Michael G. Coney

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Michael Greatrex Coney (September 28, 1932 - November 4, 2005) was a British science fiction writer who spent his last years in Canada. Born in Birmingham, England on September 28, 1932, he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in 1972. He died at age 73 of mesothelioma, a cancer of the lungs, on November 4, 2005 at the Saanich Peninsula Hospital palliative care unit.

[edit] Assessment

Settings and themes vary between the different novels. A common element is that you follow rather ordinary people who are buffeted by forces beyond their strength, and mostly not much concerned with them. Most SF gives the superior powers to the leading characters, or has them acquire it during the course of the tale. Coney avoided this, cleverly satirised it in The Hero of Downways.

The stories do also tie in with the cultural concerns of the time:

His first novel, Mirror Image (1972), neatly intensified the American genre's Cold War focus on impostors and secret invaders; in this case the "amorphs", who are indistiguishable from us, are themselves convinced that they are human.

After a first rush of dystopian tales, however, Coney began to shift his ground... his most successful later work - The Celestial Steam Locomotive and Gods of the Greataway - could almost be set on a transfigured Vancouver Island. (Obituary by John Clute).

Another of Coney's themes is small isolated communities - The Hero of Downways, Winter's Children and Fang, the Gnome. A different perspective is seen in ‘‘Hello Summer, Goodbye’’ - an adventure / mystery among people who are not quite human, on a planet rather like Earth, but with significant differences. An unpublished sequel to Hello Summer Goodbye is due to be appear in 2007.[1] It has previously been available as an internet download.

Brontomek! received the BritishScience Fiction award for best novel of 1976. He was nominated for a Nebula Award in 1995 for his novelette, Tea and Hamsters.

[edit] Novels

Mirror Image, 1972
Syzygy, 1973
Friends Come in Boxes, 1973
The Hero of Downways, 1973
Winter's Children, 1974
Monitor Found in Orbit, 1974
The Jaws that Bite, the Claws that Catch, 1974. (UK title, The Girl with a Symphony in her Fingers)
Hello Summer, Goodbye, 1975
Charisma, 1975
Brontomek, 1976
The Ultimate Jungle, 1979
Neptune's Cauldron, 1981
Cat Karina, 1982
The Celestial Steam Locomotive, 1983
Gods of the Greataway, 1984
Fang, the Gnome, 1988
King of the Scepter'd Isle, 1989
A Tomcat Called Sabrina, 1992
No Place for a Sealion, 1992

The Celestial Steam Locomotive and Gods of the Greataway are two parts of a single tale. Cat Karina, Fang, the Gnome and King of the Scepter'd Isle are independent stories in the same framework. Brontomek is set on the same world as Syzygy and is also loosely linked to Mirror Image.