Stintzi, John Elizabeth
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
Canadian poet and author whose first novel Vanishing Monuments (2020) evokes images out of the Fantastika toolkit to dramatize the growing dementia of its protagonist's mother. They are of sf interest (see in particular Absurdist SF) for their second novel, My Volcano (2022), which multiply Equipoises topoi out of various genres to depict a kind of Alternate World whose Jonbar Point seems to be the realization that everything terrifying about the year 2016 should be taken literally: it is a fine Point of turn to make (for many, the implications of 2016 are manifestly the case of things to come); but Stintzi presents it with conviction. The tale itself, erratically festooned with sub-narratives and a huge cast, follows on from the Disastrous eruption of a volcano in Central Park (see New York), dramatizing the apprehensions and reality of Climate Change, savage Pollution, world-wide Ecological collapse. The cast includes a time traveller (see Time Travel), a Golem, an aspirational Hive Mind, an imagined space explorer, all under the observation of an Alien race known as the Otherwise, which may in traditional sf fashion (see Clichés) be coming to a decision about the future of Homo sapiens. [JC]
John Elizabeth Stintzi
born Bergland, Ontario
works
- Vanishing Monuments (Vancouver, British Columbia: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020) [pb/Oliver McPartlin and Jazmin Welch]
- My Volcano (Vancouver, British Columbia: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022) [pb/]
collections and stories
- Junebat (Toronto, Ontario: House of Anansi, 2020) [poetry: coll: hb/Alysia Shewchuk]
links
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