Larison, John
Entry updated 15 September 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1979- ) US author whose first work, the nonfiction The Complet Steelheader (2008) on fly-fishing, and his first two novels, which are also about fishing, led to Whisky When We're Dry (2018), a nonfantastic Western narrated by a girl forced to masquerade as a boy. Larison is of sf interest for The Ancients (2024), set on an Earth sufficiently distant from the Near-Future devastations caused by Climate Change and Ecological ruin for the tale to be readable in terms of Planetary Romance. Three children of a hunter/gatherer family, whose parents have disappeared, roam triply across the world, their stories mixing with others' in a culture for whom the twenty-first century exists as a vague, distorted memory; the hegiras of this constellation climax together in a City whose rulers, perhaps deceptively, are mounting an expedition to a Paradise at the end of the world. The ending does not claim that this dream is delusional. [JC]
John Larison
born Philomath, Oregon: 1979
works (highly selected)
- John Larison
- The Ancients (New York: Viking, 2024) [hb/]
links
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