Hugh Cook (science fiction author)

For the Canadian novelist, see Hugh Cook (Canadian novelist).

Hugh Cook (9 August 1956 – 8 November 2008(2008-11-08) (aged 52)) was a cult author whose works blend fantasy and science fiction. He is best known for his epic series The Chronicles of an Age of Darkness.

Biography

Hugh Walter Gilbert Cook was born in Essex, England in 1956. After spending his early childhood in England he moved to Ocean Island (now Banaba Island in Kiribati). His experiences of English castles and of life on an equatorial island later influenced his writing.[1]

He moved to, and was educated in New Zealand. His first novel, Plague Summer was published when he was 24 in 1980.

Between 1986 and 1992 he wrote the ten-novel series The Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. Disappointing sales prevented the publication of further volumes (up to 60 were planned).

In 1997 he moved to Japan, and lived in Yokohama with his wife and daughter and taught English.

He subsequently published mainly online, through his site, Zen Virus. His online works include poetry, short stories, "flash fiction", and several novels.

In 2005 he underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment for cancer in the form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He wrote a medical memoir, Cancer Patient, telling of this experience.

Following a relapse, Hugh Cook died on 8 November 2008, in the hospice in Auckland.

Bibliography

Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series

The series broadly tells the story of the events leading to the end of a dark age. The idea for the series began with an ambitious outline for a series of twenty novels. This would have been followed by two equally long series, The Chronicles of an Age of Wrath, and The Chronicles of an Age of Heroes. This sixty-volume scheme ended with the publication of the tenth volume because of disappointing sales.

Other novels

This describes a postnuclear world where orange intelligent reptilian extraterrestrials known as the Spang have conquered the Earth through the use of a device called the Shift, which controls movement through space and time and can alter history. They are in league with Iridian Troy, the most powerful human on Earth, who has an overprotective attitude towards his daughter. He is opposed by his guilt-ridden over-intellectual employee Gabriel Arkhangel and his daughter's lover Clive Sendarka, whom he pursues using all the resources available to the human race. Humans are regularly exported to a slave colony known as Deep Six, which is far out in interstellar space.
A fantasy trilogy that Cook finished in the 1990s, set in Chalakanesia.
A fast-moving fantasy novel, written on an adult level, about the war on terror. In the city state of Oolong Morblock, where a certain proportion of the people have a natural ability to cause themselves to explode, in effect making them potential suicide bombers, Ibrahim Chess tries to find the middle road: to steer a course of moderation and sanity in a world which is going mad, and where the civil peace is threatened by the increasingly intolerant fanaticism of the conflict between the minority group to which Ibrahim belongs, the astrals, and the city state's dominant group, the norms. Published in 2005.
A murder mystery with fantasy elements set in the land of Nizon, where people eat with scissors rather than with chopsticks. Fantasy in a modern environment complete with computers and cellphones. Business manager Ken Udamana, a husband and a father of two, believes that someone is planning to murder him and takes a shot at find out who. This novel contains some violence and touches on the subject of an adulterous relationship.

Short stories

Chronicles of an Age of Darkness stories

Oolong Morblock stories

Chalakanesia stories

References

  1. ↑

External links

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