Groff, Lauren
Entry updated 5 January 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1978- ) US anthologist and author, active from around 2005, most of whose work is nonfantastic, though the consumerist America that traps her protagonists seems hellbound into Ecological suicide; her tales often therefore seem to register (if only tacitly) a pressure of unease awaiting us at the crossroads into the next day, which may no longer be mundane. Her second novel, Arcadia (2012), does in fact devolve into a full sf climax. The first portion of the tale, set in the exploratory 1960s and 1970s of the previous century in Upstate New York, depicts a Utopian commune through the eyes of the first child doomed to be born within this Zone; he seems capable of reading the dreams of others. By the end of the tale, set in the Near Future New York of 2018, a Pandemic has struck. Niall Harrison's "In Search of Green Overshoots" (30 January 2023 Strange Horizons) anatomizes at length the nature of the futurewards leap of this narrative. [JC]
Lauren Groff
born Cooperstown, New York: 23 July 1978
works (selected)
- The Monsters of Templeton (New York: Hyperion/Voice, 20082) [hb/]
- Arcadia (New York: Hyperion/Voice, 2012) [hb/]
- Fates and Furies (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015) [hb/]
collections and stories
- Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories (New York: Hyperion/Voice, 2009) [coll: illus/hb/Shubhani Sarkar]
- Florida (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018) [coll: hb/]
links
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