Gee, Maurice
Entry updated 16 February 2026. Tagged: Author.
(1931-2025) New Zealand author active from 1955, best known for a non-fantastic trilogy comprising Plumb (1978), Meg (1981) and Sole Survivor (1983), and for a later anatomy of the "Matter" of his constrictive native land, Blindsight (2005). His Young Adult fantasies – Under the Mountain (1979), in which ancient Monsters awaken within activated volcanoes, adapted for television in 1981; and The World Around the Corner (1980), for younger readers – are relatively tentative. More complex is the World of O trilogy – The Halfmen of O (1982), The Priests of Ferris (1984) and Motherstone (1985) – which moves from unquestioning use of sf/fantasy conventions to a less certain view of morality: the human saviours of the Parallel World of O realize that its inhabitants must discover their own solution to the problem of good and evil, even at the price of their sentience. Of his adult books, The Burning Boy (1990) complicates the relationship between a (typically) disfigured protagonist and the New Zealand world, by intermixing a paranormal intensification of his Intelligence. The Salt Trilogy, beginning with Salt (2007), which is fantasy, depicts a Dystopian world. Gee's virtues include a strong sense of character and place. [MMacL/JC]
Maurice Gough Gee
born Whakatane, New Zealand: 22 August 1931
died Nelson, New Zealand: 12 June 2025
works
series
World of O
- The Halfmen of O (Auckland, New Zealand: Oxford University Press, 1982) [World of O: hb/Gary Hebly]
- The Priests of Ferris (Auckland, New Zealand: Oxford University Press, 1984) [World of O: hb/Gary Hebly]
- Motherstone (Auckland, New Zealand: Oxford University Press, 1985) [World of O: hb/Gary Hebly]
Salt
- Salt (Victoria, British Columbia: Orca Book Publishers, 2007) [Salt: hb/]
- Gool (Victoria, British Columbia: Orca Book Publishers, 2008) [Salt: pb/]
- The Limping Man: The Salt Trilogy Book Three (Melbourne, Victoria: Text Publishing, 2010) [Salt: pb/]
individual titles
- Under the Mountain (Auckland, New Zealand: Oxford University Press, 1979) [hb/]
- The World Around the Corner (Auckland, New Zealand: Oxford University Press, 1980) [chap: hb/]
- The Burning Boy (London: Faber and Faber, 1990) [hb/]
- The Severed Land (Auckland, New Zealand: Penguin Group, 2017) [pb/]
links
previous versions of this entry