Butler, Robert Olen
Entry updated 5 December 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1945- ) US author, much of whose work intensively capitalizes on his experience in the American Army Military Intelligence in Vietnam 1969 to 1972, when he learned to speak Vietnamese. Countrymen of Bones (1983) offers, just short of literal Fantastika, some analogies between an archaeological mystery and nuclear tests. The Christopher Marlowe Cobb sequence, depicting the adventures of a secret agent up to and into World War One, is exorbitant but nonfantastic [the series is not listed below]. Some of his later work – like the stories assembled in Tabloid Dreams (coll 1996), each story narrated by someone who has literally experienced a tabloid headline, such as "Titanic Victim Speaks through Waterbed" – moves into realms of Fabulation; as does Severance: Stories (coll of linked stories 2006), a sequence of sixty-two stories, each 240 words long (see Oulipo), each recounting two final minutes of reflection, on the part of the sixty-two protagonists, after their heads have been severed, an array which includes Medusa, Thomas More, a chicken, and the author himself two years after the publication of the book. Hell (2009) is an afterlife fantasy set there. In Late City (2021) a 115-year-old man narrates to God (who talks back) his memories of the entire twentieth century; his articulacy, like that of the protagonist of Thomas Berger's Little Big Man (1964), plus the talkative god, convey some of the benefits that may accrue when elements instinct with Fantastika can be taken as if literally.
Of specific sf interest is Mr Spaceman (2000), which mutedly relates the experiences and reflections of an Alien planning to descend from his spaceship as Millennium frenzy stirs the Earthlings he has been observing. [JC]
Robert Olen Butler
born Granite City, Illinois: 20 January 1945
works
- Countrymen of Bones (New York: Horizon Press, 1983) [hb/uncredited]
- Tabloid Dreams: Stories (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996) [coll: hb/Raquel Jaramillo]
- Mr Spaceman (New York: Grove Press, 2000) [hb/Charles Rue Woods]
- Severance: Stories (San Francisco, California: Chronicle Books, 2006) [coll of linked stories: hb/photographic]
- Hell (New York: Grove Press, 2009) [hb/]
- Late City (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2021) [hb/Henry Sene Yee]
links
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