Kunzru, Hari
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1969- ) UK journalist and author, active from around 1995. In Transmission (2003), his first novel of sf interest, a programmer for a firm involved in biomedical research is laid off, and in revenge releases a Computer virus whose dissemination causes chaos as Communications systems collapse worldwide (see also Information Theory). Gods Without Men (2011) Equipoisally generates a sense of the god Coyote as both Shapeshifter and manipulator of Dimensions, possibly enabling the child at the heart of the tale to Timeslip from one era to another, to slide back and forth between worlds [for Trickster see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The text of Memory Palace (2013) comprises the narrative guideline for a museum exhibition where illustrators and graphic artists constitute (and create) icons of resistance to cultural Amnesia in a Near Future world where illiteracy has become universal; the narrator, trapped in a cell (see Prisons), saves the world (it may be) by remembering it. The exhibition itself was mounted by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2012. White Tears (2017) is a fantasy in which a blues recording whose makers fraudulently claim it to be a long-lost 1920s masterpiece seems to bring to life the Black genius responsible for the original. Sophisticatedly kaleidoscopic and transgressive of genres touched upon, Kunzru's work as a whole easily engages with the "worlds" of Fantastika available to a contemporary author. [JC]
Hari Mohan Nath Kunzru
born London: 1969
works (selected)
- Transmission (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003) [hb/]
- Gods Without Men (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011) [hb/]
- Memory Palace (London: V&A Publications, 2013) [hb/]
- White Tears (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2017) [hb/]
collections and stories
- Noise (London: Penguin Books, 2005) [coll: chap: pb/]
links
previous versions of this entry