Hopen, Stuart
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1953- ) US healthcare lawyer and author of Comics from the 1970s, his titles including the single issue of Daemon Mask (1987) with Russ Martin, the short Graphic Novel Xyr: The Seekers of Valcin (graph 1988) and the single issue of what was intended as a seven-part miniseries, The Wandering Stars (1987) with Sam Kieth. This last storyline was instead developed into Hopen's first novel, Warp Angel (1995; exp rev 2013), a conspicuous rogue singleton in the world of the New Space Opera: the more baroque, intensely conceived, transgressive form of Space Opera that came to maturity in the 1990s. In a four-planet system itself "warped" by the universal ban on Faster Than Light warp travel – the use of which had been weakening the fabric of space-time – a young street-wise female ex-assassin, married to an abducted religious guru, searches through the planet of Draconian and a concentric City called Dante for her man, who is simultaneously threatening to gain a kind of Judaism-inflected Transcendence. The style of the tale is deliberately (but at times uncontrolledly) shoved to max.
The retro Twilight Patrol sequence opening with Drones of the Ravaging Wind (2017) [see Checklist below] is presented as a run of Pulp magazine adventures from 1935, with much rousing aviational adventure distantly inspired by G-8 and His Battle Aces, though with metaphysical overtones. [JC/DRL]
Stuart Neil Hopen
born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 1953
works
series
The Twilight Patrol
- Drones of the Ravaging Wind (Sunrise, Florida: Bold Venture Press, 2017) [The Twilight Patrol: pb/]
- Maggot Czar of the Everglades (Sunrise, Florida: Bold Venture Press, 2017) [The Twilight Patrol: pb/]
- Pawnbrokers of Eternal Blight (Sunrise, Florida: Bold Venture Press, 2018) [The Twilight Patrol: pb/]
- Dragon God Over the Western Front (Sunrise, Florida: Bold Venture Press, 2018) [The Twilight Patrol: pb/]
- The City Annihilator (Sunrise, Florida: Bold Venture Press, 2018) [The Twilight Patrol: pb/]
- The World Without Pain and Death (Sunrise, Florida: Bold Venture Press, 2018) [The Twilight Patrol: pb/]
- Builders of the New Babel (Sunrise, Florida: Bold Venture Press, 2018) [The Twilight Patrol: pb/]
individual titles
- Xyr: The Seekers of Valcin (Forestville, California: Eclipse Books, 1988) [graph: pb/]
- Warp Angel (New York: Tor, 1995) [hb/Gary Ruddell]
- Warp Angel (Takoma Park, Maryland: Misenchanted Press, 2013) [exp rev of the above with added chapter: pb/Stuart Hopen]
links
previous versions of this entry