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(? - ) UK author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Complex" in Interzone for January 2012. The Osiris Project sequence, comprising Osiris (2012), Cataveiro (2013) and Tamaruq (2015), is set initially in a Near Future Keep in the Bering Sea (see Under the Sea), where its inhabitants are protected from savage Climate Change. Their conviction that only they survive of all humanity leads to a suspicion that they may in fact be the inhabitants of a Generation Starship, or at least of an artefact capable of becoming one. The plot is, perhaps to its detriment, is romance-driven, generating a quest structure (one of those enamoured's twin brother has gone missing) that for some may scumble over the otherwise sharp virtues of Swift's presentation. As the series continues, decades pass, Osiris has become a rumour, and a romance-driven search is undertaken for it in conjunction with, and perhaps governed by, a mysterious message from interstellar space.
Paris Adrift (2018), though mostly set in a dislocating Paris, places the romance-driven central action through a Changewar frame; Time Travel drives the protagonist hither and yon, at the beck of others, to no certain terminus. In The Coral Bones (2022), three narrative voices – one from the early nineteenth century, one contemporary, and one from a twenty-second century straitened by Climate Change – apprehend and celebrate and mourn the Australian coral reefs as they die: but may come to life again, if the chastened remnants of Homo sapiens so permit. [JC]
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Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 23:48 pm on 11 July 2025.
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