line, beginning with "Dreamers Rise Up" for Summer 2021. He is also the deputy editor-in-chief of the relaunched If and Galaxy magazines.

Garnier began to publish works of genre interest with "The Long Horizon" in Aphelion for December 2014/January 2015. His writing has subsequently appeared in Star*Line, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, and Eccentric Orbits: An Anthology of Science Fiction Poetry, Volume 4 (anth 2023) edited by Wendy Van Camp.

His Poetry is marked by its eye-catching structure. Times Arrow (2022 chap) features a calligram, spaced around an infinity symbol as well as punchy free verse and short final stanzas. The Telepathy Machine (2023 chap) exhibits Garnier's incisive takes on modernity. Profound emotions are expressed through words resembling those in text-messages. Both collections make use of repetition and simple language with the memorable effect of Advertising.

Garbage In, Gospel Out (2023), Garnier's longest prose work and first novella, follows a reporter whose loyalty to the truth antagonizes his managers through his writing about subjects that include Time Travel, Robotics, and a mysterious end (see End of the World). Garnier writes prose the way he writes poetry: his sentences are compressed and picturesque; there is a tendency to allude rather than explain. This allows for a breadth of content to be concentrated within a relatively small word count. With its short chapters and frequent side-narratives, the novella resembles a fixup of prose poems.

Cardboard Spaceship (coll 2024) is a collection of short stories which Michael Butterworth describes in his introduction as having the same urgency as those in New Worlds. The stories maintain Garnier's blunt, poetic, William S Burroughs-like style, albeit conversationally transparent, with key details repeated as if to convince an audience of them. This is no surprise as nearly half of the 21 stories first appeared orally on Garnier's Simultaneous Times podcast. The highlight of the collection is "Birth of Fire" (in Octo-Emanations, anth 2020, ed Carter Kaplan), which resembles the concluding chapter of Burroughs's The Soft Machine (1961) in its scope and mournful attitude towards the passing of Time.

Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books, a bookstore and Small Press independent publisher of many of his own works. It is home to the Simultaneous Times podcast, which has featured readings of fiction by Robert Silverberg and Tonya R Moore. [JM]

Jean-Paul L Garnier

born California: 16 March 1981

works (selected)

collections and stories

  • Echo of Creation (Joshua Tree, California: Space Cowboy Books/Travelling Shoes Press, 2018) [hb/Zara Kand]

poetry collections

  • Us, Clone (Joshua Tree, California: Space Cowboy Books, 2017) [eBook: na/Zara Kand]
  • Future Anthropology (Joshua Tree, California: Space Cowboy Books, 2019) [pb/Zara Kand]
  • Betelgeuse Dimming (Joshua Tree, California: Space Cowboy Books, 2020) [pb/Zara Kand]
  • Utopian Problems (Joshua Tree, California: Space Cowboy Books, 2021) [eBook: na/Jean-Paul L Garnier]
  • Time's Arrow (Joshua Tree, California: Space Cowboy Books, 2022) [eBook: na/Jean-Paul L Garnier]
  • The Telepathy Machine (Joshua Tree, California: Space Cowboy Books, 2023) [eBook: na/Jean-Paul L Garnier]

works as editor

links

previous versions of this entry



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