Park, Ed
Entry updated 9 December 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 render visible something akin to an Alternate History of the twentieth century governed by Secret Masters, a story pattern multiply evocative of the work of Thomas Pynchon. In particular, the series of sf novels written by a Korean War vet adumbrates in detail the Dystopian Near Future world implied through 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, a group that claims secret sovereignty over both Koreas. No one strand of the novel in isolation may constitute a vision of the future; but the novel's kaleidoscopic Paranoia-inducing conjunction of tales comprises a portrait of a failed century and a future in doubt. [JC]
Ed Park
born Buffalo, New York: 1970
works (highly selected)
- Same Bed Different Dreams (New York: Random House, 2023) [hb/Will Staehle]
links
previous versions of this entry