(1948- ) Australian teacher and author, in UK since 1968, where he has taught English at Christ Church, Oxford since 1973. His best nonfiction focuses on music and film; his one novel of sf interest, Underworld (1992), focuses on the metaphysics of urban life in the context of a City located, as far as can be told, in the midst of an abstractly envisioned Ruined Earth. Baroque twists of plot, and figures half-emblematic of legend, generate a rich but ultimately tentative portrayal of an urban world both static and in extremis. "An Aleatory Island", the final chapter of the nonfiction The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York (1984), adumbrates future visions of the nature of New York; earlier fantastications of the metropolis are considered elsewhere in the text. [JC]
Peter Conrad
born Hobart, Tasmania: 2 November 1948
died
works (highly selected)
- Underworld (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992) [hb/]
nonfiction
links
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