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North, Anna

Entry updated 8 May 2023. Tagged: Author.

(1983-    ) US journalist, editor and author whose Near Future Young Adult Dystopia, America Pacifica (2011), is set refreshingly in an identifiable venue, a seemingly manufactured Island a hundred or so miles off the coast of Ruined Earth California, where Climate Change has caused a deep freeze. Through the island culture is not seriously innovative – consisting of a central City run by a half-demented tyrant, surrounded by badlands inhabited by the dispossessed – it is described in convincing detail in a language so unusually mature and evocative for its presumed target audience that it may be understood as an attempted escape from the strictures of that market. The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (2015), about an almost inhumanly enigmatic filmmaker, does not in fact engage in the fantastic (see Cinema).

North's third novel Outlawed (2021) is a Western set in an Alternate History version of America, whose Jonbar Point is a Pandemic that struck in 1830 leaving only 10% of the population alive, and ending technological civilization; by the end of the nineteenth century, where the tale is set, there has been little recovery. The protagonist escapes a closed theological patriarchy in the Dakotas whose treatment of women (see Feminism; Religion; Women in SF) resembles the model made famous by Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985); she soon joins an outlaw gang restricted to women, though its gnomically dandiacal leader, who is named Kid (see Billy the Kid), does not use male or female pronouns. Adventures ensue. [JC]

Anna North

born Williamsburg, Virginia: 1983

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