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(1933-2019) Scottish author who also worked in advertising and publishing; he was best known for biographies and works of social history. His many books include some of genre interest, such as Chameleon (1967), a fantasy about a Shapeshifting executive in an oil company, The Centre of the Universe Is 18 Baedekerstrasse (coll 1985), the title novella of which is sf, and Particle Theory: A Novel (1996), a surreal metaphysical discourse set in a variety of Parallel Worlds. The Jane's Adventures sequence for children, beginning with Jane's Adventures In and Out of the Book (1966), fairly indiscriminately mixes sf and fantasy. The first title in the series is an early example of the tale whose protagonist is entrapped within the coils of a Book [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] which narrates the story experienced by that protagonist, and which the reader is simultaneously reading. This process of recursion significantly prefigures much of the rhetoric of early twenty-first-century authors attempting to describe Virtual Reality worlds. [JC]
born Edinburgh, Scotland: 17 May 1933
died Aldeburgh, Suffolk: 16 July 2019
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Jane's Adventures
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Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 05:13 am on 10 December 2024.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/gathorne-hardy_jonathan>