Somer, Bradley
Entry updated 13 October 2022. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) Australian author, in USA for some time, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Bend to Beautiful" in Evolved: Vampire Stories of the New Undead (anth 2010) edited by Nancy Kilpatrick (see Vampires). His first novel Imperfections (2012) utilizes a grotesquely exorbitant use of the engines of Fantastika in its Satirical depiction of the fate of a man who has become a limbless torso in the trunk of a car, the result of his doomed quest for what might be called a perfect body. His second novel, Fishbowl (2015), is a fantasy Tale of Circulation in which a goldfish leaps out of its bowl on the twenty-seventh floor of a high-rise, and as he falls transacts (in a sense) the lives of inhabitants on various lower floors.
Somer's third novel, Extinction (2022), is sf, set in the western mountains of a Near Future America beset by Ecological vandalism and Climate Change, a civilization now inured to the thought of abandoning the planet for exploitable nearby worlds. The protagonist of the tale, in his attempts to keep the last grizzly bear alive safe from poachers for the rich, engages in a solitary fight for survival that progresses, with some anguish after the bear's inevitable murder, to a Slingshot Ending. [JC]
Bradley Somer
born Sydney, New South Wales
works
- Imperfections (Gibsons, British Columbia: Nightwood Editions, 2012) [pb/]
- Fishbowl (London: Ebury Press, 2015) [hb/]
- Extinction (London: HarperVoyager, 2022) [hb/Mike Topping]
links
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