Terry Dowling
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Terry Dowling aka Terence William Dowling (www.terrydowling.com), born 1947 in Sydney, is an Australian writer, freelance journalist, award-winning critic, editor, game designer and reviewer, and one of Australia's most awarded and highly regarded writers of speculative fiction and dark fantasy. His academic background includes his Sydney University master's thesis on the topic of J. G. Ballard and Surrealism and a doctorate in Creative Writing with a focus on computer adventure game narrative.
Dowling has outstanding publishing credentials. As well as appearances in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Year’s Best SF, The Mammoth Book of Best New SF, The Year’s Best Fantasy, The Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (a record eight times; he is the only author to have had two stories in the 2002 volume, one chosen by each editor), his work has appeared in such major anthologies as Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction, The Best Australian Science Fiction Writing,The Dark, Dreaming Down Under, Gathering the Bones and The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories and in such diverse publications as the prestigious SciFiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Oceans of the Mind, Ténèbres, Ikarie, Japan’s SF and Russia’s Game.Exe. His fiction has been translated into many languages and has been used in a course in forensic psychology in the US.
Critical regard for Dowling's work is extensive. Locus magazine (Nov 1999) said: “Who’s the writer who can produce horror as powerful and witty as the best of Peter Straub, SF as wondrously byzantine and baroque as anything by Gene Wolfe, near-mainstream subtly tinged with the fantastic like some tales by Powers or Lansdale? Why Terry Dowling, of course.” It also his first book Rynosseros as placing him “among the masters of the field” (August 1990). In The Year’s Best Science Fiction 21 (reprinting Dowling’s story “Flashmen”), twelve-time Hugo Award winning US editor Gardner Dozois called him: “One of the best-known and most celebrated of Australian writers in any genre”, while in the Year’s Best Fantasy 4 (reprinting “One Thing About the Night”), editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer described him as a “master craftsman” and “one of the best prose stylists in science fiction and fantasy.” Dowling has also been called “Australia’s finest writer of horror” by Locus magazine, and “Australia’s premier writer of dark fantasy” by All Hallows (February 2004). The late leading Australian SF personality Peter McNamara (on his SF Review radio show on Adelaide’s 5EBI-FM, 23 June 2000) called him “Australia’s premier fantasist.”
Dowling’s fiction has been compared to that of Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, J.G. Ballard, Harlan Ellison, Gene Wolfe and Frank Herbert, Dennis Etchison and Peter Straub, as well as South American writers like Borges and Cortazar. For the US edition of Rynosseros (1993), multi-award-winning US Grand Master Harlan Ellison said this of Terry: “Here is Jack Vance, Cordwainer Smith, and Tiptree/Sheldon come again, reborn in one wonderful talent. If you lament the chicanery and boredom of so much of today’s shopworn sf, then like those of us who’ve been reading his award-winning stories for a few years now, you’ll purr and growl with delight at your great discovery of the remarkable, brilliant Terry Dowling. He comes from Downunder, and he knows how to stand you on your head with story.”
Dowling has won the Ditmar Award for fiction eleven times, [1] as well as three Aurealis Awards, a Prix Wolkenstein, and earned himself two World Fantasy Award nominations in 2001. He is the author of the Tom Rynosseros saga, comprising Rynosseros (Aphelion, 1990), Blue Tyson (Aphelion, 1992), Twilight Beach (Aphelion, 1993)and Rynemonn (forthcoming), as well as Wormwood (Aphelion, 1992), The Man Who Lost Red (MirrorDanse, 1995; 2003), and Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling (MP Books, 1999), and editor of The Essential Ellison (Nemo Press/Morpheus 1987,2000), The Jack Vance Treasury (Subterranean Press 2007) (with Jonathan Strahan) and Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF (Coronet, 1993) (with Dr Van Ikin). He is also author of three computer adventures: Schizm: Mysterious Journey (2001)(aka US Mysterious Journey: Schizm), Schizm II: Chameleon (2003) (aka US Mysterious Journey II: Chameleon) and Sentinel: Descendants in Time (2004) (aka Realms of Illusion).
Dowling is an accomplished musician and songwriter, with eight years of regular guest appearances on the long-running Australian ABC children's television program Mr Squiggle and Friends. He is a trained teacher and currently presents a communications course at the June Dally-Watkins Business Finishing College in Sydney. He has been genre reviewer for The Weekend Australian newspaper for the past seventeen years. Dowling also regularly conducts writers' workshops around Australia.
In August 2006, Dowling successfully completed his doctorate in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia, the first degree of its kind to be conferred at that University. The creative writing component was a mystery/dark fantasy/horror novel, Clowns at Midnight, while the dissertation component: “The Interactive Landscape: New Modes of Narrative in Science Fiction” examined the computer adventure game as an important new area of storytelling.
Dowling's work in the supernatural forms the most sophisticated and extensive use of the weird mode in contemporary Australian literature. A writer of formidable intelligence and admirable narrative control, he published many stories with elements of fear and haunting prior to 1995, but An Intimate Knowledge of the Night (Aphelion, 1995) was the first of his works to concentrate almost exclusively on horror. An ambitiously literary work, it presents a series of chilling reality-testings that deal with rapture, fear, and the secret, darkest mysteries of the world and the human spirit. The framing narrative concerns an author who sits down to write the linking pieces for the stories in his new book, planning to do it by the hours of the night observed by medieval scholars; he is soon interrupted by phone calls from Ray, a former mental patient obsessed with finding order in a chaotic psychic landscape. Dowling's express agenda in his writing is that of creating for his readers a resacralization of the world that works for them, that jerks them out of their quotidian slumber, that awakens them to the infinite possibility immanent in the world and its variety. This essentially moral purpose, although possibly unfashionable in postmodern times, is effective in the hands of a writer as skilled as Dowling. The volume won the Aurealis Award for Best Horror Novel in 1996.
Dowling's second significant book in the horror genre is Blackwater Days (Eidolon, 2000). The collection won the Ditmar for Best Collection 2001, and from it, "Jenny Come to Play" (Eidolon, Spring 1997)won the Aurealis Award for Best Horror Short Story (1997) and "The Saltimbanques" (Eidolon 29/30, 2000) won the Ditmar Awardfor Best Short Story (2001). It features seven closely linked tales set around the Blackwater Psychiatric Hospital at Everton in the Hunter Valley, featuring Dr Dan Truswell and his two "psychosleuths", Peter Rait and Philip Crow. "Downloading" (Event Horizon Online, September 14, 1998)is a chilling exercise in murder and possession. "Beckoning Nightframe" (Eidolon, Spring 1996)plays with narrative framing devices in the atmospheric story of a woman convinced that there is a presence behind the fluttering curtain of a shed visible from her home. "Basic Black" is a complex serial killer tale in which (mistaken) identity plays a pivotal role. "The Saltimbanques" features the otherworldly impact of a troupe of travelling carnival players on some youths of a small Australian outback town. "Jenny Come to Play" is a bizarre reconciliation of opposites in the story of sisters joined by more than simply flesh; "Light from the Deep Pavilion" is another disturbing tale about ritualistic murder and psychic detection; amd "Blackwater Days" draws the threads of the book together, an unforgettable tale of dioramas, catatonic withdrawal, mystery and madness.
Dowling's most recent publication is Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear (Cemetery Dance, 2006), a bumper collection in hardcover of the best of his weird and supernatural fiction, which includes two previously uncollected tales. It earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly (May), which said: "The everyday and ordinary show an unexpected malignant side in this collection of 18 uniquely disturbing tales of the fantastic...one of the year's more satisfying dark fantasy reads."
Future projects include Rynemonn, the fourth book of Tom Tyson (Rynosseros) stories (its concluding three stories have already appeared in print in Peter McNamara and Margaret Winch, eds, Forever Shores, Wakefield Press, 2003); and a novel in the Wormwood mythos.
Bibliography: The first full-length monograph on Dowling is Leigh Blackmore and Dr Van Ikin, The Eternal Yes: The Affirmations of Terry Dowling (forthcoming). Blackmore's chapbook Terry Dowling: Virtuoso of the Fantastic (R'yeh Texts, 2005) provides a summary of Dowling's writing career to date. See also Van Ikin and Sean McMullen, Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction'' (Greenwood Press, 1999), pp. 164-68. Useful bibliographies of Dowling's work (though now inevitably somewhat out of date) may be found in The Man Who Lost Red (MirrorDanse, 2nd ed, 2003)and Leigh Blackmore, Ellison/Dowling/Dann: A Bibliographic Checklist (R'lyeh Texts, 1996).
[edit] Reference
- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, page 351
