SFE: Kaveney, Roz (original) (raw)

Entry updated 19 June 2023. Tagged: Author, Critic, Editor.

Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com

pic

(1949- ) UK critic, editor and author. Her sf criticism, beginning in the late 1970s (before 1980 as by Andrew Kaveney), has appeared in specialist journals like Foundation and in non-genre outlets like the Washington Post and Books and Bookmen; it is marked by a seemingly off-hand general erudition and a knowing sharpness about the field; she created the term Big Dumb Objects, which became an entry in the second edition of this encyclopedia but in the third has been subsumed by Macrostructures. In 1982 she was a co-founder of Interzone. Much of her non-sf writing has concentrated on issues like Feminism, gay rights and censorship. She began publishing sf with "A Lonely Impulse" in Temps: Volume One (anth 1991), "devised by" Neil Gaiman and Alex Stewart. Her Rhapsody of Blood sequence, beginning with Rhapsody of Blood, Volume One – Rituals: A Novel of the Fantastic (2012), is fantasy, though the Temporal Adventuress at the heart of the action occasionally imparts an Equipoisal note to the narrative. She edited Tales from the Forbidden Planet (anth 1987) and More Tales from the Forbidden Planet (anth 1990) as well as three Shared-World anthologies: The Weerde: Book 1 (anth 1992), Villains (anth 1992) and The Weerde: Book 2: A Shared World Anthology (anth 1993), all with Mary Gentle. Most of the poems assembled in What If What's Imagined Were All True? (coll 2012 chap) are sf or fantasy.

Kaveney's work as a critic and reviewer is both erudite and far-flung, and she has focused only some of her energies on the fantastic; none of this work has yet been assembled. Of specific interest, however, are three volumes of nonfiction: Reading the Vampire Slayer: An Unofficial Critical Companion to Buffy and Angel (anth 2002) puts together a very sharp conspectus of takes on the Television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Angel; From Alien to The Matrix: Reading Science Fiction Film (2006) is an acutely knowledgeable study of sf Cinema, each chapter building from a fluent rendering of the narratives of each film studied; and Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films (2008). [JC]

Roz Kaveney

born London: 9 July 1949

works

series

Rhapsody of Blood

poetry

nonfiction

works as editor

links

previous versions of this entry