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West, Joma

Entry updated 19 August 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1986-    ) UK author, much travelled from childhood. The lubricious but costly Media Landscape environment depicted in the novella Wild (2016 chap) is complexly sharpened in her first novel Face (2022), a Satire set in a Near Future world where a constantly self-attentive presentation of "face" in everyday life (see Advertising; Internet) leads expectably to Dystopian outcomes, under Secret Master control. The rules of this world ensure that those incapable of making faces of themselves, usually through being unable to afford the maintenance costs involved, fall to the bottom of an unremittingly hierarchy-bound social structure. In its complex ruthlessness West's concept bears comparison with tales like David Marusek's Counting Heads (2005). Her second novel, Twice Lived (2024), contains a similarly intense examination of the topos of the Parallel World, through a tracing of the lives/life of a conjoined double-self "shifter" (see Shapeshifter) who unaccountably retain(s) their/her double memory of lives in two worlds. [JC]

Joma West

born UK: 1986

works

  • Face (New York: Tordotcom, 2022) [hb/]
  • Twice Lived (New York: Tordotcom, 2024) [hb/FORT]

collections and stories

  • Wild (Dingwall, Highland Council, Scotland: Sandstone Press, 2016) [novella: chap: pb/]

links

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