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Wharton, Thomas

Entry updated 27 February 2023. Tagged: Author.

(1963-    ) Canadian teacher, poet and author, active from before 1980, his first novel Icefields (1995) being an intensely aetherealized paeon to the Canadian Wilderness that edges at points into the water margins of Fantastika. His second novel, Salamander (2001), which is fantasy, initiates a career-long interrogation and absorption into the story-engendering ontological fecundity of Books [for Books here, as well as Secondary Worlds and Time in Faerie below, see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]; the eighteenth century protagonist of the tale, who prints novelty volumes, travels to a Labyrinthine castle in archaic Slovakia where he is commissioned to create a profoundly storyable aleph-dense infinite book, a mission perhaps evocative for modern reader's of the world under constant creation in Michael Ende's The Never-Ending Story (1979). The longing for a book-shaped world also shapes Wharton's third novel, The Logogryph: A Bibliography of Imaginary Books (2004). The Young Adult Perilous Realm sequence beginning with The Shadow of Malabron (2008), again fantasy, carries its young protagonist into a Time-in-Faerie Secondary World, where everything contributes to the story of things, which in a sense he becomes responsible for telling, and which ages whenever he leaves it.

Wharton is of sf interest for The Book of Rain (2023), an intricately tripartite tale set in Near Future Canada, where a newly discovered ore – a Power Source hugely greater than any element previously discovered – turns out to generate Time Distortions which savagely afflict the Perception of reality. Some time after the abandonment of River Meadows, the town where the ore was being worked, several characters, including a Physicist, enter the forbidden Zone on a rescue mission; around the same time, another character is found defiantly inhabiting the region in order to preserve some of the non-human planetary species trapped there; and in a final thread a flock of birds from the Far Future conveys to deeply threatened contemporary Homo sapiens an epic poem designed to implant a storyable route to map a possible route to survival: a score which we may, as it were, sing for our supper. [JC]

Thomas Wharton

born Grande Prairie, Alberta: 25 February 1963

works (selected)

series

The Perilous Realm

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