George Foy
Encyclopedia
George Michelsen Foy is a French-American
novelist and magazine journalist
, and professor of creative writing. He has published 12 novel
s, seven under his own name and five under the nom de plume G.F. Michelsen. Until February 2010, the author kept secret the Michelsen persona’s real identity.
(writing as Georges Michelsen) he notes that when he edited The Art and Practice of Explosion, the book seemed to him to come to a different conclusion from what he’d intended while writing it. The secret it revealed was different from the one he thought he’d hidden. The novel had assumed, as the cliché
has it, a will of its own.
The essay encapsulates Foy/Michelsen’s literary theory: “I hold a belief that every novel constitutes a story-world, built by the author in collaboration with the reader. . . . Much of the thrill of reading comes from the fact that a well made story-world . . . is as uncontrollable as Frankenstein’s creation. It’s an unguided missile, an independent tool. It will and must work in ways its author cannot control.”
Foy’s essays, reviews, and criticism have appeared in Harper's Magazine
, Rolling Stone
, Poets & Writers
, Men's Journal
, and other first-tier publications; The Notre Dame Review has published his short fiction. He has been teaching advanced creative writing
at New York University
since 1998. A nonfiction work, Music in Stone: Sculpture Gardens of the World, was published in 1986 by Scala Press.
s in Poets & Writers, Foy (writing as Michelsen) believes that one reason an author opts for a secret literary personality has to do with preserving artistic freedom
against a publishing establishment that seeks to pigeonhole the artist for commercial reasons. Foy/Michelsen apparently struggled from the late 1990s on to keep his dual literary identity hidden. However, a press release from UPNE revealed the stratagem. In fact, the evidence has been present since 1992 for anyone who compares jacket photos from Foy's earliest novels (Asia Rip, for example) with photos on the Michelsen books. These clearly show Michelsen and Foy to be the same person.
on Cape Cod
whose landscape and livelihood are being wiped out by policies beyond his control. To Sleep With Ghosts concerns corruption
and poverty
in an east African country (Foy specialized in African politics at London School of Economics
). Mettle’s flawed hero captains an oceangoing freighter
whose crew is breaking up under pressure from their corporate bosses, while a flaw in its steel threatens the structure of the ship itself.
The Michelsen books are, however, far less political fiction
s than classic quest novels. Foy’s subjects seek personal integrity, harmony with nature, and—whether they’re PhD-level scientists or blue-collar laborers—a hint of what human consciousness is all about. Like the fantasy novels, they probe at the interaction between memory
and perception
and between moral choice and organic compulsion.
and an officer on British merchant marine ships. Reviewers have noted the verisimilitude
in his seafaring scenes as well as in portraits of his native Cape Cod. According to some reviewers, at least, this realism
constitutes one of the pleasures of reading his fiction.
While the Michelsen novels are best described as literary fiction
, the Foy books are futuristic adventures that commentators have described as belonging to the "cyberpunk
" school. They are not, however, light reading, and it’s difficult to call them “genre.” Foy earned a BS from LSE and worked at Business Week during the 1990s; his last three fantasy titles extrapolate from contemporary global economic conditions. They “[posit] two main ideas: 1) that the world has been taken over by huge business and governmental organizations that are actual, living, breathing life-forms; and 2) that the only way to escape becoming slaves to these life-forms is to construct a web of ‘nodes,’ black-market communities that espouse no official rules but aim to achieve a barter economy independent of the ‘Megorg’ dominating most of the rest of the world.” The protagonist
s of these novels are smugglers, anarchists
, artist
s, or some combination of the three.
Cultural phenomena get fast-forwarded just to the point of satire
. Reviewing Contraband on www.sfsite.com, Victoria Strauss
wrote: “Commercials hawk earwax deodorant; graves are equipped with video so the dead don’t miss their favorite shows; people suffer from TeleDysFunction, a serotonin
imbalance triggered by overexposure to electronic media.” The TDF sufferers whom Foy invented in 1998 stagger through the novel, hung head to foot with telecom devices and unable to interact directly with other people – nicely prefiguring today’s smartphone
and iPod
addicts. But Foy makes clear that these distractions exist to mask real pain. Explaining a mutual friend’s existential depression
, one character says to another: “We are failed spacemen. That’s what’s wrong. . . . We’ve lost the earth, and we can’t reach anything else. Wouldn’t you be unhappy?”
A non-fiction
work, Zero Decibels, under the compound name George Michelsen Foy, was published by Scribner
/Simon & Schuster
in May 2010.
fellowship in literature in 1994-95. The Art and Practice of Explosion received honorary mention in ForeWord
magazine’s Best Novel of the Year competition in 2004. The Shift was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award in literary science fiction
in 1997.
As George Foy:
French American
French Americans or Franco-Americans are Americans of French or French Canadian descent. About 11.8 million U.S. residents are of this descent, and about 1.6 million speak French at home.An additional 450,000 U.S...
novelist and magazine journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
, and professor of creative writing. He has published 12 novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
s, seven under his own name and five under the nom de plume G.F. Michelsen. Until February 2010, the author kept secret the Michelsen persona’s real identity.
Career
As a professor of creative writing at NYU, Foy/Michelsen earns his living in part by explaining fiction’s “rules” to his students; as a novelist, apparently, he knows how to break them. In an essay about literary theoryLiterary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
(writing as Georges Michelsen) he notes that when he edited The Art and Practice of Explosion, the book seemed to him to come to a different conclusion from what he’d intended while writing it. The secret it revealed was different from the one he thought he’d hidden. The novel had assumed, as the cliché
Cliché
A cliché or cliche is an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning,...
has it, a will of its own.
The essay encapsulates Foy/Michelsen’s literary theory: “I hold a belief that every novel constitutes a story-world, built by the author in collaboration with the reader. . . . Much of the thrill of reading comes from the fact that a well made story-world . . . is as uncontrollable as Frankenstein’s creation. It’s an unguided missile, an independent tool. It will and must work in ways its author cannot control.”
Foy’s essays, reviews, and criticism have appeared in Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...
, Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
, Poets & Writers
Poets & Writers
Poets & Writers, Inc. is one of the largest nonprofit literary organization in the United States serving poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers...
, Men's Journal
Men's Journal
Men's Journal is an American men's lifestyle magazine focused on outdoor recreation and comprising editorials on the outdoors, environmental issues, health and fitness, style and fashion, and "gear". It is owned by Jann Wenner of Wenner Media....
, and other first-tier publications; The Notre Dame Review has published his short fiction. He has been teaching advanced creative writing
Creative writing
Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems...
at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
since 1998. A nonfiction work, Music in Stone: Sculpture Gardens of the World, was published in 1986 by Scala Press.
Use of pseudonyms
According to an essay on pseudonymPseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
s in Poets & Writers, Foy (writing as Michelsen) believes that one reason an author opts for a secret literary personality has to do with preserving artistic freedom
Artistic freedom
Artistic freedom is the extent of freedom of an artist to produce art to his/her own insight. The extent can deviate to customs in a certain school of art, directives of the assigner, etc....
against a publishing establishment that seeks to pigeonhole the artist for commercial reasons. Foy/Michelsen apparently struggled from the late 1990s on to keep his dual literary identity hidden. However, a press release from UPNE revealed the stratagem. In fact, the evidence has been present since 1992 for anyone who compares jacket photos from Foy's earliest novels (Asia Rip, for example) with photos on the Michelsen books. These clearly show Michelsen and Foy to be the same person.
Themes
The Michelsen novels address corporate and political trends in the here and now. Hard Bottom describes the struggles of a commercial fishermanCommercial fishing
Commercial fishing is the activity of catching fish and other seafood for commercial profit, mostly from wild fisheries. It provides a large quantity of food to many countries around the world, but those who practice it as an industry must often pursue fish far into the ocean under adverse conditions...
on Cape Cod
Cape Cod
Cape Cod, often referred to locally as simply the Cape, is a cape in the easternmost portion of the state of Massachusetts, in the Northeastern United States...
whose landscape and livelihood are being wiped out by policies beyond his control. To Sleep With Ghosts concerns corruption
Political corruption
Political corruption is the use of legislated powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain. Misuse of government power for other purposes, such as repression of political opponents and general police brutality, is not considered political corruption. Neither are illegal acts by...
and poverty
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
in an east African country (Foy specialized in African politics at London School of Economics
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...
). Mettle’s flawed hero captains an oceangoing freighter
Cargo ship
A cargo ship or freighter is any sort of ship or vessel that carries cargo, goods, and materials from one port to another. Thousands of cargo carriers ply the world's seas and oceans each year; they handle the bulk of international trade...
whose crew is breaking up under pressure from their corporate bosses, while a flaw in its steel threatens the structure of the ship itself.
The Michelsen books are, however, far less political fiction
Political fiction
Political fiction is a subgenre of fiction that deals with political affairs. Political fiction has often used narrative to provide commentary on political events, systems and theories. Works of political fiction often "directly criticize an existing society or.....
s than classic quest novels. Foy’s subjects seek personal integrity, harmony with nature, and—whether they’re PhD-level scientists or blue-collar laborers—a hint of what human consciousness is all about. Like the fantasy novels, they probe at the interaction between memory
Memory
In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....
and perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
and between moral choice and organic compulsion.
Reception
Foy, according to his books' biographies, has worked as an underground laborer, a factory hand, and "chief cream puff transporter in a cookie factory." He has also been a commercial fisherman in New EnglandNew England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...
and an officer on British merchant marine ships. Reviewers have noted the verisimilitude
Verisimilitude
Verisimilitude is the quality of realism in something .-Competing ideas:The problem of verisimilitude is the problem of articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory...
in his seafaring scenes as well as in portraits of his native Cape Cod. According to some reviewers, at least, this realism
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
constitutes one of the pleasures of reading his fiction.
While the Michelsen novels are best described as literary fiction
Literary fiction
Literary fiction is a term that came into common usage during the early 1960s. The term is principally used to distinguish "serious fiction" which is a work that claims to hold literary merit, in comparison from genre fiction and popular fiction . In broad terms, literary fiction focuses more upon...
, the Foy books are futuristic adventures that commentators have described as belonging to the "cyberpunk
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life." The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk, and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk," published in 1983...
" school. They are not, however, light reading, and it’s difficult to call them “genre.” Foy earned a BS from LSE and worked at Business Week during the 1990s; his last three fantasy titles extrapolate from contemporary global economic conditions. They “[posit] two main ideas: 1) that the world has been taken over by huge business and governmental organizations that are actual, living, breathing life-forms; and 2) that the only way to escape becoming slaves to these life-forms is to construct a web of ‘nodes,’ black-market communities that espouse no official rules but aim to achieve a barter economy independent of the ‘Megorg’ dominating most of the rest of the world.” The protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
s of these novels are smugglers, anarchists
Anarchy
Anarchy , has more than one colloquial definition. In the United States, the term "anarchy" typically is meant to refer to a society which lacks publicly recognized government or violently enforced political authority...
, artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
s, or some combination of the three.
Cultural phenomena get fast-forwarded just to the point of satire
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
. Reviewing Contraband on www.sfsite.com, Victoria Strauss
Victoria Strauss
Victoria Strauss is the author of eight fantasy novels for adults and young adults, including the Stone duology and the Way of Arata duology...
wrote: “Commercials hawk earwax deodorant; graves are equipped with video so the dead don’t miss their favorite shows; people suffer from TeleDysFunction, a serotonin
Serotonin
Serotonin or 5-hydroxytryptamine is a monoamine neurotransmitter. Biochemically derived from tryptophan, serotonin is primarily found in the gastrointestinal tract, platelets, and in the central nervous system of animals including humans...
imbalance triggered by overexposure to electronic media.” The TDF sufferers whom Foy invented in 1998 stagger through the novel, hung head to foot with telecom devices and unable to interact directly with other people – nicely prefiguring today’s smartphone
Smartphone
A smartphone is a high-end mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone. The first smartphones were devices that mainly combined the functions of a personal digital assistant and a mobile phone or camera...
and iPod
IPod
iPod is a line of portable media players created and marketed by Apple Inc. The product line-up currently consists of the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the compact iPod Nano, and the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle...
addicts. But Foy makes clear that these distractions exist to mask real pain. Explaining a mutual friend’s existential depression
Depression (mood)
Depression is a state of low mood and aversion to activity that can affect a person's thoughts, behaviour, feelings and physical well-being. Depressed people may feel sad, anxious, empty, hopeless, helpless, worthless, guilty, irritable, or restless...
, one character says to another: “We are failed spacemen. That’s what’s wrong. . . . We’ve lost the earth, and we can’t reach anything else. Wouldn’t you be unhappy?”
A non-fiction
Non-fiction
Non-fiction is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be fact...
work, Zero Decibels, under the compound name George Michelsen Foy, was published by Scribner
Scribner
-Media:* Charles Scribner's Sons, also known as Scribner, New York City publisher* Scribner's Magazine, pictorial published from 1887–1939 by Charles Scribner's Sons, then merged with the Commentator which continued until 1942...
/Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster, Inc., a division of CBS Corporation, is a publisher founded in New York City in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. It is one of the four largest English-language publishers, alongside Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins...
in May 2010.
Recognition
Foy received a National Endowment for the ArtsNational Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
fellowship in literature in 1994-95. The Art and Practice of Explosion received honorary mention in ForeWord
ForeWord (magazine)
ForeWord is a trade journal published six times yearly with the tagline, “Reviews of Good Books Independently Published.” The magazine is distributed primarily to librarians and booksellers to familiarize them with upcoming books from small, independent, and university presses, as well as...
magazine’s Best Novel of the Year competition in 2004. The Shift was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award in literary science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
in 1997.
Publications
As Michelsen:- Mettle (University Press of New EnglandUniversity Press of New EnglandThe University Press of New England , located in Lebanon, New Hampshire and founded in 1970, is a university press consortium including Brandeis University, Dartmouth College , the University of New Hampshire, and Northeastern University...
, 2007) - The Art and Practice of Explosion (UPNE, 2003)
- Hard Bottom (UPNE, 2001)
- Blues for Nansen (Schneekluth Verlag, 1993)
- To Sleep with Ghosts (Bantam Doubleday, 1992)
As George Foy:
- Zero Decibels (Simon & Schuster, 2010)
- Last Harbor (Bantam Doubleday, 2001)
- The Memory of Fire (Bantam Doubleday, 2000)
- Contraband (Bantam Doubleday, 1998)
- The Shift (Bantam Doubleday, 1996)
- Challenge (Viking Press, 1988)
- Coaster (Viking Press, 1986)
- Asia Rip (Viking Press, 1984)