Songbirds of pain by gary kilworth theatre

Garry Kilworth's first collection shows him to be one of the most original and enjoyable writers in the field. The thirteen stories in The Songbirds of Pain mix science fiction and fantasy, with a dash of unclassifiable strangeness. Kilworth is particularly adept at evoking colourful and exotic locales in distant parts of the world, as in 'The Dissemblers', a story set in the Arabian deserts, about a man resorting to bizarre self-torture in his attempts to see beyond the veil of death. 'Blind Windows' is an adventure set in the Far East, reminiscent of an updated Rider Haggard: a group of Westerners searching for some fabled crystals find their way into a hidden underground world. 'Scarlet Fever' is about an artist in a sterile future society who gives himself the disease in an attempt to stimulate creativity. And the titled story tells of a woman who undergoes a strange and painful series of treatments in order to achieve perfect beauty.

Entry updated 13 January 2025. Tagged: Author.

(1941-    ) UK author who began to publish sf and fantasy stories and novels in the mid-1970s, having retired after eighteen years' service as a cryptographer in the RAF; raised partly in Aden, he has travelled and worked in the Far East and the Pacific; he has also published as by Richard Argent, Garry Douglas, Kim Hunter and F K Salwood [a name used for historical novels, not listed below; nor is the Jack Crossman series of historical adventures as by G D Kilworth listed below]. He began to publish work of genre interest with "Let's Go to Golgotha!" in the Sunday Times Weekly Review for 15 December 1974, this ironic tale of Time Travel (which see) having won an associated competition. Most of his many stories have been assembled in various collections [for full titles see checklist below] including The Songbirds of Pain (coll 1984), In the Hollow of the Deep-Sea Wave (coll 1989), Dark Hills, Hollow Clocks: Stories from the Otherworld (1990), In the Country of Tattooed Men (coll 1993), Hogfoot Right and Bird-Hands (coll 1993), Moby Jack and Other Tall Tales (coll 2006), Tales from the Fragrant Harbour (coll 2010), Phoenix Man (coll 2011 ebook; exp vt The Fabulous Beast2013), The Best Short Stories of Garry Kilworth (coll 2016), ­Elemetal Tales (coll 2019) and Blood Moon (coll 2021).

Kilworth's first sf novel, In Solitary (1977), is set on an Earth whose few remaining humans have for over 400 years been dominated by birdlike Aliens, and deals with a human rebellion whose moral impact is ambiguous; the novel is the first of several combining generic adventurousness – indeed opportunism, for Kilworth seldom accords his full attention to the raw sf elements in his tales – and an identifiably English dubiety about the roots of human action. Consequences of such action in a Kilworth novel are seldom simple, rarely flattering, u