Morgan, J O
Entry updated 17 October 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1978- ) Scottish poet and author, all of whose poetry has comprised book-length narratives, sometimes multi-voiced, sometimes linear, beginning with Natural Mechanical: Being a Rendering of the True Life Stories of Iain Seoras Rockliffe (2009 chap). Of most direct sf interest is the seventh of these tales, The Martian's Regress (2020 chap), set in an unspecified but seemingly distant Near Future, at some point after Earth has been made uninhabitable through Climate Change and Ecological collapse. An inhabitant of ruthlessly Terraformed Mars makes a pilgrimage back to Earth, which he and his virtually decorticated female Android slave companion gaze upon with – manifestly in his case – dismay; the relationship to C S Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress (1933) is indistinct.
Morgan's novels include Pupa (2021), set Equipoisally in what could be an Alternate Cosmos, where most humans are born as eggs and metamorphize by stages into "full" persons, or an abstractly couched fantasy with allegorical inclinations. Appliance (coll of linked stories 2022) is set in an Alternate History whose Jonbar Point is the Invention – seemingly in 1970s Britain – of a primitive Matter Transmitter; the linked stories move into a Near Future world where transmission of first non-organic then living matter has become common. Underlying the narrative is a constant scrutiny of the consequences of digitizing the rich matter of the world into a thin recapitulation of the original polyphony. [JC]
J O Morgan
born Edinburgh, Scotland: 1978
works
- Natural Mechanical: Being a Rendering of the True Life Stories of Iain Seoras Rockliffe (London: CB Editions, 2009) [poem: chap: pb/nonpictorial]
- Long Cuts (London: CB Editions, 2011) [poem: chap: pb/]
- At Maldon (London: CB Editions, 2013) [poem: chap: pb/]
- In Casting Off (Fife, Scotland: HappenStance Press, 2015) [poem: chap: pb/nonpictorial]
- Interference Pattern (London: Jonathan Cape, 2016) [poem: chap: pb/uncredited]
- Assurances (London: Jonathan Cape, 2018) [poem: chap: pb/]
- The Martian's Regress (London: Jonathan Cape, 2020) [poem: chap: hb/J O Morgan]
- Pupa (London: Henningham Family Press, 2021) [pb/David Henningham]
- Appliance (London: Jonathan Cape, 2022) [hb/J O Morgan]
links
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