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(1952- ) UK poet – whose first collection, Familiars (coll 1983 chap), was well received – and author, mostly for Young Adult audiences, beginning with The Song of Gail and Fludd (1991), a surreal rite of passage tale whose two protagonists, questing aimlessly from venue to venue as though traversing an endless Archipelago, encounter exemplary fantasy and sf modes of life, including one Feminist Utopia; in the end, they seem to understand that life is a performance, that it is the song they sing. With the possible exception of The Air Mines of Mistila (1988 chap) with Sylvia Kantaris (1936- ), a suite of poems in which the literal mining of air leads to meditations on the self-destructive impulses inherent in Western civilization, Gross's other work at length has been less taxing, though generically various. Of specific sf interest are Plex (1994), whose young protagonists encounter a man capable of duplicating matter (see Matter Duplication), and Psylicon Beach (1998), which treats a Virtual Reality playground for adolescents as hugely and intoxicatingly dangerous.
Short poems of sf interest have appeared intermittently in various collections (see Poetry), including several evocations of the grammar of Ruins and Futurity in The Ice Factory (coll 1984 chap); the Hubble telescope in the title poem of Deep Field (coll 2011 chap) is envisioned as a fisherman staring into the depths of space. [JC]
born Delabole, Cornwall: 27 February 1952
works (selected)
collections and stories (highly selected)
links
Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleight.
Accessed 15:09 pm on 24 April 2024.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/gross_philip>