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(1926-2005) UK author who remains perhaps most famous for his first and third novels, The Collector (1963) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). His second novel, The Magus (1965; rev 1977; with additional material 2023), especially in the conciser revised version, more powerfully explores the labyrinths of obsession and manipulation underlying, in all of Fowles's work, the rigmaroles and impostures of daylight reality. In this novel a series of seemingly supernatural contrivances – themselves more articulated than presented in the original version – separates the unpleasant protagonist from his love and from any security, causing him to learn something about himself on a mysterious mazelike Island before happiness is allowed to reign; rational explanations in the end from the Daedalus-like magus do little to attenuate a sense of magic-realist entrapment. In studies of the fantastic in general, this novel's working title, «The Godgame», has become a shorthand for tales whose outcome is controlled by a god-like figure (see Godgame).
Of Fowles's other novels, Mantissa (1982) is a fantasy in which Amnesia and Sex intersect metaphysically as a writer wrestles literally and sometimes erotically with his Muse; and A Maggot (1985) is sf. Set in the eighteenth century, it subtly and intensely explores the epistemology of First Contact – focusing on the possible nature of human Perceptions when something genuinely Alien is encountered – by telling a version of the life-story of the mother of Ann Lee (1736-1784), historical founder of the Shaker religion; the protagonist's response to the insoluble knot of Perceptions visited upon her when she inadvertently stumbles upon some time travellers (see Time Travel), probably from Earth's future, is a literal seed-bed (she is pregnant at the time) for Enthusiasm. [JC]
born Leigh-on-Sea, Essex: 31 March 1926
died Lyme Regis, Dorset: 5 November 2005
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Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 19:01 pm on 10 December 2024.
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