In the tradition of Poe, Ambrose Bierce and Ray Bradbury, Tom Henighan skillfully explores the twilight realm where the tilt of reality toward chaos suggests a new kind of order. Strange Attractors is made up of nine stories, often rooted in reality but with a dark, eerie element of the fantastic. Enter a world where: a Canadian missionary re-enacts Eden among the ghostly Tasaday; a son plots to kill his robotic mother; a child has a Christmas Eve visit from a talking rat and three rather unsatisfactory wise men; the Earth is gripped by a new ice age; and enter a future where women have forgotten men.
Tom Henighan
I was born in New York City and grew up in Manhattan, the Bronx and Westchester. Early on, I became a fan of radio serials, movies and comic books'and I was a kid who loved my many trips to the Museum of Natural History, MOMA, and the New York City opera and ballet. Later I dived into science fiction, off-Broadway theatre and saw a lot of French, Italian and Japanese movies. As a young man I traveled a bit, and lived for several years in England, Germany and South Arabia, until I finally settled in Canada in 1965. I spent many years as a university English prof and taught Romantic Literature, modern fiction, SF, and western mythology; I also taught film studies for a few years. Issues such as climate change and global warming, environmental protection, Canadian cultural survival, political justice, and social equality continue to be very important to me.
Viking Terror and Demon in My View, both YA novels, due out in 2006-7, will be my 14th and 15th published books. My fiction includes The Well of Time (1986), an adult novel about the Vikings in North America, short-listed for the Seal Books first novel award; Mercury Man (2004), short-listed for the Red Maple award for YA fiction; Viking Quest (2001), the first novel of the Rigg series of YA novels about the Vikings. In addition, he I've published two volumes of short stories, Tourists from Algol (1983) and Strange Attractors (1991).
I've also published three books on Canadian arts and culture: The Maclean's Companion to Canadian Arts and Culture (2000), Ideas of North (1997), and The Presumption of Culture (1996). I was formerly Associate Editor of Ottawa Revue, an influential arts and entertainment journal of the 1970s-80s. Some of my articles and reviews have appeared in other Canadian journals and newspapers, including the Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Toronto Star and the Ottawa Citizen. My report on arts and culture for the City of Ottawa resulted in the founding of Arts Court, the city's municipal arts centre, and I continue to take an interest in neighbourhood matters.
I was one of the founders of ARC, Canada's national poetry magazine, and I have run workshops for aspiring writers of all ages, some of them'to my delight-- subsequently achieving publication. My poems have appeared in Canadian and American literary journals, and my poetry collection, Home Planet, was published in 1994. One of my poems was nominated for a Rhysling Award (USA).
My fiction and poetry has been described by the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (UK) as 'finding mythic echoes in the spaces of the great Canadian wilderness.' I've been listed in Canadian Who's Who since 1988 and I'm included in the recent Dictionary of Literary Biography (Canada).
In 2005, I published Coming of Age in Arabia, a memoir covering my time as an American vice consul in the former British Colony of Aden (Yemen), a runner-up in the 2006 Ottawa-Carleton non-fiction prize contest. I continue to work on my Viking series and other YA novels, on poetry, on a hardboiled mystery series, and I have several non-fiction works in hand.
(For samples of my work, see my website www.carleton.ca/~thenigha/)
