Weldon, Fay
Entry updated 25 October 2021. Tagged: Author.
(1931- ) UK Television and Radio scriptwriter, and author, active from the early 1960s, born Franklin Birkinshaw, granddaughter of Edgar Jepson; she began writing work of genre interest with "Angel, All Innocence" in The Thirteenth Ghost Book (anth 1977) edited by James Hale. Almost all of her work has – with passion, anger and a highly charged creative ambiguity – dealt with issues and situations generally conceived of as Feminist. Much of her later fiction verges on the supernatural or edges into the future, or both, sometimes with a tentativeness characteristic of the Mainstream Writer of SF, but with increasing fluency. In Puffball (1980) a pregnant woman is influenced by Glastonbury Tor; the film adaptation is Puffball: The Devil's Eyeball (2007) directed by Nicolas Roeg. In The Rules of Life (1987 chap), set in 2004, a dead woman communicates her memoirs through a Computer console under the control of a new Religion. After discovering a new planet, the female astronomer who narrates Leading the Band (1988) goes walkabout, skirting the fantastic in her Sex-drenched search for meaning. In The Cloning of Joanna May (1989) a man has his wife "cloned" ("not cloning in the modern sense, but parthenogenesis plus implantation", as the text explains) so that he can enjoy four younger versions of her; the novel was dramatized as a television miniseries, The Cloning of Joanna May (1991). Several of the tales assembled in A Hard Time To Be a Father: A Collection of Short Stories (coll 1998) are sharp Satires, some set in the Near Future. In Mantrapped (2004), a woman awakens to find she has suffered Identity Transfer into a man. Chalcot Crescent (2009), set in a strongly delineated 2013, depicts – through a tangle of memories on the part of a protagonist who is almost a clone of the author herself – a UK government which has responded repressively to continuing economic crisis. Kehua!: A Ghost Story (2010) is set in New Zealand; the eponymous kehua is a Maori ghost. [JC]
see also: Clones; Women SF Writers.
Fay Weldon
born Alvechurch, Worcestershire: 22 September 1931
works (selected)
- Female Friends (New York: St Martin's Press, 1974) [hb/]
- Puffball (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1980) [hb/]
- Leader of the Band (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988) [hb/uncredited]
- The Cloning of Joanna May (London: Collins, 1989) [hb/Bill Gregory]
- Darcy's Utopia (London: Collins, 1990) [hb/Peter Maynard]
- Growing Rich (London: Flamingo, 1992) [tie: novelizing the Television series: pb/]
- Splitting (London: Flamingo, 1995) [hb/Joe Partridge]
- Mantrapped (London: Fourth Estate, 2004) [hb/Photonica]
- Chalcot Crescent (London: Atlantic Books, 2009) [hb/]
- Kehua!: A Ghost Story (London: Corvus, 2010) [hb/]
collections and stories
- Watching Me, Watching You (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1981) [coll: hb/]
- The Rules of Life (London: Hutchinson, 1987) [novella: chap: hb/Amanda Faulkner]
- Wolf: The Mechanical Dog (London: Collins, 1988) [story: chap: hb/Pat Leyshun]
- A Hard Time To Be a Father: A Collection of Short Stories (London: HarperCollins/Flamingo, 1998) [coll: hb/Adam Willis]
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