Jensen, Liz
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1959- ) UK journalist, sculptor and author whose first novel, Egg Dancing (1995), is a Satire set in a Near Future Britain agitated by the destabilizing threat that Genetic Engineering can lead to the "Perfect Baby"; Ark Baby (1997), its thematic sibling, is also set in the Near Future and also deals with procreation, this time out of desperation, as fertility has plummeted. The Paper Eater (2000), set on an imaginary Island, is constructed so as to construe an unmistakable portrait of contemporary Britain as a Dystopia so surreal to constitute an Alternate World. My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (2006), again a Satire on British mores, more complicatedly features the adventures of a roisterous nineteenth-century whore from Copenhagen who stumbles across a seemingly dead Scientist's Time Machine and travels into our Near Future, where she finds others who have arrived in the dubious Utopia of twenty-first-century Britain, which they excoriate amusingly. Against a Near Future background of intensifying Climate Change, the protagonist of The Rapture (2009) becomes embroiled with a teenager in her charge, who is not only able to predict forthcoming Disasters but perhaps in fact to create them (see Psi Powers); Armageddon (see End of the World; Religion.) looms, as it also does in The Uninvited (2012), set in a Near Future where, in a wave of what might be mass hysteria, children across the globe begin to kill their parents (see Horror in SF). Although most of her work is patently fantastic, Jensen has not yet been dismissed by the British literary establishment as a genre writer (see Mainstream Writers of SF). [JC]
Liz Jensen
born Oxfordshire: 1959
works
- Egg Dancing (London: Bloomsbury, 1995) [hb/Jeff Fisher]
- Ark Baby (London: Bloomsbury, 1997) [hb/Emma Parker]
- The Paper Eater (London: Bloomsbury, 2000) [hb/]
- My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (London: Bloomsbury, 2006) [hb/William Webb]
- The Rapture (London: Bloomsbury, 2009) [hb/]
- The Uninvited (London: Bloomsbury, 2012) [hb/]
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