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Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997)
Grimwood, Ken

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(1944-2003) US radio journalist and writer who wrote three nongenre novels before publishing Replay (1986), a highly successful Time Fantasy which won the World Fantasy Award. In 1988 a 43-year-old radio journalist dies suddenly, reawakening in 1963 in his 18-year-old body with all his memories intact. He relives his life, but this time not making his earlier mistakes, and becomes immensely rich. So far, this is classic wish-fulfilment. But in 1988, at the age of 43, he dies suddenly again, and reawakens again, although somewhat later than before. This time he knows when he will die. The plot gradually and intricately thickens, with his discovery of others forced to replay their lives; but the heart of the tale is the swift sophistication of its unpacking of the great dream. Particularly interesting is the fact that each of the "replays" effectively generates an Alternate Reality or Alternate World, yet these are sequential rather than, as is almost always the case in alternate-world fictions, "parallel". Grimwood's second novel of genre interest, Into the Deep (1995), is metaphysical sf, not dissimilar in some of its implications to Greg Bear's Blood Music (1985). [JC]

Kenneth Grimwood

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