F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre
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Fergus (also Feargus) Gwynplaine MacIntyre is a Scottish-born journalist, novelist and poet, who now resides in Wales and New York City. MacIntyre's writings have been praised by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Auberon Waugh, Harlan Ellison, John Brunner, Charles Sheffield, David Brin, Charles Ardai, William Safire and other authors.
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[edit] Biographical information
MacIntyre is known to have been born circa 1948 in Perthshire, Scotland, and he has acknowledged changing his name (by deed poll) to its present form at some time in the 1970s, but he has been evasive about his precise birthdate and parentage. In the United Kingdom (unlike in most other nations), birth certificates are public documents; it is believed that MacIntyre's reticence about his vital statistics is partly a defense against the mounting problem of identity theft but largely due to his unresolved hostility towards his family. One of the few clues to MacIntyre's lineage occurs in his book review for The Wind on the Moon, a fantasy novel by Eric Linklater. In his review (published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2003), MacIntyre acknowledges that he is related to Linklater's wife. In an interview with the New York Times (July 24, 2005), MacIntyre stated that he has or once had a fraternal twin brother.
MacIntyre was born with a medical condition tentatively diagnosed as a variant of Hallopeau-Siemens syndrome, an extremely rare mutation causing blistering of the flesh on the subject's arms and legs, and webbing of the fingers and toes. Skin grafts do not resolve the problem; if the webbing is surgically removed, it grows back. MacIntyre's working-class parents were unwilling to raise a handicapped child, and in 1954 he became one of the 150,000 child migrants who were expatriated from postwar Britain under false pretenses to farms and orphanages in Australia, where they were used as slave labor. More than 20 years after his expatriation, MacIntyre's parents contacted him to attempt a reconciliation: he discovered that his non-identical twin (who did not share the Hallopeau-Siemens mutation) needed a kidney transplant, and the reconciliation was merely a ruse attempting to obtain one of MacIntyre's kidneys. As MacIntyre later told the New York Times: "First they aborted me, then they tried to use me for stem-cell donations."
In 1999, MacIntyre testified under oath to the Forde Inquiry Commission conducted by the Queensland government in Australia. This inquiry verified that, under his birth name, MacIntyre had spent part of his childhood and adolescence in several Queensland institutions, including the Marsden Home for Boys at Narangba, Kallangur; the Industrial Home at Yarrabah Mission Station and the Westbrook Farm Home for Boys, all of which are now decommissioned. Some of these institutions have been formally identified by the Forde Inquiry as abusive environments in which pre-teen children were sentenced to slave labor, and given no education. Because of MacIntyre's disfigured arms, he was easily identified by several other deponents in the Forde Inquiry who had known him by his previous name more than four decades earlier.
Among the many abuses of the "child migrant" program was the fact that the British children expatriated to Australia (including MacIntyre) were stripped of their UK. citizenship, and formally registered as Australian citizens. In 1961, MacIntyre returned to Britain via the fraudulent technique of "ghosting", using authentic I.D. issued to a deceased person. He eventually sued the UK government to recognize his British citizenship.
[edit] Career
MacIntyre began his literary career while still a teenager, writing science fiction and horror novels under various house pseudonyms for the UK publisher Badger Books. At some point in the 1960s, he took the Gaelic name "Feargus Mhic an-t'Saoir", later anglicized to "Feargus MacIntyre". He later added the name "Gwynplaine" in homage to Victor Hugo's character of that name: the protagonist of Hugo's 1869 novel The Man Who Laughs, a book which MacIntyre cites as one of his most profound influences.
In the mid-1960s, MacIntyre joined the television production firm of Lew Grade, later Sir Lew Grade and then Lord Grade. During this period, MacIntyre worked in various technical capacities on several TV series produced by Grade, including The Champions and The Prisoner.
MacIntyre briefly revisited Australia in the early 1970s, then returned to Britain and worked as a reporter and stringer for several Fleet Street newspapers. In 1975 he covered the notorious abduction/murder of heiress Lesley Whittle, but resigned in protest at the manner in which his editors violated the Whittle family's privacy. This event inspired his decision to relocate to the United States. MacIntyre has worked in the professional theater as an assistant to the producers Herman Shumlin and Alexander H. Cohen.
As an author in Britain and the U.S.A., MacIntyre has published non-fiction and fiction (sometimes pseudonymously) in several genres, but he is best-known as a science-fiction author. His stories have been published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Analog Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Absolute Magnitude, Interzone, the Irish magazine Albedo and other magazines and anthologies.
MacIntyre has authored mystery stories set in many different historical periods, distinguished by his intensively detailed recreations of these times and places. His published mystery stories include "Death in the Dawntime" (1995), set among the Wiradjuri aborigines of Australia in 35,000 BC; "The Weighing of the Heart" (2002), set in ancient Egypt during the civil war of the 21st dynasty; "Reliquary" (1996), set in a monastery in Cornwall in 589 AD; and "Murder As You Like It" (1997), which inserts an offstage homicide into the action of Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It, using this crime to explain some of the irrational motivations in Shakespeare's play. In his mystery story "O, Poisonous Weed!" (2006), set in England in 1617, MacIntyre (only half-seriously) suggests that Pocahontas was murdered by Thomas Harriot, and he adds a link to The Da Vinci Code by pointing out that Harriot was living in Syon House (the residence of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, who used the spelling "Sion House") when the Abbey of Sion was disbanded in 1617, shortly after Pocahontas's unexplained death.
MacIntyre's poetry, originally published in Auberon Waugh's Literary Review and in British anthologies, has been collected in his book MacIntyre's Improbable Bestiary (2002). His poetry maintains strict adherence to traditional rhyme and meter, a practice which has made MacIntyre a target of derision from poets and critics who prefer more modern free-form verse techniques. He has been nominated three times (1980, 1990, 1991) for the Rhysling Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. In general, MacIntyre's writings are distinguished by inventive use of language. He has coined several useful words: among these are "glutcorp" (a huge global corporation), "yesterwards" (to denote time travel into the past), "robutler" (a cybernetic servant) and "nanobots" (microscopic robots). Language authority William Safire has credited MacIntyre's contributions to the English language (New York Times, "On Language", December 2, 2001), identifying MacIntyre as the inventor of the term "clintonym" and the coiner of the phrase "the Syntax Pretentious". MacIntyre has also popularized the time-travel terms "elsewhen" and "anywhen", although he denies inventing these.
In addition to his published work under his own name, MacIntyre is known to have done "ghost writing" duties for public figures. He normally does not identify the authors whom he has assisted in this manner; however, after the 1991 suicide of Jerzy Kosinski, MacIntyre acknowledged that he wrote much of Kosinski's 1982 novel Pinball, which features a character named Gwynplaine. MacIntyre has also been identified as the pseudonymous author of a 1991 Tom Swift IV novel, The DNA Disaster.
MacIntyre has been instrumental in the recovery of several so-called "lost" motion pictures that were produced in Germany and other nations in the 1930s or earlier, but which were no longer known to exist in archives in their nations of origin.[citation needed] Acting on reports from a correspondent in the former Soviet Union, MacIntyre ascertained the location of a trove of films in Uzkoe, Russia, that had been confiscated by troops of the Soviet Red Army during their invasion of Germany in the 1940s. These films are now safely in private hands, undergoing restoration.[citation needed] He has submitted numerous reviews to the IMDb of obscure or lost silent films, but when such a film is subsequently viewed, MacIntyre's comments often turn out to be incorrect or misleading: it is unclear what sources he uses for these 'reviews'. However, it should be remembered that silent films, being more modular than sound films, sometimes exist in several different edited versions, sometimes with radical differences in plot: this is especially true in the case of European prints of American-made silent films.
From 2002 to the present, while living part-time in New York City, MacIntyre has written bylined articles for the New York Daily News on various aspects of New York's cultural history. In 2003, he was short-listed for the Mont Blanc/Spectator Art of Writing award, for his coverage of the London arts scene.
[edit] Sources
- Isaac Asimov, editorial citing MacIntyre, August 1981 Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.
- John Brunner, guest of honor speech mentioning MacIntyre's work in detail, 1983 World Science Fiction Convention.
- Introduction to Ardai for MacIntyre's story in Great Tales of Madness and the Macabre, 1990 anthology edited by Ardai.
- Blurbs by Ardai and Sheffield for MacIntyre's 1994 novel The Woman Between the Worlds.
- Blurbs by Bradbury, Brin and Sheffield for MacIntyre's 2001 anthology MacIntyre's Improbable Bestiary.
- Harlan Ellison, on-air review of MacIntyre's novel The Woman Between the Worlds, Sci-Fi Channel, 1994, subsequently in Ellison's newsletter Harlan Ellison's Watching.
[edit] External links
- F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Film comments written by MacIntyre at the Internet Movie Database [1]
