RUSHDIE, (Ahmed) Salman

(1947-)

   Indian-born writer, educated in the UK at Rugby and Cambridge and long a UK citizen. His fame derives not solely from the illegal fatwa, or death "sentence", proclaimed against him by the Islamic theocracy of Iran for The Satanic Verses (1988), but also, and far more importantly,from all his previous work, beginning with the complex and witty, legend-like Grimus (1975), a FABULATION (like all his novels) which makes marginal use of sf material in its invoking of IMMORTALITY themes and in the interdimensional conflicts its eternally young Native American protagonist must undergo in his search, through an emblematic World-Island, for the moment of death; ultimately, with Sufi-likeirreverent sublimity about the nature of transcendence, he succeeds. The narrator of Midnight's Children (1980), one of 1001 children born at midnight on the day of India's independence, interweaves personal and national stories in fabulist terms; Shame (1983) similarly but less successfully erects a mythopoeic framework around the land of Pakistan. The Satanic Verses scabrously anatomizes, in fantasy terms, a RELIGIONwhose more fanatically fundamentalist devotees responded brutally to its being comprehended in this fashion. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) is a fable reflecting, indirectly, the nature of its author's own experiences after 1988. The Wizard of Oz (coll 1992 chap US) presents his reflections on L. Frank BAUM and Hollywood. Some of the stories assembled in East, West (coll 1994) are fantasy.

   JC

   See also: PERCEPTION.