Wilson, JJ Amaworo
Entry updated 20 February 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1969- ) German-born Nigerian/UK playwright and author, most recently in USA, active since the early 1990s, his early plays and stories being nonfantastic; he has published his academic nonfiction, mostly textbooks on language learning, as JJ Wilson; son of fantasy author David Henry Wilson. He is of initial sf interest for Damnificados (2016), set in a Near Future urban conglomeration resembling Caracas, Venezuela, where in real life a partially constructed skyscraper was taken over by squatters. The abandoned Keep in Damnificados is sufficiently complex and immense that its multifarious occupiers are able to construct a microcosm of fruitful urban life, though beset (see Fantastika; Magic Realism) by an array of invaders, from militarized police to mythical Monsters. There may be some resemblance to the niche world insinuated into the girders of the Oakland Bay Bridge in William Gibson's Virtual Light (1993), but Wilson portrays the inhabitants of his keep through imagery that maintains a sense of the fluent mythopoeic urgency of life in the deep City of the world to come, if and when permitted by the owners.
Wilson's second novel, Nazaré (2021), whose title means something like great wave, is a flowingly Equipoisal tale set in some unnamed part of what might be designated from without as the Third World, a land brought to life through a revolution, as told through figures of legend and mythopoesis. It is a work of Fantastika about the world to come, without making use of any sf agencies in the mix. [JC]
Jeremy James Amaworo Wilson
born Germany: 10 July 1969
works (highly selected)
- Damnificados (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2016) [in the publisher's Spectacular Fiction series: pb/John Yates]
- Nazaré (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2021) [in the publisher's Spectacular Fiction series: hb/John Yates]
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