A page dedicated to one of the smartest and wittiest writers around.
This is the cover of Ben's first book
Ben Elton is the author of four novels and six plays. He based four of his plays on his four novels. The other two plays, Gasping and Silly Cow, can't be bought anywhere I've looked, so I don't know much about them. The four novels, Stark, Gridlock, This Other Eden, and Popcorn, also can't be bought, but I own them, so I know quite a lot about them. Well, actually, you can still buy Popcorn, and I noticed that Gridlock was in the Chapters catalogue, but This Other Eden is no longer available, and Stark is soooo not available, but I was luckily enough to find two copies of it at the Virgin Records Megastore in Vancouver; four year old copies that they had imported from the UK. Lucky me, huh?
Anyways, the important thing about Ben Elton's novels is that the first three are about environmental issues, the fourth is about censorship, and they all make you think really hard. The first three all share a similar plot structure.
Here's how it goes: First, a mega-rich company, owned by a morally corrupt billionaire (Sly Moorcock, Plastic Tolstoy) is doing something against the environment (Stark Conspiracy, Stealing Inventions, Building Biospheres). Someone (Linda Reeve, Geoffrey, Nathan) gets in the way of the big boys (by uncovering a crime or refusing to play along) and is abruptly killed by a burglar. That person's counterpart (Chrissy, Wheelchair Girl, Max), who didn't quite believe that his/her counterpart's suspicions were valid, realizes that this person's death was deliberate, and takes up the quest for the truth. Somewhere in the story, a character comes out of the closet and admits to being gay. Also, someone dresses in drag. In each novel, there is an event that is the dreaded end of everything (Vanishing Point, Gridlock, The Rat Run), and at the end of the book, this event happens, and the world's problems get fixed.