Pollock, Tom
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1984- ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Two Hands at Heartbreak House" in Pantechnicon for December 2007. His Skyscraper Throne sequence beginning with The City's Son (2012), though technically Urban Fantasy in the commercial twenty-first century sense, focuses less on supernatural or paranormal entrepreneurs like Vampires or Werewolves than on a vision of London conceived of part Edifice, part Underground hall of mirrors malignly reflecting the congestions of living under the sun [for Edifice and Urban Fantasy see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The Young Adult focus of the sequence may detract from its aspirations to significance, though reminiscences of the work of Neil Gaiman and others are not discreditable.
The eponymous app featured in Heartstream (2019), Pollock's first singleton of interest, offers to reveal users' inner emotional states to their followers, somehow enticingly; Young-Adult complications ensue, as the very Near Future Media Landscape here exposed is inimical and – in a plot turn whose permutations have been articulated in episodes of Black Mirror (2011-2019) – opens the protagonist to invasion by a Mysterious Stranger who is also a Doppelganger.
Pollock should not be confused with the US film producer Tom Pollock (1943-2020). [JC]
Tom Pollock
born May 1984 [inferred from blog post "So I'm Thirty Now ... WTF" dated 28 May 2014]
works
series
Skyscraper Throne
- The City's Son (London: Quercus/Jo Fletcher Books, 2012) [Skyscraper Throne: hb/Ghost]
- The Glass Republic (London: Quercus/Jo Fletcher Books, 2013) [Skyscraper Throne: hb/Ghost]
- Our Lady of the Streets (London: Quercus/Jo Fletcher Books, 2014) [Skyscraper Throne: hb/Ghost]
- The Skyscraper Throne (London: Quercus/Jo Fletcher Books, 2015) [omni of the above three: ebook: Skyscraper Throne: na/Ghost]
individual titles
- White Rabbit, Red Wolf (London: Walker Books, 2018) [pb/Peter Strain]
- Heartstream (London: Walker Books, 2019) [pb/]
links
- Tom Pollock
- Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- The Encyclopedia of Fantasy: Edifice; Urban Fantasy.
- Picture Gallery
previous versions of this entry