Doten, Mark
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1978- ) US editor and author in whose first novel, The Infernal (2015), a feral child suffering burns is found in the ruins of contemporary Iraq. His American captors plug him into an interrogation device known as a Memex which is "guaranteed " to extract truth from its subjects, and he begins to speak in tongues, channelling various figures from Osama bin Laden to Mark Zuckerberg. The tale avoids any thin-concept understanding in terms of Genre SF, but can be read in terms of a thick-concept immersion in the planet-addressing implications of Fantastika in general. Doten's second novel, Trump Sky Alpha (short version April 2017 Granta; 2019), treats the digital flooding of the world as seen through the eyes of a journalist in a Near Future land some time after World War Three who sees these records of America before the Fall as bricolage, disjecta membra (see Ruins and Futurity). The underlying scandal or tragedy of all this noise, he feels, is that it did not stop at the End of the World as we know it. [JC]
Mark Doten
born Minnesota: 1978
works
- The Infernal (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2015) [pb/]
- Trump Sky Alpha (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2019) [short version April 2017 Granta: pb/]
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