Burgess, Tony
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1959- ) Canadian performance artist (under the name Tony Blue) and author in whose first novel of sf interest, Pontypool Changes Everything (1998), a Meme-spread Basilisk destroys victims' ability to make sense through language: then they go mad. It was filmed as Pontypool (2008), and assembled with the more conspicuously surreal The Hellmouths of Bewdley: A Fiction for Boys & Girls (coll of linked stories 1997) and Caesarea (1999) as The Bewdley Mayhem (omni 2014). A play, Pontypool (2016), is based on the novel. The n-Body Problem (2016), a singleton, is a surreal spoof on the Zombie apocalypse subgenre (see Absurdist SF), in which a plethora of immobilized zombies threatens to choke off life on Earth; the zombies are then put in low orbit, which obliterates the light of the sun. But all is well in the end. [JC]
Tony Burgess
born Toronto, Ontario: 1959
works
series
Pontypool
- The Hellmouths of Bewdley: A Fiction for Boys & Girls (Toronto, Ontario: ECW Press, 1997) [coll of linked stories: Pontypool: pb/]
- Pontypool Changes Everything (Toronto, Ontario: ECW Press, 1998) [Pontypool: pb/]
- Pontypool Changes Everything (Toronto, Ontario: ChiZine Publications, 2010) [rev of the above: hb/]
- Caesarea (Toronto, Ontario: ECW Press, 1999) [Pontypool: pb/]
- The Bewdley Mayhem (Toronto, Ontario: ECW Press, 2014) [omni of the above three: Pontypool: pb/]
- Pontypool (Toronto, Ontario: Playwrights Canada Press, 2016) [play: Pontypool: pb/]
individual titles (selected)
- The n-Body Problem (Toronto, Ontario: ChiZine Publications, 2016) [pb/Erik Mohr]
links
previous versions of this entry