Weiner, Andrew
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1949-2019) UK-born psychologist and author, in Canada after 1973, who began publishing sf with "Empire of the Sun" in Again, Dangerous Visions (anth 1972) edited by Harlan Ellison, but who became significantly active only in the early 1980s, with thirty stories released in that decade. About half of his work was assembled in Distant Signals, and Other Stories (coll 1989), "Distant Signals" (May/June 1984 Twilight Zone) itself being televised in the Television Anthology Series Tales from the Darkside (1983-1988); the later stories assembled in This Is the Year Zero (coll 1998) showed an increasing inclination to manipulate the gear and topoi of sf into dramaturgies illustrative of premises in Psychology, at times vividly articulating the body English of art in the making. He published very few stories subsequently, the last of his short works appearing in 2000.
Station Gehenna (fixup 1987) intriguingly confronts its protagonist – sent to Gehenna to investigate a mystery involving the Space Station crew and the partially Terraformed planet – with an Alien enigma, a possible murder, and much material for thought. En approchant de la fin (2000; English text first published as Getting Near the End 2004) is set in 2023, a time psychically indistinguishable from the literal End of the World, though the astronauts at the heart of the tale may have discovered on Mars some form of access (ie escape) to the universe as a whole; but the end is also nigh. Craftsmanlike, witty and quietly substantial, Weiner never gained a reputation befitting his skills. [JC]
see also: Canada.
Andrew Simon Weiner
born London, England: 17 June 1949
died Toronto, Ontario: 3 December 2019
works
- Station Gehenna (New York: Congdon and Weed, 1987) [in the Isaac Asimov Presents series: hb/Bob Eggleton]
- En approchant de la fin (Oise, France: Le Plessis-Brion/Orion-éditions, Bifrost/Etoiles vive, 2000) [trans by Laurent Calluaud from the English manuscript: expanded from "Seeing" in F&SF, September 1992: binding unknown/]
- Getting Near the End (Toronto, Ontario: Fitzhenry and Whiteside/Robert J Sawyer Books, 2004) [first publication in English of the above: hb/Marilyn Mets and Peter Ledwon]
- Boulevard des disparus ["Among the Missing"] (Paris: Gallimard, 2006) [trans by Thibaud Eliroff from manuscript: in the publisher's Folio SF series: pb/]
collections (selected)
- Distant Signals, and Other Stories (Victoria, British Columbia: Porcépic Books, 1989) [coll: pb/Jeff Kuipers]
- This Is the Year Zero (Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield Press, 1998) [coll: pb/Geoff Butler]
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