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Boyce, Chris

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

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Working name of Christopher Boyce (1943-1999), Scottish author and newspaper research librarian who reportedly published his first sf, "Autodestruct", in 1964 in an issue of Storyteller Contest or International Storyteller which has not been traced (see Storyteller). A further and better established genre sale was "The Rig" (September 1966 SF Impulse). Boyce's most important work was the sf novel Catchworld (1975), joint winner (with Charles Logan's Shipwreck [1975]) of the Gollancz/Sunday Times SF Novel Award. Catchworld is an ornate, sometimes overcomplicated tale combining sophisticated brain-computer interfaces (see Computers; Cyborgs; Upload) and Space Opera; the transcendental bravura of the book's climax is memorable. In Brainfix (1980), a cautionary Near Future tale about social disorder in the UK, Boyce had the misfortune of predicting a rise in unemployment to an unheard-of three million in a fiction published just months before, in the harsh reality of the first Thatcher recession, it actually reached four million; he was also wrong about the government's need to use nerve gas extensively in order to control the people. Extraterrestrial Encounter (1979) is a speculative nonfiction inquiry into Xenobiology and the search for extraterrestrial Intelligence (see SETI). [JC]

see also: Cybernetics; Gods and Demons.

Joseph Christopher Boyce

born 1943

died Glasgow, Scotland: 29 June 1999

works

  • Catchworld (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975) [hb/nonpictorial]
  • Brainfix (London: Panther Books, 1980) [pb/]

nonfiction

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