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Starobinets, Anna

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

(1978-    ) Russian journalist and author whose short fiction in particular has become well known, beginning with the tales assembled in Perekhodnyj vozrast ["Awkward Age"] (coll 2005; trans Hugh Aplin as An Awkward Age 2010), in which an adroit play with Horror in SF tropes caused her very soon to be likened to Stephen King. The tales assembled in Ikarova zeleza: kniga metamorfoz: rasskazy ["The Icarus Gland"] (coll 2013; trans James Rann as The Icarus Gland and Other Stories of Metamorphosis 2014) are mostly set in an exceedingly bleak Near Future world whose inhabitants are oppressed – indeed mesmerized – by the high Technology at their apparent beck; an element of direct Satire can be detected in stories like "Shhmoochie", in which an AI-drive nanny transmogrifies a victim family.

Zhivuschchii ["Living"] (2011; trans James Rann as The Living 2012) is set in a moderately distant Near Future, after the world's population has been radically reduced by a great Disaster; the survivors, properly barcoded, survive through successive Reincarnations, everyone linked into a kind of Hive Mind. But an uncoded man, named Zero, appears, destabilizing this precarious world. Starobinets is perhaps too swift to come to conclusions, some of them twisty; but her energy is apparent. [JC]

Anna Alfredovna Starobinets

born Moscow: 25 October 1978

works (selected)

  • Ubezhishche 3/9 ["Asylum 3/0"] (Moscow: AST, 2006) [binding unknown/]
  • Zhivuschchii ["Living"] (Moscow: AST, 2011) [binding unknown/]
    • The Living (London: Hesperus Press, 2012) [coll: trans by James Rann of the above: pb/]

collections

links

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