Park, Ed
Entry updated 4 March 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1970- ) US editor, teacher, journalist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of their Absent Sweethearts" in Trampoline (anth 2003) edited by Kelly Link; for the Los Angeles Times he wrote an sf column, Astral Weeks, between 2007 and 2011. The Satire of corporate office life in his first novel Personal Days (2008) is sharply surreal but stops short at the edge of the fantastic. He is of sf interest for his second novel, the narratologically complex Same Bed Different Dreams (2023) whose variously interweaving storylines can seem, in a sense, to create one another. In particular, the series of sf novels written by a Korean War vet adumbrates in detail the Dystopian Near Future world of the frame story, whose tech-serf protagonist's discovery of the manuscript of an otherwise unconnected book, the nonfiction Same Bed, Different Dreams [the comma is deliberate], reveals the secret history of a resistance movement known as the KPG or Korean Provisional Government. No one strand of the tale constitutes a vision of the future: but the kaleidoscope of the whole conveys a sense that Homo sapiens, for better or for ill, is telling to itself the story of what will happen next. [JC]
Ed Park
born Buffalo, New York: 1970
works (highly selected)
- Same Bed Different Dreams (New York: Random House, 2023) [hb/Will Staehle]
links
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