Lakin-Smith, Kim
Entry updated 17 April 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1972- ) UK author whose first novel, Tourniquet: Tales from the Renegade City (2007), depicts a surrealized urbanized cybergoth Near Future in terms depicted by and entrapping the rock band Origin (see Music); supernatural elements interfuse with music in the Dystopian City at the heart of the tale. The world depicted in Cyber Circus (2011) has some similarities to its predecessor, as though a genre kaleidoscope had been shaken, adding Genetic Engineering and touches of Military SF into the mix. Queen Rat (2012), set Under the Sea, is a steampunkish Young Adult romance; Autodrome (2013), also young adult, is a more classic Steampunk tale set in a City powered by steam.
The sleight-of-hand generic jumbling of Lakin-Smith's earlier work is significantly more pointed in her Rise (2019), set three millennia hence, in a world grotesquely fixated into a post-Climate-Change nightmare, with Cities isolated burning deserts, an tectonic plates demarcated by lines of boiling lava. Two classes of seemingly evolved homo sapiens survive: an hierarchical elite, the daughter of whose leader narrates the tale; and an underclass, treated more or less as sweatshop workers are in the early twenty-first century, where the narrator finds herself imprisoned (see Crime and Punishment; Prisons; Slavery; Torture).
With the collection Sparks Flying (coll 2023) the author's byline changed to Kim Lakin. [JC]
Kim Lakin-Smith
born Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire: 16 April 1972
works
- Tourniquet: Tales from the Renegade City (London: Immanion Press, 2007) [pb/]
- Cyber Circus (Alconbury Weston, Cambridgeshire: NewCon Press, 2011) [coll: book-length title story plus one other: hb/Vincent Chong]
- Queen Rat (Boston, Lincolnshire: Murkee, 2012) [pb/]
- Autodrome (London: Snowbooks, 2013) [hb/]
- Rise (Alconbury Weston, Cambridgeshire: NewCon Press, 2019) [hb/Daniele Serra]
collections and stories
- Cyber Circus (Alconbury Weston, Cambridgeshire: NewCon Press, 2011) [coll: book-length title story plus one other: hb/Vincent Chong]
- Sparks Flying (Alconbury Weston, Cambridgeshire: NewCon Press, 2023) as by Kim Lakin [coll: hb/after Yabadene Belkachem]
links
previous versions of this entry