Jensen, Axel
Entry updated 15 September 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1932-2003) Norwegian author who began writing in 1955, his early novels addressing (and succumbing to) the allure of Transcendence; Ikaros: ung mann i Sahara (1957; trans Maurice Michael as Icarus: A Young Man in the Sahara 1959) in particular evokes the fantastic. His early sf, mostly in the form of scripts for untranslated Comics, is much more free-form, and was explicitly influenced by Alfred Jarry, about whom Jensen wrote extensively; the most significant example of this work is almost certainly Hariton Pushwagner's Pushwagners Soft City (graph 2008), a Dystopian vision of the last working day before the End of the World first executed between 1969 and around 1975, but unpublished for many years. His Dystopian sf novel, Epp (1965; trans Oliver Stallybrass 1967), on the other hand, describes in chillingly grey, fragmented prose a world where people live isolated from one another in cells and file reports on their similarly treacherous, alienated "neighbours"; Jensen stated that the novel was specifically inspired by Yevgeny Zamiatin's We (1924). Later sf novels, like Lul (1992) and Og resten står skrivd i stjernene ["And the Rest is Written in the Stars"] (1995), loosen the palette of Epp, but adhere to the bleakness of its message about the corporate world. [JC]
Axel Buchardt Jensen
born Trondheim, Norway: 12 February 1932
died Ålefjær, Norway: 13 February 2003
works
- Ikaros: ung mann i Sahara (Oslo, Norway: Cappelen Damm, 1957) [hb/]
- Icarus: A Young Man in the Sahara (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959) [trans by Maurice Michael of the above: hb/]
- Epp (Oslo, Norway: Cappelen Damm, 1965) [hb/]
- Epp (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967) [trans by Oliver Stallybrass of the above: hb/Lena Folke-Olsson]
- Lul (Oslo, Norway: Cappelen Damm, 1992) [hb/]
- Og resten står skrivd i stjernene ["And the Rest is Written in the Stars"] (Oslo, Norway: Cappelen Damm, 1995) [hb/Hariton Pushwagner]
- Pushwagners Soft City (Oslo, Norway: No Comprendo Press, 2008) (uncredited) with Hariton Pushwagner [graphic novel: the lack of apostrophe in "Pushwagners" is correct: illus/pb/Hariton Pushwagner]
links
- Axel Jensen (in Norwegian)
- Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Picture Gallery
previous versions of this entry