Wood, Nick
Entry updated 8 April 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1961-2023) Zambian-born clinical psychologist and author, raised in South Africa and USA, later resident in the UK, He began to publish work of genre interest with "African Shadows" as Nicholas Wood in Scheherazade 18 dated 1999, his first professional sale being "God in the Box" in Interzone for March 2003. His debut novel, The Stone Chameleon (2004), Equipoisally mixes a depiction of Near Future Cape Town (South Africa) in Dystopian terms with Urban Fantasy, where gangs of teenagers transformed into the semblance of animals (see Genetic Engineering) hunt for the mystical curative stone; the proleptic resonances of this Young Adult tale with Lauren Beukes's more complex Zoo Story (2010) may serve as markers of the disjointing intensity of the South African urban experience. Wood's second novel, Azanian Bridges (fixup 2016), is set in an Alternate History version of South Africa where apartheid has persisted into the twenty-first century. A persecuted protester is befriended by a psychologist whose Invention, a hands-on Telepathic device, brings the two protagonists intimately together but exposes both of them to a predatory police state. [JC]
Nick Wood
born Kitwe, Northern Rhodesia [now Zambia]: 1961
died UK: June 2023
works
- The Stone Chameleon (Cape Town, South Africa: Maskew Miller Longman, 2004) [pb/Ian Lusted]
- Azanian Bridges (Alconbury Weston, Cambridgeshire: NewCon Press, 2016) [fixup: hb/Vincent Sammy]
- Learning Monkey and Crocodile (Edinburgh, Scotland: Luna Press, 2019) [coll: pb/John Cockshaw]
- Water Must Fall (Alconbury Weston, Cambridgeshire: NewCon Press, 2020) [hb/Vincent Sammy]
- The Last Pantheon (Alconbury Weston, Cambridgeshire: NewCon Press, 2024) with Tade Thompson [illus/hb/Tade Thompson]
links
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