Dead Code and Other Dramatic Entertainments

This collection of dramatic entertainments brings together innovative plays by Jeff Noon, D. Harlan Wilson, Tom Prime, Gary Barwin, Andrew Joron, and Andrew C. Wenaus, with an afterword by Steve Beard. Also included are interviews with the playwrights about their influences, the role of experimental literature, and the craft of writing for the theatre.

JEFF NOON was born in Manchester, England. He trained in the visual arts and was active on the post-punk music scene before becoming a playwright, and then a novelist. His science fiction books include Vurt (winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award), Pollen, Automated Alice, Falling Out of Cars, and a collection of stories called Pixel Juice. He has written two crime novels, Slow Motion Ghosts and House With No Doors. The four Nyquist Mysteries (A Man of Shadows, The Body Library, Creeping Jenny, and Within Without) explore the shifting intersections between SF and crime. His latest books are Gogmagog and Ludluda, two alternative-world fantasy novels created in collaboration with Steve Beard. Twitter: @jeffnoon.

GARY BARWIN is a writer, musician, and multidisciplinary visual artist. He is the author of 31 books, including his national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates, which won the Leacock Medal for Humor and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was long-listed for Canada Reads. His poetry collection, The Most Charming Creatures, won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and he was shortlisted for the 2024 League of Canadian Poets’ Spoken Word prize. His latest books are Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity, Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984, and Muttertongue with Lillian Allen and Gregory Betts. A Ph.D. in music composition, Barwin has been writer-in-residence and taught at many universities, colleges, and libraries.

ANDREW JORON is a poet, essayist, and writer of speculative fiction. He is the author of the poetry collections The Absolute Letter and Trance Archive; the double-novella O0; and a selection of prose poems and critical essays, The Cry at Zero. From the German, he has translated Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch's Literary Essays and The Perpetual Motion Machine by proto-Dada fantasist Paul Scheerbart. As a musician, Joron plays the theremin in various experimental and free-jazz ensembles. He teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University.

TOM PRIME's latest collection of poetry, Male Pregnancy in Reverse, was selected as one of the top four genre-defying books of any form to be released in British Columbia by Read Local B.C. in 2023. His previous collection, Mouthfuls of Space, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Poetry Prize. He holds an M.F.A. in writing from the University of Victoria and is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Western University. Prime's work has appeared in numerous journals, among them Fjord’s Review and Lana Turner Journal, and he collaborated with Gary Barwin on two books of poetry, A Cemetery for Holes and Bird Arsonist.

ANDREW C. WENAUS is a Canadian writer, composer, professor, and literary theorist. Among his books are The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature, Jeff Noon’s Vurt: A Critical Companion, Ω-1: Chronotopologic Workings, and Declaration of the Technical Word as Such. He teaches at the University of Western Ontario.

STEVE BEARD is an experimental author of speculative novels and documentary fictions. He has contributed to various anthologies, including Suspect Device: Hard-Edged Fiction, London: City of Disappearances, and The Big Book of Cyberpunk. His latest collection of theory-fiction is Pop Heresiarchs.

D. HARLAN WILSON is an award-winning American novelist, editor, playwright, talkshow host, and college professor whose body of work bridges the aesthetics of literary theory with various genres of speculative fiction. He is the author of over thirty works of fiction and nonfiction, and his stories and novels have been translated into ten languages.