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Bradfield, Scott

Entry updated 12 February 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1955-    ) US academic, critic and author, a professor at the University of Connecticut 1989-2008. His first sf story, the orthodox "What Makes a Cage? Jamie Knows" in Protostars (anth 1971) ed David Gerrold, significantly fails to prefigure his mature works, some of the best of the latter appearing in The Secret Life of Houses (coll 1988; exp vt Dream of the Wolf 1990; further exp vt Greetings From Earth: New and Collected Stories 1993), where they apply the torque of Fabulation to Southern Californian venues whose haunted, dehydrated inmates are trapped just short of the healing waters of the Pacific Rim. It is a vision intensified if anything in the Beast Fables assembled in Hot Animal Love: Tales of Modern Romance (coll 2005) [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]; some of these tales are Equipoisal with sf readings, but without ever becoming "arguable" narratizings of mutated American life and mores. His first novel, The History of Luminous Motion (1989), trawls with surreal hilarity through the same suburban deserts, though without much direct use of the fantastic, as in What's Wrong with America (1994), where a ghost does intermittently appear, as well as the Church of Immaculate Wisdom (see Scientology). His later work includes a full-length Beast Fable, the remarkable Animal Planet (1995) (see Zoo). The Oulipo instruction articulated in the subtitle to 3 Paragraphs in the Life of Bob Johnson: A Novel in 300 3-Paragraph Stories (2022) does not impede the surrealist flow of the tale (see Absurdist SF); chapter 173 is a parody of this encyclopedia, for the second edition of which Bradfield wrote entries on Magic Realism and Oulipo. Despite its protagonist's improbable attractiveness to any woman he meets, On the Planet of Bold Women (2023) remains edgily nonfantastic in its portrayal, once again, of southern Californian mores.

Many of the pieces assembled in Why I Hate Toni Morrison's Beloved: Several Decades of Reading Unwisely (coll 2013) and Reading Great Books in the Bathtub: Essays & Reviews 2005-2021 (coll 2022) deal with sf authors of interest, including Philip K Dick and Joanna Russ. [JC]

see also: Interzone.

Scott Michael Bradfield

born San Francisco, California: 27 April 1955

works

collections and stories

nonfiction (selected)

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