Wright, Stephen
Entry updated 22 July 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1946- ) US author who remains best known for Meditations in Green (1983), a nonfantastic novel set in Vietnam; he is of direct sf interest for M31: A Family Romance (1988),a Fabulation in an agglutinative style reminiscent of that used by William Gaddis (1922-1998) in The Recognitions (1955). Abandoned by their parents – Dot and Dash, who claim to be Aliens descended from the inhabitants of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31 in the Messier catalogue) – the protagonists of the book ricochet numbly through the nightmare shopping malls and 7-11s of modern "rural" America. The vacuum family they make together and the horrors they commit contribute to an extremely distressing vision of the latter moments of the century. Going Native (1994) is a road-novel, searingly and hilariously told, apocalyptic in tone, but not sf; its gonzo confrontations with the boiling magma of American civilization on parade is followed by the hyperbolically Satirical approach to consumerism and the Media Landscape take in Processed Cheese (2020), whose very Near Future assault on this culture was perhaps derailed by the beginning of the Covid Pandemic within weeks of publication. [JC]
Stephen Wright
born Warren, Pennsylvania: 17 August 1946
- M31: A Family Romance (New York: Harmony Books, 1988) [hb/Peter Schroth]
- Going Native (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994) [hb/]
- Processed Cheese (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2020) [hb/Lauren Harms]
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