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Hendrix, Howard V

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

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(1959-    ) US academic and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "In the Smoke" (in L Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Vol 2, anth 1986, ed Algis Budrys); other early work was assembled in Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3 (coll 1990 chap). After an academic study of medieval and Renaissance texts that invoke visions of last things, The Ecstasy of Catastrophe: Apocalyptic Literature from Langland to Milton (1990 Switzerland), Hendrix came to broader notice with his Lightpaths sequence comprising Lightpaths (1997), Standing Wave (1998), which examines – sometimes rather doggedly – the implications of the space habitat as a tool for the progress of the human race, both in terms of extraterrestrial politics (of the sort frequently promulgated, without huge verisimilitude, by Hard SF writers), and in terms of the plausibilities of space exploration and settlement. Hendrix's tendency (also shared by many Hard SF writers) to erase plotting difficulties with leaps into Transcendence mars the first volume, and is evident in his work generally. His most impressive single work may be Empty Cities of the Full Moon (2001), remotely connected to the Lightpaths sequence by virtue of being set in an Alternate History which begins to diverge from the former world around the year 2000; by the middle of this twenty-first century, a slow but comprehensive Disaster – caused by a Biological engineering project which goes wrong – has resulted in a Ruined Earth landscape, full of abandoned cities, where survivor savants and clans wander towards various outcomes, not excluding the Transcendental. the Near Future Labyrinth Key sequence comprising The Labyrinth Key (2004) and Spears of God (2006) focuses on the Invention of a Quantum Computer in a post-Cold War frame. Hendrix is a writer of strong intellect but a sometimes faltering sense of how to convey his ideas in fictional form. [JC]

Howard Vincent Hendrix

born Cincinnati, Ohio: 5 March 1959

works

series

Lightpaths

  • Lightpaths (New York: Ace Books, 1997) [Lightpaths: pb/Phil Heffeman]
  • Standing Wave (New York: Ace Books, 1998) [Lightpaths: pb/Phil Heffeman]
  • Better Angels (New York: Ace Books, 1999) [Lightpaths: hb/Victor Stabin]

Labyrinth Key

  • The Labyrinth Key (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 2004) [Labyrinth Key: pb/Stanislaw Fernandez]
  • Spears of God (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 2006) [Labyrinth Key: pb/Big Dot Design]

individual titles

collections and stories

nonfiction

works as editor

nonfiction

links

previous versions of this entry



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