Ma, Ling
Entry updated 13 October 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1983- ) Chinese-born academic and author, in US from childhood, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Yeti Lovemaking" in Unstuck #2 for 2012, which was published with other variously surreal gonzo Satires as Bliss Montage (coll 2022); its description of lovemaking with a yeti dressed as a human male (see Apes as Human) is chasteningly sharp; "bliss montage" is a term in film criticism describing (as Ma sees it) a white heteronormative sequence in classic America cinema, focused on female submission to male-generated notions of romantic bliss, the most famous of these sequences being the "Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head" interlude in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).
Ma's sf novel Severance (2018) is set in an Alternate History 2011 America devastated by a Pandemic originating in China, whose victims, Automata-like, lose all sense of Identity (see also Zombies), becoming entrapped in assembly-line-like repetitive actions that continue until death. Analogies between this disease and work conditions under late capitalism, both in China and New York, are subtly enforced. [JC]
Ling Ma
born Sanming, Fujan, China: 1983
works
- Severance (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) [hb/]
collections and stories
- Bliss Montage (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) [coll: hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry