Turk, H C
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1958- ) US photographer, painter and author who began publishing sf with the comic adventure Ether Ore (1987), an Alternate History tale where the world has been transformed by the eponymous Power Source, which makes space travel cheap, and where a female "Hitler" is a force for peace. The exceedingly ambitious Black Body (1989) presents, in terms readable as both sf and fantasy, the autobiography of an eighteenth-century witch, during which she makes it clear that witches are in fact a kind of Alien species. The style in which the tale is told is both estranged, because she is not human, and strained, because Turk seems himself uneasy not only with some aspects of eighteenth-century diction, but also with the problem of maintaining reader identification with a heroine whose literal vagina dentata (see Sex) chops off her new husband's penis; but the end result is, at points, very impressive. [JC]
Harold Carl Turk
born 25 November 1958
works
- Ether Ore (New York: Tor, 1987) [pb/Boris Vallejo]
- Black Body (New York: Villard Books, 1989) [hb/Kinuko Y Craft]
links
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