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(1972- ) UK author whose first novel, Tourniquet: Tales from the Renegade City (2007), depicts a surrealized urbanized cybergoth Near Future in terms depicted by and entrapping the rock band Origin (see Music); supernatural elements interfuse with music in the Dystopian City at the heart of the tale. The world depicted in Cyber Circus (2011) has some similarities to its predecessor, as though a genre kaleidoscope had been shaken, adding Genetic Engineering and touches of Military SF into the mix. Queen Rat (2012), set Under the Sea, is a steampunkish Young Adult romance; Autodrome (2013), also young adult, is a more classic Steampunk tale set in a City powered by steam.
The sleight-of-hand generic jumbling of Lakin-Smith's earlier work is significantly more pointed in her Rise (2019), set three millennia hence, in a world grotesquely fixated into a post-Climate-Change nightmare, with Cities isolated burning deserts, an tectonic plates demarcated by lines of boiling lava. Two classes of seemingly evolved homo sapiens survive: an hierarchical elite, the daughter of whose leader narrates the tale; and an underclass, treated more or less as sweatshop workers are in the early twenty-first century, where the narrator finds herself imprisoned (see Crime and Punishment; Prisons; Slavery; Torture).
With the collection Sparks Flying (coll 2023) the author's byline changed to Kim Lakin. [JC]
born Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire: 16 April 1972
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collections and stories
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Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 00:34 am on 13 January 2025.
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