Jennings, Phillip C
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1946- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Tadcaster's Doom" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in May 1986, and who during the next few years published over thirty often pyrotechnical stories, several of which described our solar system dominated by "bugs" – personalities in electronic storage (see Computers; Hive Minds). Some of the best of these stories are assembled as The Bug Life Chronicles (coll 1989). Jennings's first novel, Tower to the Sky (1988), set in the same Bug Life universe, explosively depicts a human campaign in 3700 CE to escape the crowded solar system and the Gatekeepers who bar us from the stars, via the eponymous skyscraper; this contains much of humankind within it, is tall enough to reach into space, and is convertible into a starship. Jennings's exuberance is intermittently chaotic, and his ironies are less telling than those of David R Bunch; he gradually began to exercise greater control over his material, publishing a large number of stories after 1990, though he has not put them into book form. [JC]
Phillip Charles Jennings
born 5 March 1946
works
series
Bug Life
- Tower to the Sky (New York: Baen Books, 1988) [Bug Life: pb/Steve Hickman]
- The Bug Life Chronicles (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988) [coll: Bug Life: hb/Steve Hickman]
links
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