Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 21, 2003–Writer Paul Park has been nominated for the 2002 British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Short Fiction for his story “If Lions Could Speak: Imagining the Alien.”
“You cannot think of something outside human thought. On the other hand, the concept of alien intelligence is what animates a great deal of science fiction,” Park begins the short story. “Often you can see the way the story bends back in frustration, turning toward the human once again. The alien intelligence becomes part of the landscape, something to be experienced or overcome, something to show us aspects of ourselves.”
The story is included in Park’s new anthology of short stories, which explore cultural difference and psychological crisis, regret and reconciliation. The collection, also titled “If Lions Could Speak” (Cosmos Books, 2002), includes stories from 1983 to 2001.
Park is the author of five novels, including “Soldiers of Paradise” (1987), “Sugar Rain” (1989), and “The Cult of Loving Kindness” (1991), which compose The Starbridge Chronicles trilogy. After the publication of his first book, “Soldiers of Paradise,” Park attracted notice as one of the finest authors of American science fiction, and earned comparisons with sci-fi greats, including Gene Wolfe and Brian Aldiss. “Soldiers of Paradise” was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and “The Cult of Loving Kindness” was named a New York Times “Notable Book.”
“In the Starbridge Chronicles, the task I set for myself was to make a strange place come alive, so that the experience of reading it was comparable to the experience of living in that world,” Park said in an interview in Infinity Plus, a British webzine. “I worked at a lot of stupid jobs after college and taught squash for many years in Manhattan. I quit in 1983 to write a novel. With a notebook and a couple of shirts, I flew to New Delhi, telling myself I couldn’t come back until I had completed a manuscript. “Soldiers of Paradise” was written during my travels in Asia, largely in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Rajasthan, Burma, Thailand, and Indonesia, over the course of two years.”
“All the best writers are explorers,” award-winning sci-fi writer Terry Bisson said of Park. “Only a few are discoverers. Paul Park is one of those rare talents in science fiction, like Gene Wolfe or William Gibson, who have opened entire new worlds hitherto unimagined and, indeed, unimaginable. Is it any wonder that his fellow writers are among his most eager readers?”
Park’s stories have been published in Interzone, Full Spectrum 5, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, Azimov’s, and The New York Review of Science Fiction.
Park, part-time lecturer in English at Williams College, has also taught creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. His sixth novel, “Three Marys,” is forthcoming from Cosmos Books.
END
“If Lions Could Speak”
HB ISBN: 1-58715-512-5 ($29.95)
TP ISBN: 1-58715-508-7 ($15.00)
196 pages
Published by Cosmos Books, an imprint of Wildside Press
END
Published March 21, 2003
Megamenu Social