Gwyneth Jones (1952– ) is an award-winning English science fiction and fantasy writer and critic born in Manchester. She received her education at a convent school and received her undergraduate degree in European history at the University of Sussex. In addition to her work for adults, Jones has written almost twenty young adult and children’s books under the name Ann Halam. Jones’s works are mostly science fiction and near-future high fantasy with themes often connected to gender and feminism. She has won two World Fantasy Awards, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award.
Her first novel for adults, Divine Endurance (1984), remains one of her most widely admired. It is set in a ruined Earth governed by a matriarchy. No dates are given, but Jones’s enormously complex Southeast Asia venue has a Vance-ian Dying Earth tonality, and the matriarchal society she depicts is riven by profound ambivalences. The hard melancholy and sustained density of the book are unique in recent science fiction.
Other of her novels include Water in the Air (1977), Escape Plans (1986), White Queen (1991), and Bold as Love (2001). Her short fiction has been collected in, among others, Identify the Object (1993) and Grazing the Long Acre (2009).
“The Universe of Things,” published in New Worlds 3 in 1993, is a unique tale of alien contact in that it is about not the fate of the world but of quieter and yet more profound matters.