Maughan, Tim
Entry updated 17 October 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1973- ) Scottish journalist and author now resident in Canada, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Havana Augmented" in Ergosphere (anth 2010) edited by Rick Novy; Paintwork (coll 2011), assembles three post-Cyberpunk stories dominated by Maughan's exceedingly alert sense of twenty-first developments in online Technology (see Internet) and the Media Landscape in general. He then wrote a short film, the Near Future In the Robot Skies (2016) directed by Liam Young, which was filmed entirely by drone cameras whose role in the action – set in a Dystopian London – is to monitor the enforced separation of two teenage lovers.
Maughan is of strong sf interest for his first novel, Infinite Detail (2019), a dual narrative: an initial Near Future depiction, in terms already familiar from Paintwork, of a world whose citizens are in pro-active bondage with the trillionfold-distributed electronic networks whose surveillance is loved and abhorred. While the protagonist is in New York, the Internet is taken down by saboteurs. The second part of the tale – told interspersedly with the establishing narrative – traces an attempt to discover a digital "Black Hole" which may have survived the crash, and may contain keys to the restoration of some sort of net. In the meantime, far-right governments have more or less taken over the planet, which they are trashing. [JC]
Tim Maughan
born Glasgow, Scotland: 1973
works
- Infinite Detail (New York: MCD x FSG Originals, 2019) [pb/]
collections and stories
- Paintwork (Scotts Valley, California: CreateSpace, 2011) [coll: pb/]
links
previous versions of this entry