Paul Park

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Paul Claiborne Park (born October 1, 1954 in North Adams , Massachusetts ) is an American writer of science fiction and fantasy . His most famous work is the novel tetralogy A Princess of Roumania . Park is considered an outstanding representative of humanistic, literary science fiction and fantasy. His work has been nominated for numerous awards, including twice for the Nebula Award and 15 times for the Locus Award .

Life

Park attended Hampshire College in Amherst , Massachusetts, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1975 . He then worked for two years in various jobs in New York City , then became a copywriter and production assistant at an advertising company in 1977 and was a manager at Town Squash in New York from 1979 to 1985 , after which he worked for an Asian imports company in Pittsfield until 1990 , Massachusetts.

In 1987 Park published his first novel Soldiers of Paradise , the first volume in the Starbridge Chronicles trilogy . The other volumes are Sugar Rain (1989) and The Cult of Loving Kindness (1991). The novels are set in a distant future on a planet whose seasons last for decades, which is why one has seen similarities here with the Helliconia novels by Brian W. Aldiss . The world is ruled by the theocratic regime of the worshipers of the dog god Angkhdt, against which resistance arises in the first volume when spring comes to the city-state of Charn and brings with it some upheavals that are felt in some representatives of the Starbridge, which ruled the province of Charn Map clans. In the last volume it has become summer and the vanished cult of Angkhdt is stirring again, a sign of the coming winter.

The following novel Coelestis (1993) is a love story between a colonial civil servant stranded on a colonial world inhabited by two alien races and an alien woman who tries to match the appearance of earthly women as closely as possible. The background is the suppression and extinction of foreign cultures by imperial humanity. John Clute writes about Coelestis :

“The quietly savage density of the prose, the inexorability of the telling, and the tragedy of the continuing excruciation at human hands of the complex alien culture, all add again to a demonstration of late twentieth-century sf at its most responsible, and least conciliatory. It is one of the central texts of the last century in which cultures reminiscent of First World empires on Earth are seen (as it were) from a Third World standpoint. "

“The cruel and calm form of the narrative, the relentlessly evolving plot and the inevitably human martyrdom of a complex foreign culture show how serious and unforgiving SF could be in the late 20th century. It is one of the central texts of the last century in which cultures reminiscent of the empires of the first world are shown from the perspective of a third world . "

The novel was nominated for the James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award in 1993 in the gender-bending SF category, was a finalist at the Nebula Awards in 1996 and was nominated for the Kurd-Laßwitz Prize for best foreign novel .

The two following novels The Gospel of Corax (1996) and Three Marys (2003) marked a departure from SF in the narrower sense of the park, insofar as The Gospel of Corax in the form of an apocryphal gospel the story of Jesus exiled from Palestine and his pilgrimage to India and Tibet tells. In a sense, Three Marys follows on by telling the story of the three Marys against the background of a first Christian community, namely Mary Magdalene , Mary , the mother of Jesus, and Mary of Bethany , the sister of Lazarus . Both novels met with so little response from audiences and critics that Park thought of leaving writing as a professional perspective.

That changed in 2005 with the publication of A Princess of Roumania , the first volume of a fantastic romantic tale in which the young orphan Miranda Popescu finds out that she is the princess of a powerful Romanian empire in a parallel world where magic works . There she was not safe from persecution, which is why as a small child she was banished to the fictional world of a magical book for her protection, where she grew up as an orphan. This fictional world, it turns out, is our world, a small town in Berkshire County , Massachusetts. When Miranda burns the book and so returns to her own world, that is also the end of our world, which simply disappears. It is thus a reversal of the usual fantasy plot in which the protagonists enter another, magical world through a portal - for example the inside of a closet as in CS Lewis ' Narnia -, experience their adventures there and then mature into our something return to the more boring but “real” world. In order to intensify this reversal in effect and to give the "real" Massachusetts a fantastic impression and to make the "Greater Kingdom of Romania" appear relatively more substantial, Park resorted to memories of places that were magical for him from his childhood in North Adams, Berkshire County, back. A Princess of Roumania was nominated for the 2006 World Fantasy Award , the cycle received honorable mention at the 2009 James Tiptree Jr Memorial Awards, and the four volumes were each nominated for the Locus Award .

Park's short stories have been collected in If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories (2002) and in Other Stories (2015). In 2011, Ragnarok , a collection of poems, was published.

Park was visiting professor at the Writers' Center in Bethesda , Maryland in 1988, and visiting professor of creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore , Maryland in 1988 and 1991 . In 1989 he was first visiting professor of creative writing at Williams College in Williamstown , Massachusetts, where he has taught literature and creative writing ever since. Park has also taught at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers 'Workshop and has been teaching at the Clarion West Writers' Workshop since 1998 .

Park has been married to Deborah Brothers since 1994, with whom he has a daughter Miranda and a son Lucius.

bibliography

The Starbridge Chronicles (novel series)
  • 1 Soldiers of Paradise (1987)
  • 2 Sugar Rain (1989)
  • 3 The Cult of Loving Kindness (1991)
  • The Sugar Festival (1989, collective edition of 1 and 2)
A Princess of Roumania (novel series)
  • 1 A Princess of Roumania (2005)
  • 2 The Tourmaline (2006)
  • 3 The White Tyger (2007)
  • 4 The Hidden World (2008)
Novels
  • Coelestis (1993, also as Celestis )
    • German: Coelestis. Translated by Erik Simon. Heyne SF&F # 5400, 1996, ISBN 3-453-09461-1 .
  • The Gospel of Corax (1996)
    • German: The Gospel of Corax. Translated by Peter Hahlbrook. Ullstein TB # 24697, 2000, ISBN 3-548-24697-4 .
  • Three Marys (2003)
  • The Rose of Sarifal ( Forgotten Realms -Universum, 2012, as Paulina Claiborne)
  • All Those Vanished Engines (2014)
Collections
  • If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories (short stories, 2002)
  • Ragnarok (poems, 2011)
  • Other Stories (short stories, 2015)
Short stories
  • Rangriver Fell (1987)
  • Carbontown (1989)
  • The Village in the Trees (1991)
  • The Lost Sepulcher of Huáscar Capac (1992)
  • A Man on Crutches (1994)
  • The Tourist (1994)
  • The Breakthrough (1995)
  • The Last Homosexual (1996)
  • Get a Grip (1997)
  • Bukavu Dreams (1999)
  • Untitled 4 (2000)
  • Self Portrait, with Melanoma, Final Draft (2001)
  • Tachycardia (2002)
  • If Lions Could Speak: Imagining the Alien (2002)
  • Christmas in Jaisalmer (2002)
  • Abduction (2002)
  • No Traveler Returns (2004)
  • Fragrant Goddess (2007)
  • The Hidden World (excerpt) (2008)
  • The Blood of Peter Francisco (2008)
  • A Family History (2009)
  • The Persistence of Memory, or, This Space for Sale (2009)
  • Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance (2010)
  • Mysteries of the Old Quarter (2011)
  • Watchers at the Living Gate (2011)
  • The Statue in the Garden (2013)
  • The Mermaid and the Fisherman (2014)
  • Blind Spot (2016)
  • Creative Nonfiction (2018)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John Clute: Park, Paul. In: John Clute, Peter Nicholls : The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction . 3rd edition (online edition), version dated August 31, 2018.
  2. ↑ a b Paul Park: The Magic of Doubt , Interview in Locus , October 2006, accessed on March 14, 2019.
  3. ↑ Park's daughter is Miranda like the protagonist.
  4. ^ Interview Paul Park ( Memento from October 26, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), Interview by Aaron Hughes in Fantastic Reviews , September 2006.
  5. ↑ If Lions Could Speak, they'd tell us that Paul Park's novels just keep getting better and better ( Memento from September 24, 2006 in the Internet Archive ), Interview by Nick Gevers on SciFi Weekly # 489 from September 4, 2006.
personal data
SURNAME Park, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Park, Paul Claiborne (full name); Claiborne, Paulina (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American science fiction writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 1, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH North Adams , Massachusetts