Maskill, Alexander
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) UK author whose first novel, The Hive Construct (2014), which won the Terry Pratchett First Novel Award in 2013, is set in a bleak, moderately distant Near Future, Ruined Earth version of an Egypt devastated by Climate Change, in an Underground City called New Cairo. A not unusual Dystopian structure is modulated through the author's occasionally intermittent attention to his unusual setting. In the city – at least those portions of New Cairo outside the central Keep-like "hives" where a corporate elite enjoy five-star lives – Computer implants and Nanotechnology-based bio-implants have transformed most of the population into fairly crude Cyborgs, in order to keep them alive and working. A virus Pandemic begins to shake this world apart. As with some earlier examples of Cyberpunk, The Hive Construct is ultimately shaped around issues of Politics, with a specific (and timely) focus on an unbalanced disparity between the rich and the poor. [JC]
Alexander Maskill
born Watford, Hertfordshire
works
- The Hive Construct (London: Doubleday, 2014) [hb/Shutterstock/Girl@Stephen Mulcahey/Arcangel Images]
links
previous versions of this entry