Keneally, Thomas
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1935- ) Australian author best known for novels like Bring Larks and Heroes (1967) and Schindler's Ark (1982 UK, vt Schindler's List 1982), which won the Booker Prize and was filmed by Steven Spielberg, but who has several times edged into generic displacements in order to contain and express a remarkably intense and occasionally visionary imagination. His first novel, The Place at Whitton (1964), is horror, though without any fantastic element. Blood Red, Sister Rose (1974) is an historical fantasy. Victim of the Aurora (1977), which can be read as a detection, feels like sf in its depiction of Antarctica exactly as an sf writer might depict an alien planet. Ned Kelly and the City of the Bees (1978) is juvenile sf whose protagonist is subjected to Miniaturization and learns the Ecology of bees from within a hive. The eponymous human foetus in Passenger (1979) has been transformed by laser-scan into a conscious and articulate being, who uses a kind of ESP to guide his mother on a quest for Transcendence in Australia. In its tracing of the life of an Australian man 43,000 years ago, The Book of Science & Antiquities (2019) edges into Prehistoric SF territory. [JC]
Thomas Michael Keneally
born Sydney, New South Wales: 7 October 1935
works
- Blood Red, Sister Rose (London: Collins, 1974) [hb/]
- Victim of the Aurora (London: Collins, 1977) [hb/]
- Ned Kelly and the City of the Bees (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978) [hb/Stephen Ryan]
- Passenger (Sydney, New South Wales: Collins, 1979) [hb/Reg Boorer]
- The Book of Science & Antiquities (London: Sceptre, 2019) [hb/]
links
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