Search SFE    Search EoF

  Omit cross-reference entries  

Palmer, Dexter

Entry updated 5 December 2022. Tagged: Author.

Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com

pic

(1974-    ) US author whose first novel, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (2010), a Steampunk tale set in an Alternate World version of America where the protagonist, enduring luxurious imprisonment in a zeppelin floating above a fantasticated City while remembering – in something like a dream state – his beloved Miranda and her father Prospero, the latter in a state of Suspended Animation aboard the flying ship, and a Cyborg Caliban. Meanwhile, the protagonist also gains a form of access to a deeper alternate world, where Robot servants enable their masters to fabricate, along with other Inventions, magical Islands housed inside ornate skyscrapers [for Little Big see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The pervasive references to William Shakespeare's The Tempest (performed circa 1611; 1623), and the ominous apparent sleep of Prospero, lead to the assumption that this highly complex exercise in Equipoise may climax in a Godgame, perhaps one – given Prospero's manias – corrupted by power lust. The breezily compelling Paranoias that pace the tale are strongly reminiscent of the work of Thomas Pynchon.

Palmer's second novel, Version Control (2016), maintains in contrast a surface quietness, though under the surface of his detailed, empathetic, irrefutably telling description of a Media-Landscape-dominated Near Future America, it is easy to detect a melancholic representation of a time out of joint; in this case literally, as the storyline itself unpacks the consequences of a successful experiment in Time Travel. The universe so affected (see Physics) does not, however, tolerate any modification in the energy dynamics that define it, so that each successful travel in time creates a new world in which it did not succeed. That new world is perceived by the tale's protagonist as a kind of "wrongness", an uncanny-valley corrosion of the density of the real, so that wraithlike stigmata of previous realities fleetingly manifest themselves but then dissipate; for the universe, in this novel, is the house, and the house always wins. [JC]

Mary Toft; Or, the Rabbit Queen: A Novel (2019) is an extreme but ultimately nonfantastic historical novel whose subject matter – the medical scandals surrounding the claim of Mary Toft (1701-1763) to have given birth to rabbits – has some of the eccentricity and ultimate saliency of a tale like Hilary Mantel's The Giant, O'Brien (1998), set a generation later in the raree-show of London. [JC]

Dexter Clarence Palmer

born Virginia: 21 September 1974

works

links

previous versions of this entry



x
This website uses cookies.  More information here. Accept Cookies