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Lacey, Catherine

Entry updated 3 April 2023. Tagged: Author.

(1985-    ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "An Honest World" in Gigantic Worlds (anth 2015) edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nietois; it was assembled with other early work as Certain American States (coll 2018). She is of sf interest for her third novel Pew (2020), where her continuing explorations of contemporary Identity and its displays and extinctions can be understood as exploiting the literalism of Fantastika. The psychic travels and exorbitant trammels suffered by named protagonists in earlier tales like Nobody Is Ever Missing (2014) or The Answers (2017) are here inflicted upon an unnamed individual who awakens in so profound a state of Amnesia that they cannot fix upon their Sex either physically or in terms of choices available (see Transgender SF). Their impact on the psychically isolated small town in the American south has much of the challenge occasioned by the incursion of a typical Mysterious Stranger, though in this case with something of the added ambivalence of the scapegoat.

The book within the book that makes up the substance of Biography of X (2023) takes place in an Alternate History version of America, whose Jonbar Point is the early 1940s election of a feminist female socialist president, which generates a secession of southern states behind a great wall and known as Southern Territories (or ST), a closed, Dystopian theocracy (see Religion), where most modern Technology is banned. The New York art world at the centre of the tale had been devastated by the ST-inspired mass murder in 1945 of Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock; by 1996, when the tale begins, the scene is dominated by women (see Women in SF)and the world, as a whole, has become more terrible and more joyous.

Lacey should not be confused with the UK actor Catherine Lacey (1904-1979). [JC]

Catherine Lacey

born Tupelo, Mississippi: 9 April 1985

works

  • Nobody Is Ever Missing (New York: FSG Originals, 2014) [pb/Jonathan D Lippincott]
  • The Answers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017) [hb/]
  • Pew (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) [hb/Thomas Colligan]
  • Biography of X (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) [hb/]

collections and stories

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