Mills, Sam
Entry updated 9 September 2024. Tagged: Author.
Working name of UK journalist and author Samantha Mills (1975- ), who began to publish work of genre interest with "Tic Tac Man" in New Wave of Speculative Fiction: The What If Factor (anth 2005) edited by Sean Wright. Her first novel, the Young Adult A Nicer Way to Die (2006) is nonfantastic suspense-horror; her third, Blackout (2010), is set in a Near Future Dystopian world where a security-obsessed government massively intensifies surveillance and censors books indiscriminately. The Quiddity of Will Self (2012) can be understood as a metafiction set in a kind of Alternate World where books are treated with Religious intensity as conveying mandatory instructions, and a horrific cult has been constructed in honour of (a fictionalized) Will Self.
Mills is also of oblique sf interest for two similar novels whose protagonists are wrested from the present into adventures through time. In The Before Times (2019), a young man at the verge of suicide is sent to various eras where he learns how to survive with himself. The Watermark (2024) is an Equipoisal tale which, by taking literally its protagonists' entrapment in the novel first of Augustus Fate then others, treats as to-be-believed their Reincarnation through something like Time Travel into various worlds (see also Virtual Reality), including the Robot-ridden Dystopian world of 2047, their adventures all storyboarded by the authors' increasingly Godgame-infected manipulations of the increasingly oppressive "capers" to which they are serially bound [for Arabian Nightmare see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. Of the two main protagonists, Jaime seems initially more a victim of his Secret Masters than Rachel, who at points resembles a Temporal Adventuress parachuting her way through a Moorcockian Multiverse, until, late in the book, she complains (understandably) that what she is being subjected to is "too much like autofiction".
Sam Mills should not be confused with the US author Sam Mills (1975- ), nor with the author Samantha Mills, nor with the Australian diver Samantha Mills (1992- ). [JC]
Samantha Mills
born 1975
works (selected)
- Blackout (London: Faber and Faber, 2010) [pb/]
- The Quiddity of Will Self (London: Corsair, 2012) [hb/]
- The Before Times (no place given: Dreaming Big Publications, 2019) [pb/]
- The Watermark (London: Granta, 2024) [hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry