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Hawkins, Terence

(1956-    ) US academic and author, active in the latter capacity from around 1995. His first novel, The Rage of Achilles (2009), reworks parts of Homer's Iliad (circa 800-700 BCE) in accordance to the arguments developed by Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), in terms of which his rage would have been perceived by the pre-conscious Achilles as god-commanded. In Hawkins's second novel, the Near Future Dystopian American Neolithic (2014; rev 2019), a band of Neanderthals (see Apes as Human) have been hiding in a Keep in New York into a Dystopian Near Future America, where their behaviour is more humane and sophisticated than that of their Homo sapiens relatives. The trial of one of them for murder exposes their origin, arousing the ire of the American fundamentalist Christian right, which has already been successful in essentially criminalizing the concept of Evolution through a restrictive Constitutional amendment. [JC]

Terence Hawkins

born Uniontown, Pennsylvania: 1956

works

• The Rage of Achilles (Sacramento, California: Casperian Books, 2009) [pb/]
• American Neolithic (Chattanooga, Tennessee: C and R Press, 2014) [pb/]
  • American Neolithic (Tulsa, Oklahoma: Calliope Group, 2019) [rev of the above: pb/]

links

• Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 03:28 am on 26 April 2024.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hawkins_terence>