SF&F encyclopedia (R-R)RABELAIS, FRANCOIS (?1494-1553) French monk, doctor, priest and writer. The various manuscripts now generally published as Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-52 plus a posthumous text of dubious authenticity 1564; many trans, of which the best known is that by Sir Thomas Urquhart - first 2 books 1653 UK, 3rd book 1693 UK - and Peter Le Motteux - 4th and 5th books 1694 UK, and of which the most successful contemporary version is trans Burton Raffel 1990 US) form an immense, exuberant, linguistically inventive SATIRE with most of medieval Christendom the target. The giants of the title are enormous both physically and in their joyous gusto. In the Fourth Book (1552) of the sequence, ISLANDS exemplary of various aspects of society are visited-including the island of the Papimanes, description of whose inhabitants involves a radical criticism of the Catholic Church. Darker and more bitter in tone, the Fifth Book (1564) - which may well have been completed by another hand from FR's first draft-incorporates a section, The Ringing Island (1562), originally published separately, with the most notable sf imagery of the entire work. The islands of the 4th and 5th books were probably the most sustained invention of other worlds in literature up to that time. The succession of ALIEN societies, often making some kind of satirical comment on our own, complete with all sorts of colourful anthropological detail, has been greatly influential in PROTO SCIENCE FICTION, and its resonances can be sensed even today in the work of writers like Jack VANCE, who, even if not directly influenced by him, continue the FR tradition. [JC/PN]See also: FRANCE. RABID Film (1976). Cinepix/Dibar Syndicate/Canadian Film Development Corp. Written/dir David Cronenberg, starring Marilyn Chambers, Joe Silver, Howard Ryshpan, Patricia Gage, Susan Roman. 91 mins. Colour.In this Canadian film from David CRONENBERG an experimental skin graft on an accident victim (hardcore porn star Marilyn Chambers) turns her into the carrier of a rabies-like disease which induces homicidal mania in its victims; the disease is spread by means of a phallic, organic syringe which emerges from labia in her armpit and is used to satisfy her new, uncontrollable blood lust. Montreal is soon in the throes of apocalypse, and martial law is established; citizens who cannot produce proof of inoculation are shot by troops and their bodies dumped into garbage trucks. Structured much like The PARASITE MURDERS (1974; vt They Came from Within; vt Shivers), this is more smoothly directed but perhaps less intense, and by Cronenberg's standards is a conventional exploitation picture - though from anybody else this medical/Freudian HORROR movie, with its gender-bending, penis-wielding killer woman, would have seemed bizarre indeed. [PN/JB]See also: CINEMA; MONSTER MOVIES; SEX. RABKIN, ERIC S(TANLEY) (1946- ) US sf critic and professor of English Language and Literature, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Of the 18 books he has written or edited to 1991, 15 have a direct relevance to sf and fantasy. His critical books are: The Fantastic in Literature (1976), an academic study in genre definition (including sf), provocative but not always rigorous; Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision (1977) with Robert SCHOLES, a general introduction to the subject seemingly aimed at the novice, with strong opening and closing sections on the HISTORY OF SF and 10 representative novels, but less impressive intermediate chapters on media, sciences and themes; and Arthur C. Clarke (chap 1979; rev 1980). 2 anthologies ed ESR intended for educational use ( SF IN THE CLASSROOM), collecting fantasy and sf stories showing the historical development of those genres, are Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales and Stories (anth 1979) and Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology (anth 1983).ESR's other book publications are anthologies of critical essays: Bridges to Fantasy (anth 1982) ed with George Edgar SLUSSER and Scholes; The End of the World (anth 1983) ed with Martin H. GREENBERG and Joseph D. OLANDER; Co-Ordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy (anth 1983) ed with Slusser and Scholes; No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (anth 1983) ed with Greenberg and Olander; Shadows of the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science Fiction in Film (anth 1985) ed with Slusser; Hard Science Fiction (anth 1986) ed with Slusser; Storm Warnings: Science Fiction Confronts the Future (anth 1987) ed with Slusser and Colin GREENLAND; Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction (anth 1987) ed with Slusser; Aliens: The Anthropology of Science Fiction (anth 1987) ed with Slusser; Mindscapes: The Geographies of Imagined Worlds (anth 1989) ed with Slusser. Further such anthologies, part of the now-formidable academic publishing industry related to sf, are projected. [PN]See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; CINEMA; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF. von RACHEN, KURT [s] L. Ron HUBBARD. RACIAL CONFLICT POLITICS. RACKHAM, JOHN John T. PHILLIFENT. RADAR MEN FROM THE MOON COMMANDO CODY - SKY MARSHAL OF THE UNIVERSE. RADCLIFFE, (HENRY) GARNETT (1899- ) UK writer of occasional sf, including the title novella of The Return of the Ceteosaurus, and Other Tales (coll 1926), which pits a huge saurian against a DEATH RAY. The Great Orme Terror (1934) is a detective novel whose solution involves ROBOTS. The task of the heroine of The Lady from Venus (1947) is to acquire Earth eggs for use back home as a form of currency. [JC] RADIATION HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; MUTANTS; NUCLEAR POWER; SUN; WEAPONS. RADIO 1. Radio in the USA Fantastic thrillers, incorporating sf and supernatural elements alternately, were fairly common in the USA all through the "Golden Age" of radio (usually considered 1930-50), but "hardcore" sf was rarer.As early as 1929, Carlton E. Morse (1900-1993) in San Francisco wrote and produced closed-end serials (a single story, from which the characters did not continue indefinitely) which involved sf concepts. Amid ancient jungle temples, Morse rationalized mysticism into science in The Cobra King Strikes Back and Land of the Living Dead. The same titles and scripts were reprised in the 1945 series Adventures by Morse. Similar themes were developed with more sophistication by Morse in I Love a Mystery, 1939-45 (NBC, then CBS), and new productions repeating the scripts, 1949-52 (Mutual). Temple of Vampires had heroes Jack, Doc and Reggie facing human vampires and gigantic mutant bats. Two other I Love a Mystery episodes, The Stairway to the Sun and The Hermit of San Felipe Atabapo, concerned the same lost plateau in South America, where dwelled prehistoric monsters and a race of supermen who controlled world destiny. More celebrated for his literate domestic serial One Man's Family, Morse was also radio's foremost adventure writer, similar (and comparable) to H. Rider HAGGARD and Arthur Conan DOYLE. Much of his work has survived, thanks to private collectors, and has been re-released on record.Children's programming was deeply involved with sf. BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY was probably the first "hardcore" sf series on radio, beginning in 1932 (CBS). (It was only the second important afternoon adventure serial of any kind, its predecessor being Little Orphan Annie.) Based on the comic strip by Phil NOWLAN and Dick CALKINS, it was written partly by Calkins, but for the most part by radio producer Jack Johnstone. The stories were far from silly or trivial, and made a good job of presenting such basic ideas as time and space travel to a youthful audience. Various revivals carried the Buck Rogers title through to 1946 on radio. Other series of shorter duration were FLASH GORDON, Brad Steele - Ace of Space, SPACE PATROL and Space Cadet (the last two being original radio shows based on established tv favorites in the early 1950s: TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET). SUPERMAN was an sf character, created by Jerry SIEGEL and Joe Shuster in their comic strip, but on radio (1940-52) the series generally dealt with crime and mystery. Some sf appeared when the Man of Steel ventured to the planet Utopia, or when menaced by Kryptonite. Supporting characters included guest stars Batman and Robin.Other juvenile serials had Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy (1933-51) experimenting with Uranium-235 in 1939; Captain Midnight (1938-50), the mysterious aviator, encountering flying saucers ( UFOs) in 1949; and Tom Mix (1933-50), the Western movie star (impersonated on radio usually by Curley Bradley), constantly facing mysteries with a supernatural and superscience atmosphere. (The same actor and theme were used in Curley Bradley's Trail of Mystery, written and prod Jim HARMON in 1976 for syndication.)Horror stories, in half-hour anthologies, appeared in the 1930s. Such series were mostly supernatural in content, but sf occasionally appeared. Lights Out began in 1938 (NBC), written by Willis Cooper, later by Arch Oboler. Oboler's tale of an ordinary chicken's heart, stimulated by growth hormones to engulf the entire world, is one of the most famous single radio plays of any kind. Other horror anthologies included Witch's Tale by Alonzo Deen Cole, Quiet Please by Willis Cooper, and Hermit's Cave by various authors.A general drama anthology, Mercury Theater on the Air, was begun by its producer-star Orson Welles (1915-1985) in 1938 (CBS). One of its earliest broadcasts, WAR OF THE WORLDS, adapted H.G. WELLS's novel in the form of a contemporary on-the-spot newscast. Thousands of listeners were thrown into a state of panic, believing Mars was invading the Earth. The resulting havoc undoubtedly made this sf play the most famous radio broadcast of all time. The Mercury series also did a memorable version of Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847-1912).Before leaving for the movies and his classic Citizen Kane (1941), Welles also starred in The Shadow in 1937-8. The series had begun in 1931 and until 1954 often presented sf in charmingly lurid pulp fashion, with its mysterious hero who could "cloud men's minds" by hypnosis (thus becoming invisible), facing mad scientists who could control volcanoes, dead bodies, even light and dark. Rival fantasy heroes included The Avenger (almost an exact copy), Peter Quill, a weird, benevolent, hunchbacked scientist, and the fearless shipmates of Latitude Zero.Near the end of major night-time programming on radio in 1949, sf came into its own in an anthology of modern sf, Dimension X (later vt X Minus 1). This NBC programme had well presented versions of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles stories, Robert A. HEINLEIN's "Requiem" (written 1940), and many other celebrated sf stories, intermittently until 1957. Although sf continued through the 1970s to be presented experimentally (and only occasionally) on culture-oriented FM stations, and on the CBS Radio Mystery Theater (the first major network revival of drama, beginning 1973), X Minus 1 still stands as one of the finest showcases for sf in any dramatic medium. [JH]2. Radio in the UK The decreasing importance of US radio as a medium for dramatized sf (and drama generally) is presumably due to the death of network radio; the situation is different in the UK, where the BBC continues to broadcast across the whole country, and is not dependent on income from advertising. Few FM stations anywhere have the budget for drama productions.Sf has been broadcast by the BBC since the 1930s; indeed, radio is such a suitable medium for sf that it is hard to find a celebrated sf author whose work has not been transmitted. Sf work by writers as various as H.G. WELLS, John CHRISTOPHER and Brian W. ALDISS has regularly been broadcast as readings (sometimes by the authors themselves) or dramatizations (as single plays or as serials). Sf programmes have been aimed at all ages. For example, a typical Monday in 1953 would offer one of Angus MacVicar's LOST PLANET stories on the 5pm Children's Hour, and at 7.30pm an episode of the fantastically successful Journey into Space serial would be transmitted for the 7- to 70-year-olds.Journey into Space was written and prod for radio by Charles CHILTON, already well known to youngsters as creator of the popular Western Riders-of-the-Range series, which appeared on radio and in the BOYS' PAPER Eagle. Journey into Space ran only 1953-5, with 3 serialized stories comprising 54 episodes in all, but it enthralled a generation for whom landing on the Moon was still a far-fetched fantasy. The 3 stories were set on the MOON in 1965 and on MARS in 1971 and 1973, and featured the adventures of the Scots pilot Jet Morgan and his crew, Cockney Lemmy Barnet, Australian Stephen Mitchell and US Dr Matthews. High points were the meeting with a malevolent ALIEN civilization shortly after the first Moon landing, the foiling of a Martian INVASION, TIME TRAVEL, mass hypnosis and flying saucers. By 1955 the programme reached 5 million listeners, deservedly the largest UK radio audience ever, no previous sf radio drama having equalled it for narrative vigour. The programmes were sold to 58 countries; the adventures were novelized by Chilton as Journey Into Space * (1954), The Red Planet * (1956) and The World in Peril * (1960); he also scripted a further Jet Morgan adventure for a comic strip in Express Weekly (1956-7).Another well remembered sf radio serial was Dan Dare, broadcast for several years from 1953 by the English-language service of Radio Luxembourg in weekly 15min episodes. The programme was written and produced by people quite unconnected with the staff of Frank HAMPSON's comic strip DAN DARE - PILOT OF THE FUTURE; although it used the same characters and situations, it was in a quite different style. While unsophisticated SPACE OPERA as sf, it was thoroughly successful as juvenile high adventure.As radio lost its audience to tv in the late 1950s, so too did radio sf lose its mass appeal. Never again would an sf series reach as wide an audience as the above two programmes. In the 1970s, however, a number of breakthrough productions appeared. The BBC dramatized Isaac ASIMOV's Foundation series (1951-3) in 6 parts, and newly emerging local stations experimented with the genre: disc-jockey and comedian Kenny Everett's Captain Kremmen gained a cult following on London's Capital Radio, with a subsequent degree of multimedia success; Manchester's Piccadilly Radio helped launch the career of Stephen GALLAGHER with the 6-part serial The Last Rose of Summer (1978).But it took the stimulus of the visual media to prompt a serious reconsideration of the genre's merits. In the wake of the film STAR WARS (1977) came a mini-boom in radio sf that lasted into the 1980s: Saturday Night Theatre presented dramatizations of novels by H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham and Ray BRADBURY, and also brought about a belated revival of Journey into Space in the singleton play The Return from Mars; James FOLLETT contributed the serials Earth Search and Earth Search II; and Douglas ADAMS's HITCH HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY became the biggest radio attraction for a whole generation, each repeat broadcast bringing in a larger audience and creating an enormous market for book, record, tape and tv spin-offs.Despite its success, the BBC failed to capitalize on Hitch Hiker, although its influence held through the 1980s in a string of humorous sf series such as Nineteen Ninety-four and adaptations of the Harry HARRISON novels Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965) and Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers (1973). The most impressive drama of the decade came in single plays by Tanith LEE, Stephen Gallagher and Wally K. Daly. Charles Chilton made another worthy attempt to revive Journey into Space with 2 series of Space Force, but his efforts suffered from unsympathetic scheduling.The start of the 1990s brought mixed prospects. The launch of the BBC's newest network, Radio 5, promised serious programming for a younger audience: genre material so far presented (dramatizations of works by Alan GARNER, Ray Bradbury and Nicholas FISK) is pleasing in quantity if poor in production. In 1991 Radio 5 broadcast Orson Welles's original 1938 Mercury Theater on the Air production of WAR OF THE WORLDS. Also in that year Radio 4 presented a season of plays adapting well known sf works, from the good, such as Daniel KEYES's FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (1959; exp 1966), to the poor, such as Snoo WILSON's Spaceache (1984), with much else in between. Meanwhile, the popular repeats on Radio 2 FM of rediscovered Journey into Space episodes (repeated on Radio 5) and the later broadcasting by Radio 5 of a radio version of THUNDERBIRDS, edited from the original tv tapes, showed that, despite technical advances, the cause of radio sf had barely advanced since the Golden Age of the 1960s. [ABP/PhN] RADIO COMUNICATION COMMUNICATION. RADON (vt, outside Japan, Rodan) Film (1956). Toho. Dir Inoshiro Honda, starring Kenji Sahara, Yumi Shirkawa, Akihiko Hirata. Screenplay Takeshi Kimura, Takeo Murata, based on a story by Takashi Kuronomura. 79 mins. Colour.This film, the first Japanese MONSTER MOVIE in colour, is from the same team that produced GOJIRA (vt Godzilla). A giant pterodactyl hatches in a mine (and eats giant dragonfly larvae, in the film's best scene); it is joined by a second flying reptile; they terrorize Japan then perish in a volcano. The spectacular effects are by Eiji Tsuburaya and his team. The US version added a voice-over written by David DUNCAN. Radon's second appearance was in Kaiju Daisenso (1965; vt Invasion of Astro-Monster; vt Battle of the Astros; vt Monster Zero; vt Invasion of Planet X) and his third in Ghidorah Sandai Kaiju Chikyu Saidai No Kessan (1965; vt Chikyu Saidai No Kessan; vt Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster). His swansong, where he performed alongside 10 other major Toho monsters, was in Kaiju Soshingeki (1968; vt Destroy All Monsters; vt Operation Monsterland; vt The March of the Monsters). (For more on these sequels GOJIRA.) [PN] RAES, HUGO [r] BENELUX. RAFFILL, STEWART [r] The ICE PIRATES; The PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT. RAINE, CRAIG (1944- ) UK poet, whose first book, TheOnion, Memory (coll 1978 chap), demonstrated his capacity to illuminate theworld through estranged metaphors, a technique which came to full fruition in A Martian Sends a Postcard Home(coll 1979 chap), the title poemof which represents an alien's tabula rasa vision ofnormal human activities, and which has come for many to represent an angle of perceptioncentral to good sf (and fatally missing from routine work).His libretto for an opera by CharlesOsborne, The Electrification of the Soviet Union(1986 chap) is somewhat fantasticated; and "1953": A Version of Racine'sAndromache(1990 chap) is a HITLER WINS tale in play form,set in an Italy which, now ruled by Mussolini's son, has conquered England,bombing London flat inthe process. [JC] RAINES, THERON (1927- ) US lawyer and writer in whose sf novel, The Singing: A Fable about What Makes us Human (1988), a team of Martians crashes its UFO into the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where one of them, according to plan, meets and impregnates the human girl through whose eyes the tale is told. Both sides get what they need: for Mars new blood, and for the Earth unsubtle flattery of our tough and obdurate human stock. One senses that the author thought his storyline possessed some originality, though his concerns, after the fashion of many non-genre writers using sf instruments, are mainly didactic. [JC] R.A.K. Monsignor Ronald A. KNOX. RAMSEY, MILTON WORTH (?1848-1906) US writer who - although he self-published his sf novels - was of some interest. In Six Thousand Years Hence (1891) a visiting planet drags the protagonist's city into space, where he and his colleagues are able to view several other civilizations, including a complex advanced culture within the Sun, and return centuries hence to a tamed high-tech Earth, where they die older than Methuselah. The Austral Globe (1892) and Two Billions of Miles, or The Story of a Trip Through the Solar System (1900) are similar in viewpoint but less engaging. [JC] RAND, AYN (1905-1982) Russian-born US writer whose Objectivist philosophy, as expounded in most of her work, was influential during the 1950s among college students, who were perhaps attracted by her instructions to heed one's self-interest, to abjure altruism, and to maximize the SUPERMAN potential within each of us. Her first and better sf novel, Anthem (1938 UK; cut 1946 US), is a DYSTOPIA set after a devastating war. Individualism has been eliminated, along with the concept of the person, but the protagonist discovers his identity while escaping with a beautiful woman to the forest, where he christens himself Prometheus. The Fountainhead (1943) is a MAINSTREAM novel advancing AR's vision of things. In Atlas Shrugged (1957), which is sf, John Galt (AR's mouthpiece) and his Objectivist colleagues abandon an increasingly socialistic USA and retreat to the mountains as civilization crumbles, prepared to return only when they will be able to rebuild along the lines of Objectivist philosophy. AR's influence lessened over the years. Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991) by Mary Gaitskell systematically caricatures AR and her work. [JC]See also: ECONOMICS; LIBERTARIAN SF; POLITICS; SOCIAL DARWINISM; SOCIOLOGY; WOMEN SF WRITERS. RANDALL, MARTA (1948- ) US writer and editor who has taught in several sf writing workshops and served in the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA as vice-president 1981-2 and president 1982-4. She began publishing sf with "Smack Run" in New Worlds 5 (anth 1973 ed Michael MOORCOCK) as by Marta Bergstresser; the surname, her first husband's, was used only on this one occasion. Her stories since then have not been frequent, but are almost always of high quality, tightly and densely written, even epigrammatic at points, and generally impart elements of FEMINIST discourse, with unbemused clarity of effect, to genre material. The intense force of a late tale like "Lapidary Nights" (1987) derives at least in part-though no "didactic" argument occupies the foreground - from its thorough assimilation of a feminist agenda.MR's first and perhaps most successful novel, Islands (1976; rev 1980), movingly depicts the life of a mortal woman in an age when IMMORTALITY is medically achievable for all but a few. To cope with her world she plunges into the study of archaeology, and makes a discovery which enables her to transcend her corporeal life. In A City in the North (1976) an ALIEN species self-destructs in a morally dubious response to the colonizing presence on their planet of the human race. The Kennerin or Newhome sequence - Journey (1978) and Dangerous Games (1980) - also treats its colony-world setting with some ambivalence, for the Kennerin family's decision to create a UTOPIA on the planet they own has complex consequences, some of them relating to ECOLOGY. The Sword of Winter (1983), like some of her later short fiction, is fantasy, though with PLANETARY-ROMANCE features; and Those who Favor Fire (1984) is a near-future DYSTOPIA set in an Apocalypse-prone California much like today's. With Robert SILVERBERG, MR edited 2 vols of the ongoing New Dimensions sequence, New Dimensions 11 (anth 1980) and #12 (anth 1981); and was responsible solo for The Nebula Awards 19 (anth 1984). In the later 1980s she was less active as a writer, concentrating at least in part on the construction of "interactive time-travel games" ( GAME-WORLDS) for the California State Department of Mental Health; but her fiction, when it appeared, remained vividly alive, and she has begun to publish mysteries, with Growing Light (1993) as by Martha Conley. [JC]See also: ISLANDS. RANDALL, NEIL [r] Bill FAWCETT. RANDALL, ROBERT Pseudonym used on collaborative stories - about 19 in all (1956-8) - by Robert SILVERBERG and Randall GARRETT; Silverberg was very young at the time. The most notable were the Nidorian series, originally published in ASF, dealing with the effects of human contact on an alien race; they were published in book form as The Shrouded Planet (fixup 1957) and The Dawning Light (1957 ASF; 1959). [BS] RANDLE, KEVIN D. (1949- ) US writer who served in the Army as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam 1968-9 and in the Air Force as an Intelligence Officer 1976-86. He began publishing sf with "Future War" for Combat Illustrated in 1978, but became an active writer only in the 1980s, beginning 2 sequences in 1986: the Seeds of War books, all with Robert Cornett - Seeds of War (1988), The Aldebaran Campaign (1988) and The Aquarian Attack (1989) - and the Remember! books, also with Cornett: Remember the Alamo! (1986), Remember Gettysburg! (1988) and Remember Little Big Horn! (1990). The first series is an unremarkable example of military sf, though told with some verve; the second is a more exhilarating TIME-TRAVEL sequence, in which veterans are enlisted to travel to famous battles, where they must make sure that events take their proper course. The Jefferson's War sequence - The Galactic Silver Star (1990), The Price of Command (1990), The Lost Colony (1991), The January Platoon (1991), Death of a Regiment (1991) and Chain of Command (1992) - is again military sf, carrying members of the United States Space Infantry into various tight corners. The Global War sequence began with Dawn of Conflict (1991); the Star Precinct sequence, with Richard Driscoll, began with Star Precinct (1992),Star Precinct #2: Mind Slayer (1992) and Inside Job (1992). [JC]Other works: Once upon a Murder * (1987) with Robert J(oseph) Randisi (1951- ), a game tie; 3 nonfiction UFO books, The October Scenario (1988), The UFO Casebook (1989) and UFO Crash at Roswell (1991) with Don Schmitt. RANDOM, ALEX Donald Sydney ROWLAND. RANK, HEINER [r] GERMANY. RANKIN, ROBERT (FLEMING) (1949- ) UK writer who began writing his highly idiosyncratic sf novels with the Brentford sequence: The Antipope (1981), The Brentford Triangle (1983) and East of Ealing (1984), assembled as The Brentford Trilogy (omni 1988), plus The Sprouts of Wrath (1988). In the first volume, two layabouts and their friends challenge Forces from the Beyond ranging from an undead sorcerer to an alien invasion fleet. In later volumes the series satirizes CLICHES taken in equal measure from horror, sf and fantasy, setting them off against the thoroughly down-to-earth London suburb of Brentford. In the end humanity is (apparently) destroyed. RR's Armageddon series - Armageddon: The Musical (1990), They Came and Ate Us: Armageddon II: The B-Movie (1991) and The Suburban Book of the Dead: Armageddon III: The Remake (1992) - features a time-travelling Elvis Presley and is based on the premise that the whole of human history has been stage-managed for transmission as an extraterrestrial soap opera. Further (and similar) works include the Ultimate Truths tales, comprising The Book of Ultimate Truths (1993) and Raiders of the Lost Car Park (1994); and The Greatest Show Off Earth (1994). [NT]See also: COSMOLOGY; HUMOUR. RANKINE, JOHN Douglas R. MASON. RANSOM, BILL (1945- ) US writer who has worked as a medic and as a firefighter. His early writing was poetry, with several volumes released from Finding True North & Critter (coll 1974 chap) onward. He began publishing sf with "Songs of a Sentient Flute" for ASF in 1979 as by Frank Herbert, a story which eventually became part of Medea: Harlan's World * (anth 1985) ed Harlan ELLISON. BR is best known for the Pandora Trilogy with Frank HERBERT (whom see for details): The Jesus Incident (1979), The Lazarus Effect (1983) and The Ascension Factor (1988). His first solo novel, Jaguar (fixup 1990), is also of interest for its depiction of the physically, psychologically and morally complex dream-driven pattern of connections between Earth and another planet, each planet containing two maturing adolescents whose sleep disorders allow them to make journeys between the worlds. The Jaguar - a disturbed WWII vet who likewise roams the dreamways-must be halted before he disrupts the fragile tissues of reality. Slightly overweighted for the adventure-sf idiom in which it is told, Jaguar is all the same an intriguing attempt to say more than could easily be said. ViraVax (1993), on the other hand, almost deliberately deploys an impressive presentation of the complex perils that inevitably accompany in-depth virological research with a storyline, set early next century, which focuses primarily upon a suspenseful thriller-like action plot. [JC]See also: MESSIAHS. RANZETTA, LUAN (? -? ) UK writer (probably pseudonymous) whose routine sf adventures were The Uncharted Planet (1961) as V. Ranzetta, The Maru Invasion (1962), The World in Reverse (1962), The Night of the Death Rain (1963) and The Yellow Inferno (1964). [JC] RAOS, PREDRAG [r] YUGOSLAVIA. RAPHAEL, RICK (1919-1994) US writer and journalist who began publishing sf with "A Filbert is a Nut" for ASF in 1959 and established a considerable reputation in the field with a comparatively small output of about 10 stories, most of them assembled in The Thirst Quenchers (coll 1965 UK) and Code Three (fixup 1966). The first contains 4 good stories, the best of which is the title story about professionals in a world where water is scarce, their job being its proper allocation. Code Three describes the way of life of the police who patrol the superhighways of the future in enormously complex vehicles made to cope with the huge speeds and corresponding irresponsibility on the roads. RR was at his best when describing, in positive terms, the life of those who must deal professionally with a technological world. [JC]Other work: The President Must Die (1981), non-sf near-future thriller.See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. RASMUSSEN, ALIS A. (1958- ) US writer whose first novel, The Labyrinth Gate (1988), is a tale of considerable interest, delineating a believably matrilineal fantasy world. The Highroad Trilogy - A Passage of Stars (1990), Revolution's Shore (1990) and The Price of Ransom (1990) - depicts in a lighter vein the interstellar voyages of its young female protagonist, whose involvement in music is infectiously presented and whose search for a full life keeps the tale moving, albeit through markedly familiar venues; the third volume, which carries the maturing crew back from colonized space towards the old worlds, is the best. At this point in her career, reportedly unhappy with the nature and amount of promotion accorded her by her publishers, AAR began to write as by Kate Elliott, and under that name created a new series which followed on from the Highroad books; this sequence - the Sword of Heaven or Jaran sequence, comprising Jaran (1992), An Earthly Crown (1993), His Conquering Sword (1993) and The Law of Becoming(1994) - complicatedly embroils clans of alien warriors (the jaran), rite-of-passage subplots featuring younger women, human actors, all on an interstellar stage. [JC] RASPAIL, JEAN (1925- ) French writer, much of whose nonfiction controversially treats the kind of issue explored in the inflammatory Le camp des saints (1973; trans Norman Shapiro as The Camp of the Saints 1975 US), set in a NEAR-FUTURE world in the coils of OVERPOPULATION. When the non-White Third World lays siege to Europe, which should have been armed against the onslaught, civilization perishes. [JC] RATFANDOM UK fan group of the 1970s, most of whose members later became sf professionals. Based in London, Ratfandom produced some of the most literate, witty and scurrilous FANZINES in that fertile period for UK FANDOM; these included Big Scab (1974, 3 issues) ed John BROSNAN, Macrocosm (1971-2, 3 issues) ed Robert P. HOLDSTOCK, Magic Pudding (1973, 1 issue) ed Malcolm EDWARDS, Seamonsters (1978-9, 4 issues) ed Simone Walsh, Stop Breaking Down (1976-81, 7 issues) ed Greg Pickersgill, True Rat (1973-8, 10 issues) ed Leroy Kettle, and Wrinkled Shrew (1974-9, 8 issues) ed Pat and Graham Charnock. Others in the group's orbit, though not Rats, included Christopher PRIEST and Peter NICHOLLS. Ratfandom organized the 1975 UK national CONVENTION, Seacon '75. [RH] RATHENAU, WALTHER [r] UTOPIAS. RATHJEN, CARL H(ENRY) (1909-1984) US writer in various genres from boys' fiction to tales for the "slick" markets. Of sf interest is his contribution to the Land of the Giants sequence, Flight of Fear * (1969). [JC] RAT SAVIOUR, THE YUGOSLAVIA. RAW MEAT DEATH LINE. RAY, RENE Pseudonym of UK actor and writer Irene Creese (1912-1993), in whose sf novel, The Strange World of Planet X * (1957), romance becomes mixed with the fourth DIMENSION. It was written to novelize her own tv series, The STRANGE WORLD OF PLANET X, although there are differences in plot, which differences are replicated in the 1958 film of the same name. Two of her other novels - Wraxton Marne (1946) and Angel Assignment (1988) - are fantasies. [JC] RAY, ROBERT (1928- ) Hungarian-born writer, in UK from 1957, who began publishing sf with "Nightmares in Grey" for New Strand Magazine in 1962. His sf novels, bleak but otherwise unexceptional, are No Stars for Us (1964), The Seedy (1969) and Metamorphosis (1976). [JC] RAY BRADBURY THEATRE US tv series (1985-6). Atlantis Films/Wilcox Productions for Home Box Office. Executive prods Michael MacMillan, Larry Wilcox, Ray BRADBURY; prod Seaton McLean; teleplays by Bradbury, based on his own stories. Leading actors included Drew Barrymore, James Coco, Jeff Goldblum, Nick Mancuso, Peter O'Toole, William SHATNER. 6 25min episodes, the first 3 in 1985, the second 3 originally shown together as a 90min special in 1986.These playlets, introduced a little stiffly by Bradbury, were imaginative adaptations of "Marionettes, Inc." (1949), "The Playground" (1953), "The Crowd" (1943), "The Town Where No One Got Off" (1958), "The Screaming Woman" (1951) and"Banshee"" (1984). Only the first could be called sf (it features a neglected wife's husband being replaced by an " ANDROID); the rest are dark fantasy. They were among the most successful of many Bradbury dramatizations on tv (winning several awards and good ratings), perhaps because Bradbury dramatized them himself.Further Bradbury adaptations, intended as part of a new Ray Bradbury Theatre package but actually screened in 1988-9 in the UK as part of the Twist in the Tale series, were made by Granada TV in the UK. The 4 stories adapted were "The Coffin" (1947), "Punishment without Crime" (1950), "The Small Assassin" (1946) and "There was an Old Woman" (1944). Prod Tom Cotter, they starred among others Cyril Cusack, Roy Kinnear, Dan O'Herlihy and Donald Pleasence. Other programmes for the same package, which was screened in the USA, were made in France and Canada. [PN] RAYER, F(RANCIS) G(EORGE) (1921-1981) UK writer and technical journalist who began publishing sf with "Juggernaut" for Link House Publications in 1944. His first sf novel was the unremarkable Realm of the Alien (1946 chap) as by Chester Delray. His most notable was perhaps Tomorrow Sometimes Comes (1951), in which the general who has inadvertently caused a nuclear HOLOCAUST awakens from SUSPENDED ANIMATION to save the world from a destructive COMPUTER; this thinking machine gave its name to the Mens Magna series, which includes also "Deus Ex Machina" (1950), "The Peacemaker" (1952), "Ephemeral This City" (1955), "Adjustment Period" (1960) and "Contact Pattern" (1961). FGR was most closely associated with NW, and also had several lead novels in the early years of Authentic, each of which comprised a whole single issue of the journal, and cited therefore in this Encyclopedia as separate titles; they are: The Coming of the Darakua (1952); Earth-Our New Eden (1952) and We Cast No Shadow (1952). [JC]Other works: Fearful Barrier (1950); The Star Seekers (1954 chap); The Iron and the Anger (1964); Cardinal of the Stars (1964; vt Journey to the Stars 1964 US).As Editor: Worlds at War (anth 1949), containing stories by FGR and his brother-in-law, E.R. James.See also: COMPUTERS. RAY-GUNS WEAPONS. RAYMOND, ALEX (1909-1956) US COMIC-strip artist. After graduating from the Grand Central School of Art in New York City, he worked on the strip Tillie the Toiler. He soon moved up in the comics world, working for Chic Young on Blondie and with Lyman Young on Tim Tyler's Luck before being given his own strip, Secret Agent X-9; it was during this time that he began to develop his distinctive style. In 1934 he was given the chance to do a new strip, FLASH GORDON, and US cartooning has not been the same since; he was the first demonstrably modern comics illustrator. Although his style at first was characterized by convoluted masses and strong, sweeping lines, by 1936 it had become more precise and controlled. He refined the technique of "feathering" (a series of fine brush-or pen-strokes used in cartooning to create contours) to a degree as yet unexcelled in comic strips. The style was romantic, the protagonists' features impossibly heroic, the settings exotic and fantastic. In 1944, AR joined the US Marines, leaving the strip to Austin Briggs (1909-1973); when he returned in 1946 he created a new strip, not sf, the very popular Rip Kirby. AR died in a tragic accident in 1956, at the peak of his career. [JG]See also: ILLUSTRATION. RAYMOND, DEREK Robin COOK. RAYMOND, E.V. [s] Raymond Z. GALLUN. RAYMOND, P.T. Cornelius SHEA. RAYON INVISIBLE, LE PARIS QUI DORT. READ, [Sir] HERBERT (EDWARD) (1893-1968) UK poet and prolific critic of art, literature and politics; knighted 1953. His only novel, The Green Child (1935), is a remarkable double UTOPIA in which two visions of ideal human life - one a Latin-American political utopia, the other a mystical, underground realm in which human aspirations are transcended - mirror one another, comprising together a critique and dramatic metaphor of the utopian impulse as a whole. [JC] READE, PHILIP Pseudonym of an unidentified US writer of dime novels ( DIME-NOVEL SF) whose work appeared in STREET & SMITH's Good News and The Nugget Library in competition to Tousey's Frank Reade, Jr. stories ( FRANK READE LIBRARY). PR wrote 9 stories about Tom Edison, Jr., no relation to the inventor ( Hyperlink to: EDISONADE); unusual in being plotted (instead of haphazard) in terms of character conflicts, they are the best of the various invention series, containing as well an element of tongue-in-cheek and fantasy. Tom Edison, Jr.'s Sky-Scraping Trip (1891), Tom Edison, Jr.'s Sky Courser (1891), Tom Edison, Jr.'s Prairie-Skimmer Team (1891) and Tom Edison, Jr.'s Air Frigate (1891) together form an episodic novel describing the scientific feud between Tom and his rogue cousin. The stories are filled with fantastic aircraft, individual flying suits, advanced weapons and air battles. PR's most important story is Tom Edison, Jr.'s Electric Sea Spider (1892), in which Tom combats the US-educated Chinese mastermind of sea crime, Kiang-Ho of the Golden Belt. The story culminates in an underwater battle between two fantastic submarine vessels. This perhaps marks the first appeareance of a FU MANCHU-like villain.Tom Edison, Jr. stories #10 and #11, Tom Edison, Jr.'s Air-Ship in Australia (1892) and Tom Edison, Jr.'s Electric Eagle (1892), were written, on a much lower level, by Henry Livingston Williams (1842-? ), a prolific hack editor and author. [EFB] READERCON SMALL PRESS AWARDS AWARDS. READY, WILLIAM B(ERNARD) (1914-1981) Welsh librarian and writer, in the USA from 1948 as professional librarian at several universities, and in Canada from 1966 in the same capacity at McMaster University. His first story, "Barring the Weight" for Atlantic Monthly in 1948, was not sf, but several of the tales assembled in The Great Disciple, and Other Stories (coll 1951) are of interest. He was best known, however, for his early study of J.R.R. TOLKIEN, The Tolkien Relation: A Personal Inquiry (1968 US; vt Understanding Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings 1969; orig title restored 1981). [JC] REAL GENIUS Film (1985). Tri-Star/Delphi III. Dir Martha Coolidge, starring Val Kilmer, Gabe Jarret, Michelle Meyrink, William Atherton, Robert Prescott. Screenplay Neal Israel, Pat Proft, Peter Torokvei, based on a story by Israel and Proft. 106 mins. Colour.Genius students at a college for advanced science are manipulated into designing a high-power laser by their corrupt professor (Atherton), who unknown to them is supplying it to a cold-blooded government agency as a secret weapon. On discovering this, they revenge themselves with a complex practical joke. This was one of several sf "teen" movies of the period (others were MY SCIENCE PROJECT [1985] and WEIRD SCIENCE [1985]), and perhaps the best. Director Coolidge, who is "feminist-influenced", as she cautiously puts it, gives a more realistic flavour than usual to the dialogue, performances and even the science, but much of the film dissolves into routine student-prank sequences. [PN]See also: CINEMA. REALITY AND APPEARANCE CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; METAPHYSICS; PERCEPTION. REAMY, TOM Working name of US writer, movie projectionist and graphic designer Thomas Earl Reamy (1935-1977). He began publishing with "Twilla" for FSF in 1974 and, by late 1977 when he died of a heart attack, had become a writer of potential stature in the field, having just won the 1976 JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer (though in fact most of his work must be thought of as fantasy). The tales assembled in San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories (coll 1979) - the title novelette won a 1976 NEBULA - were notable for the threatening sweetness of their probing of unconscious material, often sexual, though they often ended at a point of healing uplift, occasionally sentimentalized. In his novel Blind Voices (1978), which shared a common background with "Twilla" and "San Diego Lightfoot Sue", a small Kansas town around 1930 is visited by a travelling circus full of freaks and creatures of legend. The homage to Charles G. FINNEY, Theodore STURGEON and Ray BRADBURY is clearly deliberate; a final explanation of the circus creatures in terms of GENETIC ENGINEERING provides no more than an sf pretext, the book reading as elegiac fantasy. [JC]Other work: "Sting" in Six Science Fiction Plays (anth 1976) ed Roger ELWOOD.See also: The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION; PSI POWERS. RE-ANIMATOR Film (1985). Re-Animator Productions/Empire. Dir Stuart Gordon, starring Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale. Screenplay Dennis Paoli, William J. Norris, Gordon, based on "Herbert West - Reanimator" (1922) by H.P. LOVECRAFT. 86 mins. Colour.In this Grand Guignol film Herbert West (Combs), a medical student at Miskatonic University, develops a reagent which restores corpses to life: they become vigorous but brain-damaged zombies. He decapitates an evil professor (Gale) who is envious of his brilliance, resuscitates both head and body, and mayhem ensues. Sponsored by Charles BAND's Empire Pictures, based on an untypical series of sardonic sketches by H.P. Lovecraft, R-A is a lively SPLATTER MOVIE featuring the kind of undergraduate humour that assumes it is funny to be disgusting. It very nearly proves the point, not least in a scene involving the sexual activities of the still-living severed head. R-A opened up new perspectives in bad-taste movies, and helped introduce the comedy trend that dominated HORROR cinema in the late 1980s.The sequel was Bride of Re-Animator (1989; vt Re-Animator II) dir Brian Yuzna, who had produced R-A. A lethargic reworking of R-A's bizarre imagery, again starring Combs, Abbott and Gale, with a plot recapitulating parts of The BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), it lacks the zest necessary for the desired horror-comic effect and is merely emetic. Yuzna's SOCIETY (1989) is so much better that the two hardly seem the work of the same director. [PN] RE-ANIMATOR II RE-ANIMATOR. REAVES, J(AMES) MICHAEL (1950- ) US writer who has written at least 100 teleplays, most with fantastic elements, for the children's Saturday-morning market, and who began publishing sf stories with "The Breath of Dragons" for Clarion 3 (anth 1973) ed Robin Scott WILSON, after attending the previous year's CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP. His first 3 books were published as by J. Michael Reaves, his later books as by Michael Reaves. Much of his work is fantasy, though his first novel, I, Alien (1978), is adventure sf, and Darkworld Detective (coll of linked stories 1982) characteristically mixes sf, fantasy and detective genres in the story of the quest by a colony planet's only detective for the Dark Lord (a familiar fantasy icon), who is his father. Hellstar (1984) with Steve PERRY is sf; and Dome (1987), also with Perry, a post- HOLOCAUST tale set in the eponymous undersea habitat, engagingly tracks its large cast through various crises while, in the background, an AI begins to collaborate with humanity in preparing for the aquatic future. It is never easy to find technical fault with JMR, but at the same time it is hard to discover much individuality beneath the professional surface. [JC]Other works: Dragonworld (1979) with Byron PREISS; the Shattered World sequence of fantasies comprising The Shattered World (1984) and The Burning Realm (1988); Time Machine 3: Sword of the Samurai * (1984) with Steve Perry; Street Magic (1991). RECURSIVE SF Recycling material from the vast and growing storehouse of the already-written has long been a practice of sf writers. Plots and characters constantly reappear throughout sf, usually but not always in the form of sequels written by the author of the original work; venues (like Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's MARS) become universal props; and terms descriptive of devices or circumstances unique to sf (from BEMS to CORPSICLES to partials - Greg BEAR's coinage for autonomous computer-generated partial copies of human personalities) tend, once introduced, to become common parlance. When Robert A. HEINLEIN made reference in "The Number of the Beast" (1980 UK) to characters and situations which appeared in earlier novels by him and other sf writers, he was operating in this traditional manner. But when he introduced into the same book people - writers, editors, fans - who had been involved in sf itself, he did something very different, something which marked his career, and the sf genre within which the book was written, as approaching a late and self-referential phase. Wilson TUCKER so frequently introduced real figures into his stories that such insertions became known for a while as Tuckerisms; but a Tuckerism is a private allusion or joke among friends, and should not be seen as making a binding argument about the relationship between fiction and the world. Heinlein, on the other hand, was writing full-blown recursive sf, a term narrowly defined in Anthony R. LEWIS's An Annotated Bibliography of Recursive Science Fiction (1990 chap) as "science fiction stories that refer to science fiction . . . to authors, fans, collectors, conventions, etc.". More broadly, recursive sf may be defined as stories which treat real people, and the fictional worlds which occupy their dreams, as sharing equivalent degrees of reality. It is, in other words, a technique which may be used to create ALTERNATE WORLDS, usually backward-looking in time, and frequently expressing a powerful nostalgia for pasts in which the visions of early GENRE SF do, in fact, come true.Novels with recursive elements include Brian W. ALDISS's Frankenstein Unbound (1973) and Dracula Unbound (1991), Manly BANISTER's early spoof on sf fandom, Egoboo: A Fantasy Satire (1950 chap), Michael BISHOP's The Secret Ascension (1987), Anthony BOUCHER's detective novel Rocket to the Morgue (1942), Fredric BROWN's Martians, Go Home (1955), Gene DEWEESE's and Robert COULSON's Now You See It/Him/Them (1975) and Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats (1977), Philip K. DICK's The Man in the High Castle (1962), David DVORKIN's Time for Sherlock Holmes (1983), Philip Jose FARMER's To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971) and its sequels, Charles L. HARNESS's Lurid Dreams (1990), Sharyn MCCRUMB's farce-mysteries Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987) and Zombies of the Gene Pool (1992), Barry N. MALZBERG's Dwellers of the Deep (1970 dos), Gather in the Hall of the Planets (1971 dos, both as by K.M. O'Donnell, a pseudonym which itself homages C.L. MOORE and Henry KUTTNER), and Herovit's World (1973), Larry NIVEN's and Jerry POURNELLE's Footfall (1985), Tim POWERS's The Stress of Her Regard (1989), Christopher PRIEST's The Space Machine (1976), Mack REYNOLDS's mystery The Case of the Little Green Men (1951), Rudy RUCKER's The Hollow Earth (1990), Fred SABERHAGEN's and Roger ZELAZNY's The Black Throne (1990) and Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965). Inside the Funhouse (anth 1992) ed Michael RESNICK assembles examples of the form, with an introductory essay. [JC] REDAL, JAVIER [r] SPAIN. RED DAWN Film (1984). MGM/United Artists. Dir John Milius, starring Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen. Screenplay Kevin Reynolds, Milius. 114 mins. Colour.Russians nuke US cities and their paratroops, with Cuban and Nicaraguan allies, invade the Midwest. Highschool kids escape into the Colorado mountains, become guerrillas, undergo rites of passage and male bonding, fight brilliantly, mostly die. This incoherent and implausible film gets so sentimental about toughness, like a parody of Robert A. HEINLEIN, that the viewer's sympathy is largely with the homesick Cuban commander. RD is symptomatic of the interest in SURVIVALIST fictions during the 1980s. [PN] RED DWARF UK tv series (1988- ). A Paul Jackson Production for BBC North West; from Series IV Paul Jackson Productions have not been credited. Prod Ed Bye, Rob Grant, Doug Naylor. Dir Bye. Written Grant, Naylor. Starring Craig Charles as Lister, Chris Barrie as Rimmer, Danny John-Jules as Cat, Robert Llewellyn (season III onward) as Kryten, Norman Lovett (Seasons 1 and 2) and Hattie Hayridge (season III onward) as Holly. Six seasons (given Roman numerals from season III onwards, as in Red Dwarf III) of 6 30min episodes each (to 1994). Possibly current but in suspension. Colour.Probably the best blend of humour and sf on tv since The HITCH HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY , RD, a true situation comedy, rapidly became a cult success. Red Dwarf is a very large, very dirty spaceship with only one crew member, a definitively working-class Liverpudlian, Lister, who has been in suspended animation for millions of years. Also present are a tyrannical but self-pitying hologram, Rimmer, who outranks Lister, a vain humanoid called Cat, descended from Lister's pet cat, an angst-ridden computer called Holly and, later, an ANDROID trained to serve, the admirable Kryten. Miracles of sf evocation - time travel, black holes, alternate realities and other such tropes - are performed with considerable wit and style on, one might deduce from the deliberate tackiness of the whole endeavour, a tiny budget. At its radical fringes, UK tv of the 1980s specialized in comedy emphasizing vulgarity, despair, entropy, stupidity and lack of hygiene, and the people behind RD have impeccable pedigrees in this field: executive prod Paul Jackson had made the nicely revolting The Young Ones and Filthy, Rich and Catflap, and Grant and Naylor had been head writers for the politically satirical puppet series Spitting Image. Spin-off books as by Grant NAYLOR (Grant and Naylor) are Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers * (1989) and Better than Life * (1990). [PN] REDGROVE, PETER (WILLIAM) (1932- ) UK poet and novelist, married to Penelope SHUTTLE. His first work of sf interest was "Mr Waterman" for Paris Review in 1963; although he contributed occasionally to NW, including a fantasy poem later published as The God-Trap (1966 chap), he remains of sf interest mainly for his novels, the first two of which - The Terrors of Dr Treviles: A Romance (1974) and The Glass Cottage: A Nautical Romance (1976) - were written in collaboration with Shuttle. Both are FABULATIONS whose venues are rendered unstable through hyperbolic imagery and their authors' taste for holy witchcraft and other transcendental transgressions of the natural order. The God of Glass (1979) is a tale of the NEAR FUTURE in which a new prophet diseases the world with his message. The Sleep of the Great Hypnotist (1979) introduces a device which cures ills but also hypnotizes its inventor's daughter into bringing him back to life after death. The Beekeepers (1980) and its sequel, The Facilitators, or Mister Hole-in-the-Day (1982), set in an ominous insane asylum where strange experiments are being conducted, marry occult imagery and murk-choked scientism in a complex narrative involving an ambiguous penetration of Bedlam. Primarily a poet, PR writes novels whose plots ride upon deep swells of language-driven meditation, although the tales assembled in The One who Set Out to Study Fear (coll 1989) - perhaps because they are derived from the Brothers Grimm-display a more forthright story-telling gift. [JC] RED PLANET MARS Film (1952). Melaby Pictures/United Artists. Dir Harry Horner, starring Peter Graves, Andrea King, Marvin Miller. Screenplay John L. Balderston (1889-1954), Anthony Veiller, based on the play Red Planet (produced in New York in late 1932; 1933 chap) by Balderston, John E. Hoare. 87 mins. B/w.Two young US scientists, man and wife, pick up tv transmissions apparently from MARS. These messages (confusingly) take two forms. One class, suggesting Mars is the centre of incredible technological breakthroughs, has been faked by an ex-Nazi scientist and is designed to panic the Western World, which it does, though it pleases the evil Russians. The second class (genuine) tells us that Mars is ruled by a "Supreme Authority" who is none other than God himself. This revelation also causes chaos, and there are accusations of fakery, but religion is ultimately justified and Godless communism (the true villain) destroyed: aged revolutionaries overthrow the Soviet Government and restore the monarchy, choosing an Orthodox priest as their new Czar.RPM is a fascinating (and quite hysterical) product of the Cold War PARANOIA that swept the USA in the early 1950s, and specifically a mirror of the widespread feeling in US society that religious crusades (as led by Billy Graham and others) were a political weapon against communism. Balderston, responsible for the script and the original play, had a distinguished career in genre movies, his screenplays including Dracula (1931), BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), MAD LOVE (1935) and Gaslight (1944), but this essay in patronizing populism did him no credit. The film flopped. [PN/JB]See also: GODS AND DEMONS. REED, CLIFFORD C(ECIL) (1911- ) South African-born writer and civil servant, in UK from 1950, who began publishing sf with "Jean-Gene-Jeanne" in Authentic in 1954. In Martian Enterprise (fixup 1962) escaped convicts learn slowly how to create a community on a new planet. [JC] REED, DAVID V. Pseudonym used by US writer David Vern (1924- ) for almost all his fiction, mostly for Ray PALMER's magazines, starting with "Where is Roger Davis?" for AMZ in 1939. He collaborated with Don WILCOX (who wrote the first of the 2 stories from which it was cobbled together, DVR writing the second) on The Whispering Gorilla (1940-43 Fantastic Adventures; fixup 1950 UK), about an ape with a man's brain ( Hyperlink to: APES AND CAVEMEN); the book was published as by DVR alone. Murder in Space (1944 AMZ; 1954) unconvincingly attempts to combine mystery and sf techniques. DVR was probably the first writer to use the house name Alexander BLADE; he used also the house names Craig ELLIS and Peter HORN and wrote 1 story as Clyde Woodruff. [JC/PN]Other work: The Thing that Made Love (1943 Fantastic Adventures as "The Metal Monster Murders"; 1952?), a mystery. REED, ISHMAEL (SCOTT) (1938- ) US writer, poet and playwright who emerged in the 1960s as a central representative of the New Black Aesthetic movement, and a figure controversial to the Black critical establishment from the publication of his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), a powerful SATIRE. In this and in books like Yellow-Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) and Mumbo Jumbo (1972), whose main characters use Black humour to express their outrage in the face of oppression, he mixed elements of surreal satire and MAGIC-REALIST fantasy into complex plots, calling this distinctive literary method Neo-Hoodooism. Further such tales include The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974) and Flight to Canada (1975). In several of these books grotesquely overelaborated thriller plots carry the burden of the flamboyant text, and similar plots - featuring a bemused detective named Nance Saturday - shape his genuine sf novels, The Terrible Twos (1982) and The Terrible Threes (1989). In the first of these sad and rather savage NEAR-FUTURE satires the US President is a male model with an IQ of 55; the second is a DYSTOPIAN vision of the Reagan years. Critics have seen IR's use of humour as an attempt to distract attention from important social issues and his suspicion of Black FEMINISTS as less than persuasive; by contrast, Thomas PYNCHON and other authors of contemporary interest have cited IR as an exemplary writer. [CAJ/JC]Other works: Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (coll 1978), essays and interviews; Reckless Eyeballing (1986). REED, JEREMY (1951- ) UK poet and writer, much of whose fiction comprises a set of loosely-linked tales about19th century decadents; those with fantasy elements include Isidore: ANovel About the Comte de Lautreamont (1991) and When the Whip Comes Down: A Novel about de Sade(1992), in which de Sade timeslips through the centuries. JR's sf novel,Diamond Nebula (1994), is set in the 23rd century, and describesits protagonist's obsessions with decadents of the 20th century, including J.G. BALLARD. [JC] REED, KIT Working name of US writer Lillian Craig Reed (1932- ), as well known for her work outside sf and fantasy as within; she has also written a horror novel, Blood Fever (1986) as by Shelley Hyde, and two detections - Gone (1992) and Twice Burned (1993) - as by Kit Craig. She began publishing stories of genre interest with "The Wait" (vt "To Be Taken in a Strange Country") in 1958 for FSF, afterwards publishing mainly with that journal. After some non-genre novels, the first being Mother isn't Dead She's Only Sleeping (1961), KR began to assemble short stories of genre interest in Mister da V. and Other Stories (coll 1967 UK), later releasing The Killer Mice (coll 1976 UK), Other Stories And . . . the Attack of the Giant Baby (coll 1981), Revenge of the Senior Citizens ** Plus: A Short Story Collection (coll 1986) and Thief of Lives (coll 1992). It could be said, unkindly, that her stories domesticate the world of Shirley JACKSON; but that would be unduly to deprecate the sharp, clear, self-amused perceptiveness of her best moral fables, often closer to fantasy than sf as they make their uncomfortable points with precision and delicacy. Her first sf novel, Armed Camps (1969 UK), perhaps more conventionally posits a NEAR-FUTURE USA sliding into irretrievable collapse; neither the soldier nor the woman pacifist who share the narrative, nor what they represent, are seen as representing any solution. Magic Time (1980), less effective because of its chatty plot, treats the USA as analogous to a grotesque theme park, posthumously run by a Disney-like guru in cold storage. Fort Privilege (1985) more convincingly transforms into moral fable a tale set in an expensive New York apartment building under siege from the innumerable homeless of the great city; and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse (1994) similarly examines the lives of a group of women besieged - in a world tainted by violence and social disintegration - by conflicting gangs of marauders. Though sometimes her reticence is overpowering, KR at her best is, very quietly, an explosive writer. [JC]Other works: Fat (anth 1974), stories about obesity, several being sf or fantasy; George Orwell's 1984 (1984), nonfiction. REED, PETER [s] John D. MACDONALD. REED, ROBERT (1956- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Mudpuppies" as by Robert Touzalin for L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future (anth 1986) ed Algis BUDRYS; the story gained the $5000 grand prize awarded in the WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST for that year. RR has since gradually become productive in short forms, though he remains best known for his novels, beginning with The Leeshore (1987), a tale which combines adventure-sf plotting (a pair of twins, the sole humans left on the eponymous water-covered colony planet, must guide a task force in pursuit of the COMPUTER-worshipping zealots who have killed everyone else) with an almost mystical sense for the genius of place, the intricacies of selfhood. The Hormone Jungle (1988) is set in an entirely different venue, a densely crowded Solar System drawn in CYBERPUNK colours; but a similar attention to the mysterious depths of his distorted characters saves the book from RR's tendency to indulge in a sometimes choking virtuosity. Black Milk (1989) is set in yet another of sf's familiar 1980s venues, a NEAR-FUTURE world threatened by uncontrolled and secret GENETIC-ENGINEERING experiments instigated by a late and movingly presented version of the inventor/entrepreneur who runs the world ( EDISONADE); once again, the expertness of the writing and its knowing exploitation of current scientific speculations are balanced by an underlying quiet sanity about how to depict and to illumine human beings. In Down the Bright Way (1991) a group of sentient beings searches through an endless string of PARALLEL WORLDS for the old gods - or sentient beings at the start of things - while fending off others intent on using the pathways for darker purposes. In The Remarkables (1992) a confrontation between the main stream of humanity - sequestrated in densely populated local space - and a lost colony leads to a complexly engaging rite of passage involving representatives of both human streams with the eponymous aliens. And in Beyond the Veil of Stars (1994), the sense of claustrophobia characteristic of RR's work derives from an image of our Solar System as impacted upon - from beyond a fabricated and deceitful veil of stars - by innumerable similar inhabited systems. We live in a megalopolis of planets, and we communicate with each other by passing through dimensional barriers, which change our bodies so that we resemble natives of the visited world; which is also overcrowded. RR's course to date has been unusual in that he has avoided sequels in his first 5 novels, none of which share any background material or assumptions whatsoever. Today's sf readers tend to expect a kind of brand identity from authors, and it may be for this reason that RR has not yet achieved any considerable fame. [JC]See also: ANDROIDS. REED, VAN House name used for 2 books published by CURTIS WARREN, one by Dennis HUGHES and the other, Dwellers in Space (1953), by an unknown author. [JC] REEVE, ARTHUR B(ENJAMIN) (1880-1936) US writer almost exclusively remembered for his Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective sequence, the early stories being first published 1910-15 in monthly instalments in Cosmopolitan. Almost every volume of the series contained one of more sf device, sometimes trivial, sometimes central to the tale. Kennedy himself ( EDISONADE) was interminably responsible for developing new forms of weaponry, making medical breakthroughs, forging super-metals and chemicals . . . Though many individual stories showed only minimal displacement into an sf frame, the overall framework was clearly generic, and the individual titles warrant listing: The Silent Bullet: The Adventures of Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective (similar subtitles are ignored below) (coll 1912; vt The Black Hand 1912 UK), The Poisoned Pen (coll 1913), The Dream Doctor (coll 1914), The War Terror (coll 1915; vt Craig Kennedy, Detective 1915 UK), The Gold of the Gods: The Mystery of the Incas Solved by Craig Kennedy - Scientific Detective (1915), The Exploits of Elaine (1915), The Social Gangster (coll 1916; vt The Diamond Queen 1917 UK), The Ear in the Wall (1916), The Romance of Elaine * (1916), a film tie, The Triumph of Elaine (1916), The Treasure-Train (coll 1917), The Adventuress (1917), The Panama Plot (coll 1918), The Soul Scar (1919), The Film Mystery (1921), Craig Kennedy Listens In (coll 1923), Atavar, the Dream Dancer (1924), The Fourteen Points (coll 1925), The Boy Scouts' Craig Kennedy (coll 1925), Craig Kennedy on the Farm (coll 1925), The Radio Detective * (1926), a film tie, Pandora (1926), The Kidnap Club (1932), The Clutching Hand (1934), Enter Craig Kennedy (1935) with Ashley Locke, and The Stars Scream Murder (1936). Of these titles, the most remarkable was perhaps Pandora, in which the evil land of Centrania successfully seduces the USA from her former power by (as E.F. BLEILER remarks) "subsidizing jazz musicians", inventing a synthetic fuel, and causing a stock-market crash. The quick development of a tiny atomic bomb leads to the utter defeat of Centrania. ABR was editorial consultant to SCIENTIFIC DETECTIVE MONTHLY (1930), which printed 1 new Craig Kennedy story and reprinted 9 old ones. [JC]Other works: Guy Garrick: An Adventure with a Scientific Gunman (1914); Constance Dunlap, Woman Detective (1916); The Master Mystery (1919) and The Mystery Mind (1921), both with John Grey; The Best Ghost Stories (anth 1936).See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. REEVES-STEVENS, GARFIELD (1953- ) Canadian writer who began writing works of genre interest with Bloodshift (1981), a vampire tale which - not unusually for thisauthor - intermixes sf, fantasy and horror. A professional killer is hired by establishment vampiresto find a renegade female vampire who is interfering with the sf-like Phoenix Project, throughwhich it is hoped to eliminate the human race entirely. Other novels combining similar genremixes include Dreamland (1985),Children of the Shroud (1989), Nighteyes (1989 US), which additionally injects conspiracy-talk fromthe UFO sub-genre,and Dark Matter(1990 US). GR-S's Star Trek TIES are more conventional sf, andinclude Star Trek: Memory Prime* (1988US),Star Trek: Prime Directive* (1990 US),Star Trek: Federation* (1994 US) with his wife,Judith Reeves-Stevens,and The Making of Star Trek: Deep SpaceNine (1994 US), also with Judith Reeves-Stevens. [JC]Other works: the Chronicles of Galen Sword, a fantasy sequence with JudithReeves-Stevens comprising Shifter (1990) andNightfeeder (1991); an Alien Nation tie:The Day of Descent*(1993). REEVES-STEVENS, JUDITH [r] Garfield REEVES-STEVENS. REEVES, L(YNETTE) P(AMELA) (1937- ) UK writer exclusively associated with ROBERT HALE LIMITED, but whose novels, often featuring TIME TRAVEL, rise intermittently above their element: The Nairn Syndrome (1975), Time Search (1976), The Last Days of the Peacemaker (1976), Harlow's Dimension (1977), Stone Age Venture (1977), A Twist in Time (1978) and If it's Blue, it's Plague (1981). [JC] REGINALD, ROBERT The pseudonym under which US bibliographer, librarian and publisher Michael Roy Burgess (1948- ) is best known, and under which (or as R. Reginald) he has published his most important work in the sf field; it is also under this name that he publishes and edits the BORGO PRESS in California, a SMALL PRESS that publishes many monographs on and bibliographical studies of sf, fantasy and horror. As M.R. Burgess or Michael Burgess he has also published fairly widely, his most important sf work under the latter form of his name being Reference Guide to Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (1992); less frequently used pseudonyms include Boden Clarke, C. Everett Cooper and Lucas Webb. RR has written on himself in The Work of R. Reginald: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide (1985 chap as by Michael Burgess and Jeffrey M. ELLIOT; exp vt The Work of Robert Reginald: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide 1992 as by Burgess alone).The various incarnations of RR's most important publication have intermittently occupied his career through 1992. His first book, Stella Nova: The Contemporary Science Fiction Authors (1970 anon; rev vt Contemporary Science Fiction Authors, First Edition 1974 as RR), eventually became the second volume of his magnum opus, Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature: A Checklist, 1700-1974, with Contemporary Science Fiction Authors II (1979) in 2 vols as RR, and listing over 15,000 titles up to the end of 1974. The long-awaited supplement to this essential reference tool has been broken back down into separate enterprises, with Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature : A Bibliography, 1975-1991 (1992), with Darryl F. MALLETT and Mary Wickizer Burgess, being restricted to an updating of the checklist alone, to which it adds a further 22,000 titles; a biographical volume, building on the original Stella Nova, is also projected ( Hyperlink to: BIBLIOGRAPHIES for further comments).Other bibliographical publications of interest include: Cumulative Paperback Index, 1939-1959: A Comprehensive Bibliographic Guide to 14,000 Mass-Market Paperback Books of 33 Publishers under 69 Imprints (1973) as RR with M.R. Burgess; Science Fiction & Fantasy Awards (1981 chap as RR; much exp vt Reginald's Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive Guide to the Awards and their Winners 1991 by Daryl F. Mallett with RR); A Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy in the Library of Congress Classification Scheme (1984 chap; exp 1988) as by Michael Burgess; The Work of Jeffrey M. Elliot: An Annotated Bibliography & Guide (1984 chap) as by Boden Clarke; The Work of Julian May: An Annotated Bibliography & Guide (1985 chap) as by RR with Thaddeus DIKTY; The Work of George Zebrowski: An Annotated Bibliography & Guide (1986 chap; exp 1990) as by RR with Jeffrey M. Elliot; Mystery and Detective Fiction in the Library of Congress Classification Scheme (1987) as by Michael Burgess; Western Fiction in the Library of Congress Classification Scheme (1988 chap) as by Michael Burgess, with Beverly A. Ryan; and The Work of William F. Nolan: An Annotated Bibliography & Guide (1988 chap) as by Boden Clarke, with Nolan writing as James Hopkins. The individual author bibliographies, part of an ongoing Borgo Press series by several hands, are devotedly thorough and accurate.Before founding Borgo in 1975, RR founded the short-lived Unicorn & Son, Publishers (which produced Stella Nova), and was an associate editor of FORGOTTEN FANTASY (1970-71) and advisory editor of the ARNO PRESS sf reprint series and Arno's subsequent reprints of supernatural, fantasy and LOST WORLD books. Borgo itself began publishing titles in 1976, and by 1992 had released well over 100 titles under its own imprint as well as distributing over 1000 other titles. Though RR became full Librarian at Cal State in 1984, he maintained complete control over the firm, initiating and silently collaborating on many of its bibliographical projects and publishing through it much of his non-bibliographical work, as well as his two novels. The Attempted Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Political Fantasy (1976 chap as by Lucas Webb; rev vt If J.F.K. Had Lived: A Political Scenario 1982 chap as by RR with Jeffrey M. Elliot) is an ALTERNATE-WORLD tale in which monarchies have been retained worldwide and Kennedy is not killed. Up Your Asteroid!: A Science Fiction Farce (1977 chap), as by C. Everett Cooper, is a desultory spoof.RR also ed several anthologies for Arno Press, all with Douglas MENVILLE: Ancestral Voices: An Anthology of Early Science Fiction (anth 1975; cut 1992), Ancient Hauntings (anth 1976), Phantasmagoria (anth 1976), R.I.P.: Five Stories of the Supernatural (anth 1976), The Spectre Bridegroom, and Other Horrors (anth 1976), Dreamers of Dreams: An Anthology of Fantasy (anth 1978), King Solomon's Children: Some Parodies of H. Rider Haggard (anth 1978), They: Three Parodies of H. Rider Haggard's She (anth 1978) and Worlds of Never: Three Fantastic Novels (anth 1978). Also with Menville, RR wrote two film books: Things to Come: An Illustrated History of the Science Fiction Film (1977) and, with Mary Wickizer Burgess also collaborating, Futurevisions: The New Golden Age of the Science Fiction Film (1985). RR remains of central importance to sf as a bibliographer of persistent exactness and enormous energy. He won the PILGRIM AWARD in 1993. [PN/JC] REHN, JENS [r] GERMANY. REICHERT, MICKEY ZUCKER Working name of US medical doctor and writer Miriam S. Zucker Reichert (1962- ), almost allof whose fiction (see Other Works below) has been fantasy; but whose 9th novel,The Unknown Soldier (1994), is an sf tale aboutan amnesiacal soldier whose treatment in hospital is complicated by doubts over his origins intime and space, and interrupted by guerrilla assaults; his character and feats are reminiscent ofthose of MZR's fantasy protagonists. The medical side of the tale is perhaps more sustained thanthe sf side. [JC]Other Works: the Bifrost Guardians sequence, comprising Godslayer (1987), ShadowClimber (1988), DragonrankMaster(1989), Shadow's Realm(1990) and By Chaos Cursed (1991);the Renshai seuqence, comprising The Last of theRenshai (1992),The WesternWizard (1992) and The Child ofThunder (1993); The Legend ofNightfall (1993), a singleton. REID, DESMOND A house name used by at least 30 writers for Sexton Blake Library tales, one of which - The World-Shakers! (1960 chap) by Rex Dolpin ( Peter SAXON) - was a UFO tale. Another - Caribbean Crisis (1962 chap) by James CAWTHORN and Michael MOORCOCK - was Moorcock's first novel. Other authors of genre interest who used the name included Sydney J. BOUNDS, Jonathan BURKE, Stephen FRANCES, A.A. GLYNN, John LYMINGTON and Wilfred MCNEILLY. [JC] REIDA, ALVAH (1920-1975) US writer whose sf novel, Fault Lines (1972) - not to be confused with Kate WILHELM's later novel of the same title - deals apocalyptically with the consequences of a San Andreas Fault earthquake. [JC] REIN, HAROLD (? -? ) US writer in whose extremely grim post- HOLOCAUST novel, Few Were Left (1955), a suicidal protagonist is trapped with others in the New York subway system after the bomb has dropped. He fails, after several adventures, to escape. [JC] REINCARNATION The idea of reincarnation exerts a considerable fascination; its fashionability has recently been renewed by hypnotists who claim to facilitate a "regression" of their subjects which allows access to memories of "former lives". Serial reincarnation is one of the standard varieties of IMMORTALITY. In FANTASY the notion is an axiom of the curious subgenre of "transcendental romance" - stories in which love becomes a quasisupernatural force transcending time or death so that lovers may meet in different ages to make repeated attempts to find true happiness. This is the pattern of H. Rider HAGGARD's She (1887) and its sequels, Edwin Lester ARNOLD's Phra the Phoenician (1890) and George GRIFFITH's Valdar the Oft-Born (1895). Arnold's Lepidus the Centurion (1901) shows one of the more subtle and intelligent uses of the notion. Many romances of reincarnation have also been inspired by the ancient Egyptian methods of preserving the dead, including Haggard's "Smith and the Pharaohs" (1912; as title story of Smith and the Pharaohs and Other Tales coll 1920). PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC rationalizations of the notion often invoke the concept of "race memory"; Haggard bolstered his belief with this idea, deploying it in The Ancient Allan (1920) and Allan and the Ice Gods (1927), and Jack LONDON used it in Before Adam (1906) and The Star Rover (1915; vt The Jacket). The most impressive sf story built on the race-memory premise is John GLOAG's 99% (1944).Camille FLAMMARION, the first writer to develop the notion of ALIEN beings adapted to LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS, did so mainly in order to support his theory of the immortality of the soul with speculations about possible reincarnations on other worlds. First presented in Lumen (1864; exp 1887; trans 1897), the idea was used also in Urania (1890) and was copied by Louis Pope GRATACAP in the didactic The Certainty of a Future Life on Mars (1903).Hugh KINGSMILL reincarnated Shakespeare in The Return of William Shakespeare (1929) so that a critical commentary on the works could be put into the Bard's own mouth and bracketed by a satirical comedy. When GENRE SF began to deploy technological methods of reincarnation, the resurrection of great men of the past was a theme used in many stories, including Manly Wade WELLMAN's Giants from Eternity (1939), Ray BRADBURY's "Forever and the Earth" (1950), James BLISH's "A Work of Art" (1956), R.A. L AFFERTY's Past Master (1968), Philip K. DICK's We Can Build You (1972), Barry N. MALZBERG's THE REMAKING OF SIGMUND FREUD (1985) and Dan SIMMONS's The Fall of Hyperion (1990). Henry J. SLATER's The Smashed World (1952) features a remarkable version of the Eternal Triangle involving Archimedes, Napoleon and Cleopatra 3000 years in the future. In Anne Rice's The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (1989) an immortal Ramses forces the reincarnation of the spirit of Cleopatra into the mummy of that queen, with disastrous results - not just for Ramses but also for the novel, since the explanation of the "mechanism" of reincarnation is hopelessly fudged.Reincarnation in sf usually involves the "recording" of personalities for later re-embodiment, sometimes in an ANDROID body. TIME TRAVEL also comes in handy as a means of duplicating individuals. The idea that CLONES might be seen as reincarnations is propounded in such stories as "When You Care, When You Love" (1962) by Theodore STURGEON, and in several of the works of John VARLEY clones are used such that in effect individuals can cheat death by living in "serial bodies". MATTER TRANSMISSION is employed as a reincarnating device in such stories as Algis BUDRYS's ROGUE MOON (1960). The natural extravagance of genre sf has occasionally encouraged a blithe disregard for the inconvenience of death; two writers who have sometimes been very casual about incorporating metaphysical or frankly mysterious methods of reincarnation into their scenarios are A.E. VAN VOGT, in such works as The Book of Ptath (1943; 1947; vt Two Hundred Million A.D.), The World of A (1945; 1948; vt The World of Null-A) and "The Monster" (1948; vt "Resurrection"), and Philip Jose FARMER, most notably in the Riverworld series-which stars many notable figures plucked from various eras of Earthly history, and helped to inspire Janet E. MORRIS's Hell series of shared-world adventures - but also in Inside Outside (1964) and Traitor to the Living (1973).The particular ideas of reincarnation contained in extant RELIGIONS are sciencefictionalized in various works by Roger ZELAZNY, notably LORD OF LIGHT (1967), whose framework is taken from Hindu MYTHOLOGY, and Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969), which uses Egyptian mythology. Syd LOGSDON's A Fond Farewell to Dying (1981) thoughtfully confronts a technology of reincarnation with Hindu beliefs which view it as a blasphemy. An aesthetically satisfying quasireligious "mechanism" for reincarnation is presented in the parapsychological thriller Death Knell (1977) by C. Terry CLINE. Alien biologies permitting reincarnation, perhaps adaptable to use by humans, are sometimes presented within an explicitly religious framework; Robert SILVERBERG's Downward to the Earth (1970) is a notable example.Future societies dramatically transformed by technologies of reincarnation are featured in Robert SHECKLEY's Immortality, Inc (1959), in which disembodied minds must compete for bodies made redundant by their occupiers for one reason or another, Silverberg's To Live Again (1969), in which similarly disembodied minds must share living hosts, Robert THURSTON's Alicia II (1978), which examines the predicament of the "rejects" whose bodies are used to house the reincarnated, Stephen GOLDIN's The Eternity Brigade (1980), in which the tapes recording trained soldiers for serial reincarnation are bootlegged, with predictable consequences, and Michael BERLYN's Crystal Phoenix (1980), in which attitudes to death are dramatically and repulsively transformed. In Gray Matters (1971) by William HJORTSBERG and Friends Come in Boxes (1973) by Michael G. CONEY minds awaiting re-embodiment are mechanically-and not very happily - stored. Silverberg's "Born with the Dead" (1974), Lucius SHEPARD's Green Eyes (1984) and Kevin J. ANDERSON's Resurrection, Inc (1988) all draw some inspiration from the idea of zombies, but develop their hypotheses in strikingly different ways. [BS]See also: ESCHATOLOGY; SUSPENDED ANIMATION. REINSMITH, RICHARD Working name of US writer Richard Rein Smith (1930- ), who has apparently written many sf novels under various pseudonyms, including the sf adventure Starbright (1983) as by Damon Castle; further pseudonyms remain unrevealed. As RR he wrote The Savage Stars (1981) and a Tarzan tie, Tarzan and the Tower of Diamonds * (1985). [JC] REJECTS Some of science fiction’s best writers received their share of rejection slips.Doubleday initially turned down Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy as well as his I, Robot.In 1953, John Campbell rejected Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity for publication in Astounding because he felt that it would not divide naturally for serialization. He changed his mind after Frederik Pohl divided it into three parts.After Samuel R. Delany won the Nebula Awards for two consecutive novels, his experimental novel Dhalgren was rejected by several publishers. When Bantam finally published Dhalgren in 1975, it became a word-of-mouth bestseller. RELATIVITY COMMUNICATIONS; FASTER THAN LIGHT; PHYSICS. RELIGION Familiar DEFINITIONS OF SF imply that there is nothing more alien to its concerns than religion. However, many of the roots of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION are embedded in traditions of speculative fiction closely associated with the religious imagination, and contemporary sf recovered a strong interest in certain mystical and transcendental themes and images when it moved beyond the TABOOS imposed by the PULP MAGAZINES. Modern sf frequently confronts age-old speculative issues associated with METAPHYSICS and theology - partly because science itself has abandoned them. Speculative fiction always tends to go beyond the merely empirical matters with which pragmatic scientists concern themselves; perhaps something called "science" fiction ought not to include metaphysical fiction, but the genre as constituted obviously does.It was the religious imagination of people such as Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) which first envisioned an infinite Universe filled with habitable worlds, and it was visionaries like Athanasius KIRCHER and Emanuel SWEDENBORG who first journeyed in the imagination to the limits of the Solar System, and beyond. John WILKINS, who first supposed in all seriousness that people might go to the Moon in a flying machine, was a bishop, and so was Francis GODWIN, the author of the satirical cosmic voyage The Man in the Moone (1638). Other early speculative fictions were attacks upon religious cosmology and religious orthodoxy by freethinkers such as CYRANO DE BERGERAC, VOLTAIRE and, later, Samuel BUTLER. Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein (1818) takes its imaginative inspiration from the image of the scientist as usurper of the prerogatives of God. The boldest of all the 19th-century speculative fictions, Camille FLAMMARION's Lumen (1864; exp 1887; trans 1897), was the result of the astronomer's desperate need to reconcile and fuse his scientific knowledge with his religious faith. J.H. ROSNY aine, the prolific writer of evolutionary fantasies, also saw the object of his work as an imaginative revelation of the divinely planned evolutionary schema, and he too wanted to remake theology so that it might be reconciled with modern scientific knowledge - a task later taken up by the heretic Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). C.H. HINTON's stories and essays about the fourth DIMENSION were inspired by the notion that a four-dimensional God might be omniscient of everything that has ever or will ever take place in our three-dimensional continuum. Marie CORELLI re-envisaged God as an entity of pure electric force in A Romance of Two Worlds (1886). John Jacob ASTOR's A Journey in Other Worlds (1894), Jean DELAIRE's Around a Distant Star (1904) and John MASTIN's Through the Sun in an Airship (1909) are among many novels borrowing the literary devices of SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE to dramatize cosmic voyages whose real purpose was to "justify" theological dogmas. Edgar FAWCETT's The Ghost of Guy Thyrle (1895) does not hesitate to engage its hero in conversation with a messenger from God at the edge of the Universe.In virtually all late-19th-century and early-20th-century speculative fiction the antagonism of the scientific and religious imaginations - sharpened by controversies regarding Darwinian EVOLUTION, socialism and humanism - is evident, whether the thrust of the narrative is toward reconciliation or conflict. Many of the early UK writers of scientific romance-notably George GRIFFITH, M.P. SHIEL, William Hope HODGSON and J.D. BERESFORD - were the sons of clergymen who converted to free thought and used their fiction to justify and explore the consequences of their decision. Guy THORNE's When it was Dark (1904) and Shiel's The Last Miracle (1906) both feature rationalist plots to discredit Christian faith, although the authors take up very different positions in extrapolating the consequences. In Robert Hugh BENSON's Lord of the World (1907) a humanist socialist woos the world to his cause, but proves to be the Antichrist; its companion-piece, The Dawn of All (1911), offers an alternative vision of a UTOPIAN future in which people have renounced such heinous heresies as materialism, humanism, socialism and protestantism. Some humanists were equally prepared to turn religious imagery to their own purposes: H.G. WELLS brought a new kind of angel to Earth to observe the sins of mankind in The Wonderful Visit (1895); his later flirtation with a reconstituted faith-explained in God the Invisible King (1917) - led him to produce a new Book of Job in The Undying Fire (1919), and towards the end of his life he rewrote the tale of Noah in All Aboard for Ararat (1940). A similar interest in "alternative theology" is central to the work of Olaf STAPLEDON, whose STAR MAKER (1937) explores a vast cosmic schema, and culminates in a vision of God the Scientist, constantly experimenting with Creation. C.S. LEWIS co-opted the methods and ideas of scientific romance for his theological fantasies OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938), Perelandra (1943) and The Great Divorce (1945 chap). In France Andre MAUROIS confronted a SCIENTIST with proof of the existence of the soul in Le peseur d'ames (1931; trans as The Weigher of Souls 1931); and the Austrian Franz WERFEL wrote Stern der Ungeborenen (1946; trans as Star of the Unborn 1946), a bizarre futuristic SATIRE promiscuously combining ideas from the scientific and religious imaginations. The dedicatedly sceptical philosopher Bertrand RUSSELL produced the VOLTAIRE-esque contes philosophiques "Zahatopolk" (1954) and "Faith and Mountains" (1954), two vitriolically scathing treatments of organized religion and faddish cults. This long tradition of theological and antitheological speculative fiction extends into recent times in such works as John CAMERON's The Astrologer (1972), Romain GARY's The Gasp (1973), E.E.Y. Hales's Chariot of Fire (1977), Bernard MALAMUD's God's Grace (1982), Jeremy LEVEN's Satan (1982), Theodore STURGEON's Godbody (1986) and James K. MORROW's Only Begotten Daughter (1990).If speculative fiction in the MAINSTREAM has always been as much concerned with the visions of the religious imagination as with those of the scientific imagination, within GENRE SF religious issues were for many years excluded by editorial TABOO. One pulp subgenre to be exempted was the "Shaggy God" story, often dealing with ADAM AND EVE; writers mostly played safe by scrupulously avoiding the New Testament. Godlike aliens were treated with circumspection, Clifford D. SIMAK's The Creator (1935; 1946) finding a home only in the semiprofessional MARVEL TALES. The future evolution of institutionalized religion was considered in Robert A. HEINLEIN's "If This Goes On . . ." (1940), in which a tyrannical state of the future operates through an Established Church headed by a bigoted fanatic - a recurrent image in sf. Heinlein's Sixth Column (1941 as by Anson MacDonald; 1949; vt The Day After Tomorrow), based on a John W. CAMPBELL Jr story whose original version was ultimately published as "All" (1976), shows the USA overthrowing Asian conquerors by means of a fake religious cult - another recurrent image. Fritz LEIBER amalgamated the two ideas in GATHER, DARKNESS! (1943; 1950), in which the tyrannical rule of a state religion is overthrown by a cult masquerading as witches and warlocks. ROBOTS sceptical of what humans tell them about Earth construct a new faith for themselves in Isaac ASIMOV's "Reason" (1941). But all these religions were mere superstructure: the theological issues remained untouched. In the pages of UNKNOWN, Campbell's authors used angels, GODS AND DEMONS with gay abandon, but such stories as Henry KUTTNER's "The Misguided Halo" (1939) and Cleve CARTMILL's "Prelude to Armageddon" (1942) were conscientiously playful in dealing with the apparatus of the Christian mythos. Only A.E. VAN VOGT's The Book of Ptath (1943; 1947 vt Two Hundred Million A.D.) came close to serious speculation about metaphysics.After WWII there was a spectacular boom in sf stories which, without any trepidation whatever, cut straight to the heart of theological matters. The space travellers in Ray BRADBURY's "The Man" (1949) follow Jesus on his interplanetary mission of salvation, while the priests in "In this Sign . . ." (1951; vt "The Fire Balloons") encounter sinless beings on Mars. A robot in Anthony BOUCHER's "The Quest for St Aquin" (1951) emulates St Thomas Aquinas in logically deducing the existence of God, thus justifying its own - and the author's - adherence to the Catholic faith. In Paul L. Payne's "Fool's Errand" (1952) a Jew finds a cross in the sands of Mars. In James BLISH's classic A CASE OF CONSCIENCE (1953; exp 1958) a Jesuit interprets the axioms of his faith to infer, heretically in the Manichaean style, that an alien world is the creation of the Devil, and that it must be exorcised. In Lester DEL REY's "For I Am a Jealous People" (1954) alien invaders arrive to take possession of the Earth, having made their own covenant with God and become his chosen people. In Arthur C. CLARKE's "The Star" (1955) spacefarers discover the wreckage of inhabited worlds which had been destroyed by the nova that shone over Bethlehem. Philip Jose FARMER's THE LOVERS (1952; exp 1961) features a future Earth whose social mores derive from the "Western Talmud"; its sequel, A Woman a Day (1953; rev 1960; vt The Day of Timestop; vt Timestop), continues an earnest exploration of future religion. Farmer's "The God Business" (1954) is a phantasmagoric, pantheistic fantasy whose hero ends up as a deity; and the same opportunity is offered to a conventional Churchman in "Father" (1955), part of a series featuring the priest John Carmody, whose conversion as a result of authentic transcendental experience is described in Night of Light (1957; exp 1966), and whose eventual mission is the subject of "A Few Miles" (1960) and "Prometheus" (1961). The most impressive single work to come out of this boom is Walter M. MILLER's A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (1955-7; fixup 1960), which describes the role played by the Church in the rebuilding of society after a nuclear HOLOCAUST. Even stories like Robert A.W. LOWNDES's Believer's World (1952; exp 1961), James E. GUNN's This Fortress World (1955) and Poul ANDERSON's "Superstition" (1956), which deal with fake or misguided religious cults, exhibit a far more sophisticated view of the SOCIOLOGY of religion than "If this Goes On . . ." or Sixth Column.Blish, tempted to try to explain this remarkable phenomenon by his own involvement with it, wrote the notable essay "Cathedrals in Space" (1953 as by William Atheling Jr; incorporated into The Issue at Hand, coll 1964), citing the stories as "instruments of a chiliastic crisis, of a magnitude we have not seen since the chiliastic panic of 999 A.D.", and drawing a parallel between them and the boom in atomic Armageddons - a parallel made explicit by Boucher and Miller and spectacularly developed by Blish himself in Black Easter (1968) and The Day after Judgment (1970). The supposed panics of AD999 were in fact a myth invented by much later apocalyptic writers, but the argument holds good. The advent of the atom bomb in 1945 was a revelation of sorts, and the 1953 invention of the H-bomb gave to each of two ideologically opposed nations the power to annihilate the entire human race. The interest in theological issues, and in metaphysical issues in general, prompted by the acute sense of existential insecurity to which this awareness gave birth became gradually more powerful, though often less explicit. The 1950s also saw a remarkable proliferation of images obviously allied to religious notions but shorn of their association with actual religious doctrine. Arthur C. Clarke has said that any religious symbolism or imagery in CHILDHOOD'S END (1950; exp 1953) is "entirely accidental", although the text itself refers to the climax as an "apotheosis" and the events described there are strikingly - but coincidentally - similar to Teilhard de Chardin's notion of the coming-together of displaced planetary "noospheres" at an apocalyptic "Omega Point". Clifford D. Simak's Time and Again (1951; vt First He Died) is similarly free of formal doctrine, although the alien symbionts which infest all living things are obviously analogous to souls ( ESCHATOLOGY). In later works by Simak - particularly A Choice of Gods (1972) and Project Pope (1981)-religious ideas do become explicit, and here again there are strong echoes of a Teilhardian schema. Sf works explicitly based on Teilhard's ideas are George ZEBROWSKI's The Omega Point Trilogy (2 parts published 1972, 1977; omni, including 3rd part, 1983) and Gene WOLFE's The Book of the New Sun (1980-83) and The Urth of the New Sun (1987 UK). The syncretic approach of these stories, which blends the religious and scientific imaginations, contrasts with uncompromising stories using TIME TRAVEL and other facilitating devices directly to confront the central symbol of the Christian faith: the crucifixion. Richard MATHESON's "The Traveler" (1962) visits the scene in order to find faith. The heroes of Brian EARNSHAW's Planet in the Eye of Time (1968) go there to protect faith from subversion. The protagonists of Michael MOORCOCK's Behold the Man! (1966; exp 1969) and Barry N. MALZBERG's Cross of Fire (1982) must become Christ and suffer crucifixion in search of redemption for themselves. The time tourists of Garry KILWORTH's "Let's Go to Golgotha" (1975) discover the horribly ironic truth about the condemnation of Christ. More oblique treatments of the motif can be found in Harry HARRISON's "The Streets of Ashkelon" (1962) and Philip Jose Farmer's Jesus on Mars (1979).There was a very noticeable change, too, in the attitude of sf writers to ALIEN religion. Before WWII, it was taken for granted that all such religions were misguided, ripe for SATIRE and open mockery; after WWII sf writers were prepared to treat alien beliefs reverently, and frequently to credit them with a truthful dimension which Earthly religion lacked. In Katherine MACLEAN's "Unhuman Sacrifice" (1958) missionaries to an alien world find that the "superstitions" they set out to subvert are not as absurd as they assumed. In Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND (1961) religious ideas imported from Mars become important on Earth. In Robert SILVERBERG's Nightwings (1969) and Downward to the Earth (1970) humans seek their own salvation via the transcendental experiences associated with alien religion, although his Tom O'Bedlam (1986) is more ambiguous in its treatment of a cult based on visionary experience of an alien world, and "The Pope of the Chimps" (1982) is highly and ironically ambivalent. In D.G. COMPTON's The Missionaries (1972) alien missionaries bring an enigmatic offer of salvation to mankind. Poul ANDERSON's "The Problem of Pain" (1973) is a fine conte philosophique about the relativity of values deriving from human and alien religions. Satan is portrayed as a wise and misunderstood alien in Harlan ELLISON's "The Deathbird" (1973), which argues that the story of the Fall is a fraud perpetrated on us by God. In the first part of Gregory BENFORD's and Gordon EKLUND's If the Stars are Gods (1974; fixup 1977) alien visitors seeking a new sun-god allow a man to share their enigmatic communion with our SUN. In George R.R. MARTIN's "A Song for Lya" (1974) humans again seek and find transcendental experience in alien ways. The first section of Dan SIMMONS's HYPERION (1989) deals with an alien religion based in the effects of alien PARASITISM (or perhaps symbiosis). Alien gods are treated with much greater suspicion in Zebrowski's "Heathen God" (1970), Ian WATSON's extraordinary God's World (1979) and Ted REYNOLDS's The Tides of God (1989), which is robustly unsentimental in proposing that if God is an alien the best thing we can do is get out there and destroy Him.Sf also became increasingly eager to look at religious experience from the "other side", exploring the experience of being a (or even the) God. This notion was tentatively developed in pulp stories about scientists presiding over tiny creations, including Edmond HAMILTON's "Fessenden's Worlds" (1937) and Theodore STURGEON's "Microcosmic God" (1941), and in "Shaggy God" squibs like Fredric BROWN's "Solipsist" (1954) and Eric Frank RUSSELL's "Sole Solution" (1956). It received more serious consideration in Farmer's "The God Business" and "Father" and in Robert BLOCH's intensely bitter "The Funnel of God" (1960), and was more elaborately explored in a number of novels by Roger ZELAZNY, notably LORD OF LIGHT (1967), Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969) and Isle of the Dead (1969), and in Frank HERBERT's The God Makers (1972).The sf writer who has dealt most prolifically with issues in speculative theology is Philip K. DICK, whose long-standing fascination was brought to a head by a series of unusual and possibly religious experiences which he underwent in the early months of 1974. Novels like Radio Free Albemuth (written 1976; 1985), comprehensively reworked as VALIS (1981), are attempts to get to grips with these experiences. The development of Dick's theological fascination can be tracked through such works as "Faith of Our Fathers" (1967), GALACTIC POT-HEALER (1969) and A Maze of Death (1970), and culminate in The Divine Invasion (1981) and the non-sf The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).Artificial religions and cults still crop up regularly in sf, sometimes deployed for satirical purposes, as by Kurt VONNEGUT Jr in THE SIRENS OF TITAN (1959), Cat's Cradle (1963) and Slapstick (1976), sometimes in the cause of thoughtful extrapolations in the sociology of religion, as in This Star Shall Abide (1972; vt Heritage of the Star) by Sylvia Louise ENGDAHL. Keith ROBERTS's PAVANE (coll of linked stories 1968) and Kingsley AMIS's The Alteration (1976) are both ALTERNATE-WORLD stories endorsing the thesis of Max Weber (1864-1920) regarding the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism by displaying an unreformed Catholic Church dominating a Europe where the Industrial Revolution is only just getting under way in the 20th century. Roberts's Kiteworld (fixup 1985) is one of the more memorable sf images of oppressive Theocracy. More earnest explorations of possible developments in future religion include Richard COWPER's Kinship series begun with the novella "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" (1976). A number of books excoriate future theocracies, particularly fundamentalist ones, such as The Stone that Never Came Down (1973) by John BRUNNER, recent examples of the assault on fundamentalism being Parke GODWIN's Snake Oil series, beginning with Waiting for the Galactic Bus (1988), and several books by Sheri S. TEPPER, notably Raising the Stones (1990). Conversely, in several of Orson Scott CARD's novels a thinly disguised version of Mormonism is depicted with a utopian glow. In contemporary sf, however, perhaps the most sophisticated and detailed treatment of a future religion is The Starbridge Chronicles by Paul PARK, beginning with SOLDIERS OF PARADISE (1987), in which the seasons of a generations-long Great Year encourage contrasting faiths.There are several interesting theme anthologies, including Other Worlds, Other Gods (anth 1971) ed Mayo Mohs, Strange Gods (anth 1974) ed Roger ELWOOD, An Exaltation of Stars (anth 1973) ed Terry CARR, Wandering Stars (anth 1974) ed Jack DANN (a collection of Jewish sf), The New Awareness: Religion through Science Fiction (anth 1975) ed Martin H. GREENBERG and Patricia S. WARRICK, Perpetual Light (anth 1982) ed Alan Ryan, and Sacred Visions (anth 1991) ed Michael CASSUTT and Andrew M. GREELEY. [BS]See also: IMMORTALITY; MESSIAHS; REINCARNATION; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES. REMEMBER LEMURIA When SF fans debate the fine line between magazine science fiction and pop pseudo-science, the name of Richard Shaver inevitably comes up.Shaver wrote "I Remember Lemuria," which was published in 1945 in Amazing Stories. His tale contained what is now called a "conspiracy theory," in which humans are manipulated by evil creatures called "deros," part of an ancient civilization driven underground by solar radiation. Shaver maintained that his theory was based on fact.The story became wildly popular - and 2500 letters were received by Amazing after it appeared. So more of the stories were commissioned. In 1947 an entire issue was written about Lemuria for Amazing. Most SF fans called the Shaver tales a pure hoax - and an earlyexample of the bogus stories about flying saucers, worldwide conspiracies, and ancient races that have become such a staple of American culture. RENARD, JOSEPH (1938- ) US playwright and novelist whose sf has been restricted to The Monodyne Catastrophe (1970 Venture as "How We Won the Monodyne"; exp 1977), in which Native Americans attempt to take over the eponymous source of future power. [JC] RENARD, MAURICE (1875-1939) French writer, generally regarded in FRANCE as the most important native sf writer for the period 1900-1930, whose career began with the stories assembled as Fantomes et fantoches ["Phantoms and Puppets"] (coll 1905) as by Vincent Saint-Vincent. He is best known by English-language readers for his sf novel Les mains d'Orlac (1920; trans Florence Crewe-Jones as The Hands of Orlac 1929 US; new trans Ian White 1981 UK), filmed in 1924 as ORLACS HANDE; another version was Mad Love (1935). The story deals in GOTHIC terms with the ominous consequences of a hand transplant. A less well known though more wildly imaginative novel is Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu["Doctor Lerne, Undergod"] (1908; trans anon as New Bodies for Old 1923 US), in which a sinister SCIENTIST's experiments in grafting produce, for example, rats with leaves; the transplantation of a man's brain into a bull's body, and vice versa, creates a smart cow and a Minotaur. Ultimately the German villain - who has already occupied the scientist's brain - transplants himself into the body of a car, but the machinery, thus rendered mortal, putrefies.Le Singe (1925; trans Florence Crewe-Jones as Blind Circle 1928 US) with Albert Jean (1892- ) is a gruesomely comic mystery story whose solution reveals the manufacture of a series of identical ANDROIDS by a kind of electrolysis. The title story of Le Voyage Immobile, suivi d'autres histoires singulieres (coll 1909; rev 1922; title story trans anon as The Flight of the Aerofix 1932 chap US) features an unsteerable craft, powered by ANTIGRAVITY and detrimental to its passengers.MR's untranslated works include the collections Monsieur D'Outremort et autres histoires singulieres ["Mr Overdeath and Other Curious Stories"] (coll 1913; vt Suite Fantastique 1921); L'Homme truque ["The Altered Man"] (coll 1921), the long title story of which described by Pierre VERSINS as "a nightmare based on the Universe as seen by a mutilated giant whose eyes have been replaced by 'electroscopes' . . . the pretext for many pages of a strange, visual poetry"L'invitation a la peur ["Invitation to Fear"] (coll 1926),Le Carnaval du mystere ["Mystery Merry-go-Round"] (coll 1929) and Celui qui n'a pas tue ["He Who Did Not Kill"] (coll 1932). These volumes include many fine stories on a great variety of sf themes: CLONES, invisibility, time travel, cyborgs, gravity, space-time paradoxes, ESCHATOLOGY and, especially and often, altered modes of PERCEPTION. His untranslated novels include Le peril bleu ["The Blue Peril"] (1911), about an extraordinary civilization of lifeforms living on the top of an atmosphere as if it were a sea; Un homme chez les microbes, scherzo ["A Man Amongst the Microbes: A Scherzo"] (1928), a journey into the microcosm with more sophistication and verbal wit than those of Ray CUMMINGS; and Le maitre de la lumiere ["Master of Light"] ( 1933 L'Intransigeant; 1947), about the creation of a new form of glass which condenses space and time, similar to the "slow glass" invented (independently) by Bob SHAW. The huge Maurice Renard: Romans et contes fantastiques ["Maurice Renard: Fantasy Novels and Tales"] (omni 1990) contains most of his work of genre interest. [PN/JC]See also: HISTORY OF SF. RENOWN PUBLICATIONS SATELLITE SCIENCE FICTION. REPO MAN Film (1984). Edge City Productions/Universal. Written/dir Alex Cox, starring Emilio Estevez, Harry Dean Stanton, Tracey Walter, Olivia Barash. 92 mins. Colour.Set in the seedier areas of Los Angeles, this independent, low-budget, semi-surreal film concerns a young man (Estevez) who gets a job as a repo man - a repossessor of unpaid-for cars. A 1964 Chevrolet Malibu driven by a lobotomized nuclear physicist is driving around town with something nasty and radioactive in the trunk. People who look inside see a glaring white light (shades of KISS ME DEADLY [1955]) which distintegrates them. A series of coincidences (concerning repo men, a teenager obsessed with aliens, chicano car thieves, middle-class punk thugs and secret agents led by a woman with a metal hand) reveal something about the underbelly of urban life and provide sciencefictional metaphors for urban dreams. The Chevy undergoes a final apotheosis: now glowing all over, it drifts into the heavens with two repo men inside. We never learn what was in the car's trunk but, as an acid-head explains early on, flying saucers and time machines are fundamentally the same thing and getting into specifics misses the point. RM became an instant cult movie, not just because of its punk aesthetics and black humour, but also because of its old-fashioned virtues: it is well made and coherently scripted. [PN] REPP, ED EARL (1901-1979) US advertising man and newspaper reporter who wrote a large number of fairly typical PULP-MAGAZINE adventures for about a decade from 1929, ceasing to produce sf during WWII, after beginning work as a screenwriter; some of his tales appeared as by Bradnor Buckner. His first sf story - "Beyond Gravity" for Air Wonder Stories in 1929 - appeared simultaneously with the magazine publication of his first novel, The Radium Pool (1929 Science Wonder Stories; with 2 other stories, as coll 1949) which was later bound with L. Ron HUBBARD's Triton and Battle of Wizards as Science-Fantasy Quintet (omni 1953). 3 stories - 2 of them linked - were assembled in The Stellar Missiles (coll 1949). EER also wrote a series in AMZ 1939-43 about John Hale, a scientific detective perhaps modelled on Arthur B. REEVE's Craig Kennedy; they remain uncollected. Most of his published books were Westerns. [JC]See also: AIR WONDER STORIES. REPTILICUS Film (1962). Cinemagic/AIP. Dir Sidney Pink, starring Carl Ottosen, Ann Smyrner. Screenplay Ib Melchior, Pink. 90 mins. Colour.In this, the Danish cinema's only excursion into the monster genre, the tail of a buried dinosaur is exhumed and taken to a laboratory where it regenerates an entire new body, which proceeds to behave like RADON. Generally thought to be the worst MONSTER MOVIE ever made, R is notable for the visible strings holding up the puppet dinosaur and for the fact that AIP found it necessary to cut all flying scenes before the US release. The novelization, Reptilicus * (1961) by Dean OWEN, was released before the film and alleged in a lawsuit brought by Pink to contain gratuitous passages of "lewd, lascivious and wanton desire"; there was also a 1961 comic book, Reptilicus, which fittingly changed its name in #3 to Reptisaurus the Terrible. [JB/PN] REPUBLIC FEATURES SYNDICATE SPACE SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE. RESNICK, MICHAEL D(IAMOND) (1942- ) US author and dog-breeder who began his genre career with an Edgar Rice BURROUGHS pastiche, The Forgotten Sea of Mars (1965 chap), and who soon began producing many novels in various genres, most often soft pornography and Gothics, and almost always under unrevealed pseudonyms; his later books are usually signed Mike Resnick. His interest in Burroughs had also generated material which he published in ERB-dom Magazine; his first novels, the Ganymede series - The Goddess of Ganymede (1967) and Pursuit on Ganymede (1968) - showed Burroughs's influence. After Redbeard (1969), a post- HOLOCAUST tale set generations hence in the New York subway system, he left sf and fantasy, restricting his activity to the pseudonymous novels, writing (it has been estimated) well over 200 before returning, around 1980, to work under his own name. The first relevant title - Battlestar Galactica 5: Galactica Discovers Earth * (1980) with Glen A. LARSON, a tv tie - was the least. MDR's large 1980s production showed an increasing - and increasingly sophisticated - interest in the use of sf venues and instruments to tell what he has more than once described as "morality tales", sometimes with a simplistic ease, but in later work with mounting vigour and a winningly complex sense of the nature of the world; this was most evident in those stories and novels - like Ivory: A Legend of Past and Future (1988), Paradise: A Chronicle of a Distant World (1989) and Bwana & Bully! (coll 1981) - set in either a literal Africa or an sf analogue of it. Ivory has a Masai descendant searching through many worlds for the tusks of a particular elephant and the Chronicles of a Distant World sequence recasts the post-independence history of various African countries as the history of various worlds: Paradise treats Kenya; Purgatory (1993) treats Zimbabwe; and Inferno (1994) treats Uganda. Two of the short works belonging to the thematically linked Kenya series; both set in an African-styled SPACE HABITAT, Kirinyaga (1988 FSF; 1992 chap) and its sequel, "The Manamouki" (1990), though well received and both winning HUGOS, caused some controversy through their display (and perhaps espousal) of cultural values alien to our own. Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge (1994chap), which is about the origins of homo sapiens, is actually set in Africa, and won a 1995 NEBULA Award for Best Novella.Two further series of the 1980s are the Tales of the Galactic Midway sequence - Sideshow (1982), The Three-Legged Hootch Dancer (1983), The Wild Alien Tamer (1983) and The Best Rootin' Tootin' Shootin' Gunslinger in the Whole Damned Galaxy (1983) - and the Tales of the Velvet Comet sequence - Eros Ascending (1984), Eros at Zenith (1984), Eros Descending (1985) and Eros at Nadir (1986). Both series - the first set in a carnival, the second in a whorehouse visited at 50-year intervals - are smooth, swift, cynical and without much in the way of argument about anything that might be described as the moral Universe. But many of his remaining novels of this decade shared the general background outlined in Birthright: The Book of Man (coll of linked stories 1982), a text which sketches in the next 15,000 years or so as our race expands through the Galaxy, peaks, then dwindles to extinction. The individual stories within this extremely loose frame convey in general a sense that humans are incapable of answering the demands of history, that we are too short-lived and too caught in our mortality to answer the challenges of a greater world. Novels like Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (1986) and The Dark Lady: A Romance of the Far Future (1987) tend to portray adventurous characters engaging in SPACE-OPERA exploits against a black, barely felt background of closure; for the feats of MDR's protagonists are little more than selfish spasms in the great night. His better novels are, all the same, at least superficially cheerful, bustling with competently framed action, and clear-headed.Tales that stand outside the future history include The Soul Eater (1981), a retelling of Herman MELVILLE's Moby-Dick (1851), and Stalking the Unicorn: A Fable of Tonight (1987), a fantasy. After publishing some earlier short collections, MR signalled his increasing involvement in short forms with Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Shut off the Sun? (coll 1992), which contains several award-winning tales. In the 1970s, MDR published The Official Guide to Fantastic Literature (1976), Official Guide to Comic Books and Big Little Books (1977) and Official Price Guide to Comic and Science Fiction Books (1979). [JC]Other works: Walpurgis III (1982); The Branch (1984); Unauthorized Autobiographies and Other Curiosities (coll 1984 chap); The Inn of the Hairy Toad (1985 chap); Adventures (1985); Through Darkest Resnick with Gun and Camera (coll 1990); Second Contact (1990); Stalking the Wild Resnick (coll 1991); Pink Elephants and Hairy Toads (coll 1991 chap); The Alien Heart (coll 1991); The Red Tape War (1991) with Jack L. CHALKER and George Alec EFFINGER; the Oracle Trilogy, comprising Soothsayer (1991), Oracle (1992) and Prophet (1993); A Miracle of Rare Design: a Tragedy of Transcendence (1994).Anthologies: Shaggy B.E.M. Stories (anth 1988); Inside the Funhouse (anth 1992), assembling examples of RECURSIVE SF; the Alternate series, exploring at perhaps too considerable a length a variety of ALTERNATE WORLD scenarios, and including Alternate Kennedys (and 1992), Alternate Warriors(anth 1993), Alternate Worldcons (anth 1994), By Any Other Fame (anth 1994) and Alternate Outlaws (anth 1994), all with Martin H. GREENBERG, not necessarily (as usual with his more recent anthology project) credited; Aladdin: Master of the Lamp (anth 1992) with Greenberg; Whatdunits(anth 1992) and More Whatdunits(anth 1993), both with Greenberg; Future Earths: Under South American Skies(anth 1993) and Future Earths: Under African Skies(anth 1993), both with Gardner DOZOIS;Dinosaur Fantastic (anth 1993) with Greenberg; Christmas Ghosts(anth 1993) with Greenberg; Deals with the Devil (anth 1994) with Greenberg and Loren D. Estleman (1952- ).See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; HEROES; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION; SOCIOLOGY. RESTIF DE LA BRETONNE Name by which the French writer Nicolas-Anne-Edme Restif (1734-1806) is usually known. He was an extremely prolific author of formless, semi-autobiographical novels often attacked for imputed pornographic content. Of his various utopian texts, La decouverte australe par un homme volant, ou le Dedale francais ["The Southern-Hemisphere Discovery by a Flying Man, or the French Daedalus"] (1781) comes closest to genuine PROTO SCIENCE FICTION, first describing the flying Frenchman's gear (wings plus parachute), then his Alpine UTOPIA, then his adventures in the Antipodes where, like Francois RABELAIS's heroes, he visits a number of allegorical ISLANDS. [JC]Other works: Les posthumes ["The Posthumous Ones"] (1802).See also: EVOLUTION; FRANCE. RETURN FROM WITCH MOUNTAIN Alexander KEY. RETURN OF CAPTAIN INVINCIBLE, THE Film (1982). Willarra/Seven Keys. Dir Philippe Mora, starring Alan Arkin, Christopher Lee, Kate Fitzpatrick. Screenplay Steven E. De Souza, Andrew Gaty; additional dialogue Peter Smalley. 91 mins. Colour.Australian musical comedy whose premise is that its eponymous SUPERHERO (Arkin), purged in the USA of the McCarthy period as "a premature anti-fascist", is now a washed-up drunk. Discovered in Sydney by policewoman Patty Patria (Fitzpatrick), he is recalled to confront his nemesis Mr Midnight (Lee), whose evil plan is first to sell housing developments to non-Whites in New York, then nuke them and make the city all-White. Much of the humour comes from Captain Invincible's forgetting how to fly, and suffering low self-esteem that affects his supermagnetic powers. As a spoof movie TROCI is likable, and genre-literate in the range of sf motifs it hits off; the songs are unmemorable. Arkin's muted, depressive performance, reminiscent of something from a Barry N. MALZBERG novel, contrasts nicely with Lee going over the top. [PN] RETURN OF CAPTAIN NEMO, THE Irwin ALLEN. RETURN OF GODZILLA, THE GOJIRA. RETURN OF THE FLY Film (1959). Associated Producers/20th Century-Fox. Dir Edward L. Bernds, starring Vincent Price, Brett Halsey, David Frankham. Screenplay Bernds. 78 mins. B/w.The first of 2 sequels to the successful sf/horror film The FLY (1958), the other being CURSE OF THE FLY (1965). Here the son of the scientist in The Fly, after being attacked by an evil assistant, is forced to replay his late father's tragedy, which he does rather limply; it is the least successful of the 3 films. Although The FLY (1986) is a remake of The Fly (1958), The FLY II is not a remake of ROTF. [PN] RETURN OF THE GIANT MONSTERS, THE DAIKAIJU GAMERA. RETURN OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK The INCREDIBLE HULK . RETURN OF THE JEDI Film (1983). Lucasfilm/20th Century-Fox. Executive prod George LUCAS. Dir Richard Marquand, starring Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Ian McDiarmid, David Prowse. Screenplay Lawrence Kasdan, Lucas, based on a story by Lucas. 132 mins. Colour.Crisp and entertaining for the most part, with dazzling special effects, ROTJ still seems weaker than its predecessors, STAR WARS (1977) and The EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980), perhaps because it is more sentimental. Han Solo (Ford) is rescued from literally toadlike Jabba the Hutt in the bravura opening sequence, and then the democratic rebels are pitted once again against a Death Star fortress as part of their galactic struggle against the totalitarian Empire. The Emperor (a cleverly obscene performance from McDiarmid) is an even stronger incarnation of the Dark Side of the Force than Darth Vader (Prowse), who finally turns good, saves his son Luke, is unmasked and is then given a Viking's funeral. The forest world of Endor, populated by Ewoks (teddy-bear lookalikes), is the venue for stirring battles. The appalling cuteness of the Ewoks and the harmless rubbery appearance of the monsters are surely Lucasfilm's acknowledgement, in this finale to the cycle (the threat of 6 further episodes having evaporated), that young children were now the series' main audience: even the potentially painful father-son conflict is more soap opera than oedipal myth. The Ewoks later resurfaced in 2 made-for-tv films, The EWOK ADVENTURE (1984) and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985).The novelization is Star Wars: Return of the Jedi * (1983) by James KAHN. [PN]See also: CINEMA; HUGO. RETURN OF THE LOST PLANET The LOST PLANET. RETURN TO THE PLANET OF THE APES PLANET OF THE APES. REVENGE OF THE CREATURE Film (1955). Universal. Dir Jack ARNOLD, starring John Agar, Lori Nelson, John Bromfield, Ricou Browning. Screenplay Martin Berkeley, story William Alland. 82 mins. 3D. B/w.The success of CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954) inspired the inevitable sequel, shot in 3D although seldom projected in that format. This time the Creature (Browning) is captured and taken to an oceanarium in Florida, but it soon breaks out and (some time later, after voyeuristically spying on her) makes off with a blonde woman scientist (Nelson) under its arm. Though the film has erotically charged moments, it is generally limp compared with its predecessor, and is one of Arnold's weaker sf movies. A further sequel, not dir Arnold, was The CREATURE WALKS AMONG US . [JB/PN] REVENGE OF THE MYSTERONS FROM MARS CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE MYSTERONS. REVENGE OF THE STEPFORD WIVES The STEPFORD WIVES . REY, RUSSELL Dennis HUGHES. REYNA, JORGE DE Diane DETZER. REYNOLDS, MACK Working name of US writer Dallas McCord Reynolds (1917-1983); his first sf story was "Isolationist" for Fantastic Adventures in 1950. He occasionally used the pseudonyms Clark Collins, Guy McCord, Mark Mallory and Dallas Ross; he wrote 2 Gothics as Maxine Reynolds and 1 other non-sf book as Todd Harding. Some of his early work was with Fredric BROWN, and he also wrote stories with Theodore R. COGSWELL and August W. DERLETH. He was for 25 years an active member of the American Socialist Labor Party, for which his father, Verne L. Reynolds, had twice been presidential candidate; his "militant radicalism" is mutedly reflected, sometimes ironically, in his sf, making him a maverick in the mostly right-wing stable of writers associated with John W. CAMPBELL Jr's ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION (MR was one of several writers who wrote up Campbell's plot ideas). Many of his later works are unashamedly didactic, although not doctrinaire.MR's first novel, The Case of the Little Green Men (1951), was a murder mystery set at an sf CONVENTION. It was to be 10 years before he would publish another novel. Although his 1950s work is minor, he served 1953-63 as foreign correspondent of Rogue magazine, travelling extensively, and began to plough back this experience into more substantial works on socioeconomic themes. Many of the books which appeared prolifically through the 1960s-70s were expansions and fixups of earlier magazine stories; the tauter magazine texts are usually preferable to the padded-out versions. Planetary Agent X (fixup 1965 dos), the first of several books featuring Section G, shows subversive secret agents of a United Planets Organization working in the cause of socioeconomic progress in the often-eccentric Ultima Thule colony worlds of a Galactic Empire, masking their activities under the nom de guerre Tommy Paine. It was followed by Dawnman Planet (1966 dos), The Rival Rigelians (1960 ASF as "Adaptation"; exp 1967 dos), which ironically describes an experiment comparing the methods of US capitalism and Soviet communism in developing a primitive world, Code Duello (1968 dos) and Section G: United Planets (1967 ASF as "Fiesta Brava" and "Psi Assassin"; fixup 1976).Tomorrow Might be Different (1960 ASF as "Russkies Go Home!"; exp 1975) is a SATIRE in which the USSR has overtaken the USA as the world's leading economy. "Farmer" (1961) is the first of 3 notable stories which MR set in North Africa, each similarly dealing with the problem of fostering economic and technological development in the teeth of cultural inertia. It was followed by the Homer Crawford sequence, the first 2 volumes of which are Black Man's Burden (1961-2 ASF; 1972 dos) and Border, Breed nor Birth (1962 ASF; 1972 dos), offering entirely serious and constructive versions of Section G-type plots; although they have dated even more quickly than MR's stories about the USSR, the issues raised in them (otherwise virtually untouched in sf) remain politically pertinent. The Best Ye Breed (fixup 1978), which incorporates "Black Sheep Astray" (1973) and a revised version of "The Cold War . . . Continued" (1973), extends the series. Day After Tomorrow (1961 ASF as "Status Quo"; exp 1976) introduced a status-conscious future USA further elaborated in Mercenary from Tomorrow (1962 ASF as "Mercenary"; exp 1968 dos), which became the first of the Joe Mauser series set in a future world in which corporate disputes are settled by pseudo-gladiatorial contests, packaged by the media as entertainment, and involving small professional armies fighting with pre-1900 WEAPONS ( GAMES AND SPORTS). Several lines of speculative thought carried forward in the later didactic novels originated in this novella, but the later novels in the series - The Earth War (1963 ASF as "Frigid Fracas"; 1963), Time Gladiator (1964 ASF as "Sweet Dreams, Sweet Princes"; exp 1966 UK; rev by Michael A. BANKS, vt Sweet Dreams, Sweet Princes 1986 US) and The Fracas Factor (1978) - are routine action-adventure novels. Joe Mauser, Mercenary from Tomorrow (coll 1986) with Banks contains revisions of the earlier items. The Cosmic Eye (1963 FSF as "Speakeasy"; exp 1969) is a less convincing story set in a future USA where free speech is prohibited.During 1965-72 MR's work was more determinedly commercial. He continued to write stories around Campbell plot ideas. All involve a good deal of rather slapstick HUMOUR; examples include Amazon Planet (1966 ASF; Italian trans 1967; 1975) and Brain World (1978). Of Godlike Power (1966; vt Earth Unaware 1968) is a comedy about a preacher whose curses really work. "Romp" (1966) was the first of a group of crime stories reprinted as Police Patrol: 2000 A.D. (fixup 1977). Space Pioneer (1966 UK) and After Some Tomorrow (1967) are undistinguished, but 2 novels about COMPUTERS, Computer War (1967 dos) and The Computer Conspiracy (1968), gained strength from the timeliness of their themes. The final 2 stories making up The Space Barbarians (fixup 1969 dos) and The Five Way Secret Agent (1969 ASF; 1975 dos) were the last items MR did for Campbell, and after Rolltown (1969 If as "The Towns Must Roll"; exp 1976) he published virtually no new sf for three years (although he did publish books in other genres).When his sf career resumed it was with the strikingly different Looking Backward, from the Year 2000 (1973), a reprise of Edward BELLAMY's classic UTOPIAN novel, displaying MR's ideas about the POLITICS and ECONOMICS of an energy-affluent society. He was later to add a sequel - Equality: in the Year 2000 (1977) - which borrowed an idea from his earlier Ability Quotient (1975) to subvert the ending of the first book. MR further extrapolated this line of speculation into the increasingly doubt-ridden After Utopia (1977), which incorporates "Utopian" (in The Year 2000 [anth 1970] ed Harry HARRISON) and Perchance to Dream (1977), although he salvaged a curiously ironic optimism by re-using a deus ex machina first deployed in the earlier Space Visitor (1977). He developed parallel lines of thought in sequels to Rolltown - these were Commune 2000 A.D. (1974) and The Towers of Utopia (1975) - and re-used the central characters of The Five Way Secret Agent in more lightweight stories with similar underlying concerns: Satellite City (1975) and "Of Future Fears" (1977 ASF). This series was further expanded in novels about the tribulations of a quasi-utopian space colony: Lagrange Five (1979), The Lagrangists (1983) and Chaos in Lagrangia (1984), The last 2 were ed Dean ING, who went on to prepare for publication several other manuscripts which MR had left behind on his death: Eternity (1984), Home Sweet Home: 2010 A.D. (1984), The Other Time (1984), Trojan Orbit (1985) and Deathwish World (1986). Space Search (1984) is a posthumous work credited to MR alone.The Best of Mack Reynolds (coll 1976) has an introduction explaining MR's decision to concentrate on sf which speculated on social and economic issues, and reflecting on his travels and the lessons he learned therefrom. Although he was once voted most popular author in a poll run by the GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION group of magazines, MR never received the recognition he deserved for the fertility of his distinctive speculative imagination. His ideas were always far more interesting than his plots, and his writing was sometimes unpolished, but at his best he was a skilled craftsman whose attempts to foresee the NEAR FUTURE were unusually bold, well informed and challenging. It is a great pity that he had such difficulty in finding publishers willing to put his work into respectable formats. [BS]Other works: Mission to Horatius * (1968), a STAR TREK novel; Once Departed (1970), a thriller with sf elements; Computer World (1970); Depression or Bust (fixup 1974); Galactic Medal of Honor (1960 AMZ as "Medal of Honor"; exp 1976); Trample an Empire Down (1978); Compounded Interests (coll 1983).As Editor: The Science Fiction Carnival (anth 1953) with Fredric Brown.About the author: "The Utopian Dream Revisited: Socioeconomic Speculation in the Work of Mack Reynolds" by Brian M. STABLEFORD in Foundation 16 (May 1979); A Mack Reynolds Checklist: Notes Toward a Bibliography (1983 chap) by Chris DRUMM and George Flynn.See also: AUTOMATION; CITIES; CRYONICS; IMMORTALITY; LEISURE; RELIGION; SLEEPER AWAKES; SOCIAL DARWINISM; SPACE HABITATS; TECHNOLOGY; TIME PARADOXES; WAR. REYNOLDS, PHILIPS Pseudonym of an unidentified French writer (1916- ) whose sf novel, When and If (1950 Ce Matin as "Ce pourrait se passe come ca"; trans Joseph F. McCrindle 1952 US; vt It Happened Like This 1953 UK), describes a future WAR between the West and Soviet Russia in convincing detail; nuclear weapons are eventually used, though the final battles are conducted in a chastened, post-nuclear mood. The West wins. REYNOLDS, TED Working name of US writer Theodore Andrus Reynolds (1938- ), who began publishing sf with "Boarder Incident" for IASFM in 1977. His first novel, The Tides of God (1989) - the last of the Terry CARR Ace Specials - intriguingly allows the surmise that millennial fervour is caused, on a regular 1000-year basis, by a deranging ALIEN being whose expected arrival from deep space as the 20th century ends spurs the mounting of an expedition to destroy it. But RELIGION is a subject too complexly integrated into the human psyche to be excised by any quasimilitary sortie into the unknown; and the tale ends in ambiguity. [JC] RHINEHART, LUKE Pseudonym of US writer George Powers Cockcroft (1932- ). His first novel, The Dice Man (1971; rev 1983), though not sf, inhabits the same universe of discourse as The Adventures of Wim (1986 UK), a long, frequently garrulous picaresque detailing the eponymous innocent's travels through time and space. Matari (1975) is a heavily allegorical love story set in a partly mythologized 18th-century Japan. Long Voyage Back (1983) takes the crew of a small ship through post- HOLOCAUST ordeals and from Chesapeake Bay to Chile. LR's books burst with didacticism, but have vivid moments. [JC] RHODES, W(ILLIAM) H(ENRY) (1822-1876) US lawyer and writer who published various newspaper pieces and stories under the name Caxton, notably The Case of Summerfield (1871 Sacramento Daily Union; 1907 chap), about a scientist who threatens to set the oceans of the world afire unless he is paid blackmail. Along with its sequel, 4 further sf stories and other ephemera, the tale was first published as a memorial by his colleagues in Caxton's Book: A Collection of Essays, Poems, Tales and Sketches (coll 1876). Also of interest in this volume is "The Telescopic Eye", about a boy blind at normal distances but able to observe the activities of the wheel-shaped denizens of the Moon. [JC] RHYS, JACK [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. RHYSLING AWARD AWARDS; POETRY. RICE, ELMER First the pseudonym, then the legal name of US playwright and novelist born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein (1892-1967). Of his plays, The Adding Machine (1923) interestingly transforms its protagonist, Mr Zero, into the para-human creature designated by the title. A Voyage to Purilia (1930), a novel, combines a deft use of sf instruments - the protagonists travel to the planet Purilia in a ship propelled by ANTIGRAVITY - with a very extensive guying of UTOPIAN assumptions. On Purilia, life mirrors the conventions of the cinema - the implication being that utopian worlds are as fatuously bound by rigmarole and fetish as the "normal" lives depicted in the classic Hollywood films - and the protagonist escapes marriage, which is identical to a Hollywood fade-out, by the skin of his teeth. [JC] RICH, BARBARA Robert GRAVES. RICHARDS, ALFRED BATE (1820-1876) UK editor of the Morning Advertiser and writer. For many years he was active as a propagandist for UK military preparedness, but The Invasion of England (A Possible Tale of Future Times) (1870 chap), published privately, had little impact, and was in any case much inferior to Lt.-Col. Sir George T. CHESNEY's The Battle of Dorking (1871), which effectively founded the future- WAR/ INVASION genre so popular over the next 40 years. [JC] RICHARDS, GUY (1905-1979) US writer and reporter. In Two Roubles to Times Square (1956; vt Brother Bear 1956 UK) a Russian takeover of Manhattan is embarrassedly disowned by the Kremlin. [JC] RICHARDS, HENRY J.L. MORRISSEY. RICHARDS, JOEL Pseudonym of US writer Joel Richard Fruchtman (1937- ), who began publishing sf with "Speedplay" for AMZ in 1980 and has published subsequent stories in original anthologies. His first novel was Pindharee (1986), an sf adventure. [JC] RICHARDS, ROSS [r] Peter SAXON. RICHARDSON, LINDA [r] David R. BISCHOFF. RICHARDSON, ROBERT S. [r] Philip LATHAM. RICHMOND, LEIGH (TUCKER) (1911- ) US writer who began publishing with "Prologue to an Analogue" for ASF in 1961, and who wrote some solo stories. Her several sf novels were all in collaboration with her husband, Walt RICHMOND; 3 were revised by LR after his death. Almost all their work together expressed a sense - one formally presented by the Centric Foundation which they founded and directed - that scientific breakthroughs could be made by young minds freed of the bureaucratic artifices of orthodox scientific thinking; unfortunately, overloaded SPACE-OPERA plotting did little to make their novels convincing emblems of this new clarity, and the exaggerated individualism they expressed seemed less mould-breaking than nostalgic. They published frequently in ASF. Their novels were Shock Waves (1967 dos), The Lost Millennium (1967 dos; rev vt Siva! 1979), which typically suggests that a new source of solar energy was first exploited by prehistoric supermen, Phoenix Ship (1969 dos; rev vt Phase Two 1980), Gallagher's Glacier (1970 dos; rev 1979), Challenge the Hellmaker (1963 ASF as "Where I Wasn't Going"; exp 1976) and The Probability Corner (1977). Stories were collected as Positive Charge (coll 1970 dos). [JC] RICHMOND, MARY Pseudonym of South-African-born UK writer Kathleen Lindsay (1903-1973), author of about 900 romances and 2 sf novels, The Valley of Doom (1947), a LOST-WORLD tale, and The Grim Tomorrow (1953), whose UK protagonists fail to avert a Teutonic atomic HOLOCAUST, but who survive, after being flung into space on a chunk of England fortunately large enough that they can start a new life. The tale's telling is less incompetent than its science. [JC]Other work: Terror Stalks Abroad (1935). ; The Hidden Horror (1937); Terror by Night (1939); The Devil's Dominion (1956) as by Kathleen Lindsay RICHMOND, WALT(ER R.) (1922-1977) US writer and research scientist whose fiction was written exclusively in collaboration with his wife, Leigh RICHMOND (whom see for details). [JC] RICHTER-FRICH, OVRE [r] SCANDINAVIA. RICKETT, JOSEPH COMPTON (1847-1919) UK politician and writer, who was knighted in 1907 and subsequently changed his name to Compton-Rickett. His sf novel The Quickening of Caliban: A Modern Story of Evolution (1893) suggests that a more natural (i.e., perhaps, less evolved) branch of Homo sapiens continues to exist in Africa. The two branches are able to breed together, and do. [JC] RIDERS TO THE STARS Film (1954). Ivan Tors/United Artists. Dir Richard Carlson, starring William Lundigan, Herbert Marshall, Richard Carlson, Martha Hyer. Screenplay Curt SIODMAK. 81 mins. Colour.Cosmic rays are destroying space vehicles, and the theory is put forward that meteors possess a special quality that protects them in space. Manned spaceships with special scoops on their noses are sent up to capture meteors before they burn up in the atmosphere so that their coating - which turns out to be diamond! - can be used to protect spaceships. The story has been rightly singled out by Damon KNIGHT as a splendid example of all that is silliest and most unscientific in sf CINEMA, from which much of its value as entertainment unintentionally derives. Riders to the Stars * (1953), as by Siodmak and Robert (Eugene) Smith (1920- ), is the novelization. [JB/PN] RIDING, JULIA [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. RIDING, LAURA [r] Robert GRAVES. RIDLEY, FRANK A(MBROSE) The usual working name of UK politician, freethinker and author Francis Ambrose Ridley (1897-1994), most of whose books were on historical subjects. The Green Machine (1926) as by F.H. Ridley, though clearly cavalier in in its treatment of science - presenting as it does the eponymous bicycle as a spaceship capable of interplanetary travel - interestingly sends its protagonist to tour a crowded Solar System accompanied by a Martian ant bent on colonizing Earth. [JC]See also: HIVE-MINDS. RIDLEY, F.H. Frank A. RIDLEY. RIENOW, LEONA (TRAIN) (1903-1983) US writer whose short Dark Pool prehistoric-sf sequence for children comprises The Bewitched Caverns (1948) and The Dark Pool (1949). With her husband Robert Rienow (1909-1989), a political scientist, she later wrote The Year of the Last Eagle (1970), a sour NEAR-FUTURE comedy about ECOLOGY, set in 1989. The hero's job is to locate the last bald eagles (the national bird of the USA), if any still exist. [JC/PN] RIENOW, ROBERT [r] Leona RIENOW. RIFBJERG, KLAUS (THORVALD) (1931- ) Danish writer in whose sf novel, De Hellige Aber (1981; trans Steve Murray as Witness to the Future 1987 US), two adolescents are transported almost half a century forward from 1941; they find little in the year 1988 to give them joy about Progress. [JC] RIGG, [Lt.-Col.] ROBERT B. (? - ) US writer on military topics whose War - 1974 (1958) puts into the didactic fictional form of a future- WAR narrative his speculations about developments in WEAPONS and tactics. After an initial exchange of ICBMs, East and West settle down to conventional conflict dominated by much implausible non-nuclear gimmickry. [JC] RILEY, FRANK (? - ) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Execution" for If in 1956, and who is mainly known for collaborating with Mark CLIFTON on They'd Rather Be Right (1954), the HUGO-winning conclusion to Clifton's Bossy series about an advanced COMPUTER rendered almost useless by men's fear of "her". [JC]See also: AUTOMATION. RIMWORLD A common item of sf TERMINOLOGY. GALACTIC LENS. RIPLEY, KAREN (? - ) US writer who began publishing sf with Prisoner of Dreams (1989). It and its sequel, The Tenth Class (1991), feature the adventures of a female starship-pilot who must cope with repressive authorities and with planets named, for instance, Heinlein. Romance also looms. The Slow World trilogy - comprising The Persistence of Memory (1993), The Warden of Horses (1994) and The Alchemist of Time (1994) - more impressively presents autism as a metaphor for understanding - but not an explanation of - the relation between the real or Slow world, and the fantasy world ruled by the eponymous Warden of Horses, an autism victim in the here and now. [JC] RITCHIE, PAUL (1923- ) Australian painter, novelist and playwright whose Confessions of a People Lover (1967) depicts a grey, urban, DYSTOPIAN UK where the old ("longlivers") are eliminated by the state and the young are corrupt, cultureless vandals. The book is narrated by a longliver in an enriched, clotted, free-associational style, and is devoid of sf instruments or speculations; it can be read as an allegory of the post- WAR UK. [JC] RIVERE, ALEC Charles NUETZEL. RIVERSIDE, JOHN [s] Robert A. HEINLEIN. RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY FANZINE (1964-current) ed Leland Sapiro from Canada and the USA. RQ began as a retitled continuation of the fanzine Inside (1953-63), published by Ron Smith and then Jon White, which won a HUGO in 1956 and itself incorporated a still earlier fanzine, Fantasy Advertiser, later known as Science Fiction Advertiser (1946-54). RQ quickly formed a quite different character of its own, academic essays on sf and fantasy being its main content. Alexei PANSHIN originally published the major part of his Heinlein in Dimension (1968) in RQ; other contributors have included James BLISH, Algis BUDRYS and Jack WILLIAMSON. Though irregular, this is one of the longest-running - as well as the most serious - of all fanzines; it had reached #32 by early 1992. [PN/PR] ROAD WARRIOR, THE MAD MAX 2. ROBBINS, DAVID L. (1950- ) US author of the Endworld post-holocaust SURVIVALIST military-sf sequence: Endworld #1: The Fox Run (1986), #2: Thief River Falls Run (1986), #3: Twin Cities Run (1986), #4: The Kalispell Run (1987), #5: Dakota Run (1987), #6: Citadel Run (1987), #7: Armageddon Run (1987), #8: Denver Run (1987), #9: Capital Run (1988), #10: New York Run (1988), #11: Liberty Run (1988), #12: Houston Run (1988), #13: Anaheim Run (1988), #14: Seattle Run (1989), #15: Nevada Run (1989), #16: Miami Run (1989), #17: Atlanta Run (1989), #18: Memphis Run (1989), #19: Cincinnati Run (1990), #20: Dallas Run (1990), #21: Boston Run (1990), #22: Green Bay Run (1990), #23: Yellowstone Run (1990), #24: New Orleans Run (1991), #25: Spartan Run (1991), #26: Madman Run (1991) and #27: Chicago Run (1991). The concurrent Blade series comprises Blade #1: First Strike (1989), #2: Outlands Strike (1989) (these 2 assembled as First Strike/Outlands [omni 1992]), #3: Vampire Strike (1989), #4: Pipeline Strike (1989), #5: Pirate Strike (1990), #6: Crusher Strike (1990), #7: Terror Strike (1990), #8: Devil Strike (1990), #9: L.A. Strike (1990), #10: Dead Zone Strike (1990), #11: Quest Strike (1991), #12: Deathmaster Strike (1991) and #13: Vengeance Strike (1991). Singletons include The Wereling (1983), which seems to have been DLR's first novel, The Wrath (1988), Spectre (1988), Hell-o-Ween (1992) and Prank Night (1994). Under the house name J.D. Cameron he has written 2 of the Omega Sub sequence: #2: Command Decision (1991) and #4: Blood Tide (1991). [JC] ROBERT HALE LIMITED UK publishing firm which from 1936 through 1984, though mainly in the 1970s, published more than 450 sf novels, in hardbound editions, primarily for the library market. (In 1990 a few US sf titles were reprinted, but no originals.) A large majority of titles originating with the firm were uniform in length (192 pages) and routine in substance, most being SPACE OPERAS. In its early years Hale published speculative fiction from authors like S. Fowler WRIGHT and Wyndham LEWIS, and in the 1970s many established foreign writers - including Poul ANDERSON, A. Bertram CHANDLER, Hal CLEMENT, Gordon R. DICKSON, Ron GOULART, Harry HARRISON, Keith LAUMER, Frank Belknap LONG, Andre NORTON, Robert SILVERBERG and Kate WILHELM - released titles to the UK market through the house; but from the middle of that decade Hale published mostly books signed by names otherwise unknown to the sf world. Some of these were young authors - e.g., Adrian COLE - who would soon move on to more ambitious projects, and some - e.g., the actor Michael ELDER - were authors who published primarily with Hale but who were clearly real individuals; but many were pseudonyms, some of which have been identified and can be found below so designated. Almost certainly several remaining names - some of those below without birth-dates being reasonable suspects - are also pseudonymous. Below we list authors whose names are solely or primarily identified with the Hale imprint, and, where appropriate, their works as well.John (Kempton) AIKEN, writing for RHL as John Paget.Roy Ainsworthy Lauran Bosworth PAINE.Adrienne Anderson: Wings of the Morning (1971).Walter Bacon: The Last Experiment (1974).Bee BALDWIN.Jo Bannister (1951- ): The Matrix (1981); The Winter Plain (1982); A Cactus Garden (1983).Mark Bannon Paul CONRAD.Alan BARCLAY.D(onald) A(ndrew) Barker (1947- ): A Matter of Evolution (1975); A Question of Reality (1981).G.J. BARRETT, whose pseudonyms include Edward Leighton, Dennis Summers and James Wallace.Roger (Alban) Beaumont (1935- ): Deep Space Processional (1982) with R. Snowden Ficks.John Bedford (pseudonym of David Wiltshire - see below): The Titron Madness (1984).Peter Bentley (real name Alan Moon): Destined to Survive (1977).Leigh Beresford: Fantocine (1981).Fenton Brockley Donald S. ROWLAND.Eric BURGESS.Roger Carlton Donald S. ROWLAND.Mark Carrel Lauran Bosworth PAINE.R.M.H. Carter: The Dream Killers (1981).Garet Chalmers: A Legend in his Own Deathtime (1978); Homo-Hetero (1980).David Clements: The Backwater Man (1979).Paul CONRAD, who writes also under his real name (Albert King) and as Mark Bannon, Floyd Gibson, Scott Howell and Paul Muller.Paul COREY.James CORLEY.(Michael) George Corston (1932- ): Aftermath (1968).S(idney) H(obson) Courtier (1904-1974): Into the Silence (1973); The Smiling Trip (1975).N(icholas) J(ohn) Cullingworth: Dodos of Einstein (1976).Jules N. Dagnol: The Sandoval Transmissions (1980).Cyril Donson (1919-1986): Born in Space (1968); Tritonastra - Planet of the Gargantua (1969); The Perspective Process (1969); Draco the Dragon Man (1974).Iain Douglas: Point of Impact (1979); Saturn's Missing Rings (1980); The World of the Sower (1981); The Hearth of Puvaig (1981).Alfred Dyer: The Symbiotic Mind (1980); The Gabriel Inheritance (1981).Michael ELDER.James England: The Measured Caverns (1978).R. Snowden Ficks Roger Beaumont (above).Arthur H(enry) Friggens (1920- ) Eric BURGESS.Nicholas Ganick: California Dreaming (1981).Donald J. Garden: Dawn Chorus (1975).Graham Garner Donald S. ROWLAND.T.S.J. Gibbard (pseudonym of Michael Vinter - see below): Vandals of Eternity (1974); The Starseed Mission (1980); The Torold Core (1980).Floyd Gibson Paul CONRAD.John Gilchrist (real name Jerome Gardner; 1932- ): Birdbrain (1975); Out North (1975); Lifeline (1976); The English Corridor (1976); The Engendering (1978).David Graham (1919- ): Down to a Sunless Sea (1979).J(ohn) M(ichael) Graham: Voice from Earth (1972).Anthony Grant (possible real name, Marion Staylton Pares [1914- ]): The Mutant (1980).Hilary Green: Centrifuge 1977 (1978).Harry J. Greenwald: Chinaman's Chance (1981).Brian GRIFFIN.Peter J. Grove: The Levellers (1981).Norman Hall (1904- ): Green Hailstones (1978).William C. HEINE.Gordon T(homas) Horton: X-Isle (1980).Troy Howard Lauran Bosworth PAINE.Scott Howell Paul CONRAD.Mark Jales: Prelude to Exodus (1979); In his Own Image (1979); Normal Service Will be Resumed (1980).R. Alan James: No News from Providence (1978).Norman Jensen: The Galactic Colonisers (1971).Neville Kea: The World of Artemis (1980); The Rats of Megaera (1980); The Glass School (1980); Scorpion (1981).Albert King Paul CONRAD.Edward Leighton G.J. BARRETT.John LIGHTRichard Lindsay: The Moon is the Key (1980).Roger Lovin: Apostle (1980).Ronald A. McQueen: The Cosmic Assassin (1980); The Sorcerer of Marakaan (1981); The Man who Knew Time (1981); Mardoc (1981).Michael F. Maikowski: Fire in the Sky (1981) with Chris L. Wolf.Sue Mallinson: The Serpent and the Butterfly (1980).David Mariner (real name David McLeod Smith, 1920- ): A Shackleton Called Sheila (1970; vt Countdown 1000 1974 US).Dave Morgan: Reiver (1975); Genetic Two (1976); Adverse Camber (1977). Paul Muller Paul CONRAD.Hugh A. Nisbet: Farewell to Krondahl (1980); The Raven's Beak (1981).John October (real name Christopher Portway): The Anarchy Pedlars (1976).Lauran Bosworth PAINE, whose pseudonyms include Roy Ainsworthy, Mark Carrel and Troy Howard.John Paton (real name Frederick John Alford Bateman [1921- ]): Leap to the Galactic Core (1978); Proteus (1978); The Sea of Rings (1979).David G(eorge) Penny (1950- ): The Sunset People (1975), Starshine 43 (1978) - both post- HOLOCAUST tales of some grimness - Starchant (1975) and Out of Time (1979).W.D. PEREIRA.Roger Perry (real name Roger William Cowern [1928- ]): Senior Citizen (1979); The Making of Jason (1980); Esper's War (1981).Audrey Peyton: Ashes (1981).Alex Random Donald S. ROWLAND.L.P. REEVES.Jack Rhys: The Eternity Merchants (1981); The Five Doors (1981).Julia Riding: Gabion (1979); The Strange Land (1980); Deep Space Warriors (1981) - Space Traders Unlimited (1987), for children, is not a Hale book.J.R. Robertson: The Crab Eagle Trees (1978).Brian Rolls: Something in Mind (1973).Raymond J. Ross: One Hundred Miles above Earth (1981).Donald S(ydney) ROWLAND, whose pseudonyms include Fenton Brockley, Roger Carlton, Graham Garner, Alex Random, Roland Starr, Mark Suffling.James Ryder: Kark (1969); Vicious Spiral (1976).Ras Ryman (real name James D. Brown): The Quadrant War (1976); Day of the Ultramind (1977); Weavers of Death (1981).J(oseph) W(illard) SCHUTZ.William T. SILENT.D(enise) N(atalie) Sims (1940- ): A Plenteous Seed (1973); A Pastime of Eternity (1975).A(nthony) C(orby) Smith (1925- ): A Glimpse of Judgement (1978).Walter J(ames) Smith (1918- ): The Grand Voyage (1973); Fourth Gear (1981).Roland Starr Donald S. ROWLAND.Mark Suffling Donald S. ROWLAND.Dennis Summers G.J. BARRETT.Nevil Tronchin-James: Ministry of Procreation (1968).James B. Tucker (1922- ): Not an Earthly Chance (1970).Michael Vinter (1927- ): Along Came a Spider (1980).Walter Walkham (real name James Harvey Trevithick Ivory [1921- ]): When Earth Trembled (1980).James Wallace G.J. BARRETT.Chad Warren: Alien Heaven (1976).William Thomas Webb (1918- ): The Eye of Hollerl-Ra (1977); After the Inferno (1977); Cheyney's Robot (1978); Poisoned Planet (1978); The Time Druids (1978); Dimension Lords (1979); The Fate of Phral (1980); The Froth Eater (1980).Philip Welby: The Pleasure Dome of Sigma 93 (1978). Martyn Wessex (real name D.F. Little): The Slowing Down Process (1974); The Chain Reaction (1976).Ronald Wilcox: The Centre of the Wheel (1981).Eric C. WILLIAMS.T. Owen Williams: A Month for Mankind (1970).Robert Hendrie Wilson: The Gods Alone (1975); Ring of Rings (1976); A Blank Card (1977); The Frisk Donation (1979).David Wiltshire (1935- ): The Homosaur (1978); Child of Vodyanoi (1978; vt The Nightmare Man 1981); Genesis II (1981).Chris L. Wolf: Fire in the Sky (1981) with Michael F. Maikowski.J.A. Wood: We Alien Seed (1978). [JC]Further reading: Hale & Gresham Hardback Science Fiction (1988 chap) by Roger ROBINSON. ROBERTS, ANTHONY (1950- ) UK illustrator; he often works as Tony Roberts. He attended Wolverhampton College of Art, 1967-9, and Ravensbourne College of Art, 1969-72. AR has painted sf covers for many UK paperback publishers. His style is similar to, and perhaps imitative of, that of Chris FOSS; his smooth, hard-edged, highly detailed paintings are typical of UK commercial sf ILLUSTRATION during the 1970s. [JG/PN] ROBERTS, ARTHUR [r] John S. GLASBY. ROBERTS, [Sir] CHARLES G(EORGE) D(OUGLAS) (1860-1943) Canadian poet and novelist, important in CANADA's literary history. Among his many works are several collections of animal fantasies, most notably The Kindred of the Wild (coll 1902), in which various beasts reason like human beings. In the Morning of Time (1914-15 Cosmopolitan; coll of linked stories 1919 UK), set in prehistoric times, romantically presents the first stages of the ascent to civilization. [PN/JC]See also: ORIGIN OF MAN. ROBERTS, JANE Working name of US writer Jane Roberts Butts (1929-1984), perhaps best remembered for such speculative works as Dialogues of the Soul & Mortal Self in Time (1975), which took the form of a series of connected poems. She began publishing sf with "The Red Wagon" for FSF in 1956. Her sf novel The Rebellers (1963 dos) provides a melodramatic mix of OVERPOPULATION and ECOLOGY themes as successive waves of plague answer humanity's problems by nearly eliminating the race for good. More typical of her later concerns is The Education of Oversoul Seven (1973), a transcendental parable about the meaning of reality and time and space, whose student protagonist inhabits the bodies and souls of 4 humans from different periods, ranging from 35,000BC to AD2300, and who discovers en passant the profound simultaneity of all realities; its sequels are The Further Education of Oversoul Seven (1979) and Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time (1984). Emir's Education in the Proper Use of Magical Powers (1979) is a juvenile. JR published many further titles of mystical speculation. [JC] ROBERTS, JOHN [s] John R. PIERCE. ROBERTS, JOHN MADDOX (1947- ) US writer, prolific in the later 1980s. His first sf novel, The Strayed Sheep of Charun (1977; rev vt Cestus Dei 1983), is an action-packed romance set on a medievalized planet in which Jesuits and others attempt to reform the violence which is the planet's (and novel's) raison d'etre. There followed a variety of work, all adventure fiction - whose style is perhaps best described as brisk - in sf or fantasy settings, including the juvenile SPACE-OPERA sequence comprising Space Angel (1979), in which the commandeering of a spaceship by an ancient ALIEN leads to adventures for a boy, and its sequel Spacer: Window of the Mind (1988). King of the Wood (1983) is set in an alternate USA inhabited variously by Norsemen, Native Americans, Aztecs and Spanish Muslims. The Cingulum sequence about a raffish spaceship crew's adventures is The Cingulum (1985), Cloak of Illusion (1985) and Cingulum #3: The Sword, the Jewel and the Mirror (1988). JMR also collaborated on 4 books with Eric KOTANI (whom see for details): the sequence Act of God (1985), The Island Worlds (1987) and Between the Stars (1988), as well as Delta Pavonis (1990). JMR's The Enigma Variations (1989) sets an amnesiac in a corporate future. While all this sf activity was going on, JMR also contributed several titles to the ever-growing Conan series, set in a SHARED WORLD derived from Robert E. HOWARD's famous SWORD-AND-SORCERY stories: Conan the Valorous * (1985), Conan the Champion * (1987), Conan the Marauder * (1988), Conan the Bold * (1989), Conan the Rogue * (1991), Conan and the Manhunters* (1994) and Conan and the Treasure of Python* (1994). The Stormlands series, set in a tribalized fantasy world, so far comprises The Islander (1990), The Black Shields (1991), The Poisoned Lands (1992), The Steel Kings(1993) and Queens of Land and Sea (1994). [PN]Other works: the associational SPQRsequence comprising SPQR (1990), SPQR II: The Catiline Conspiracy (1991), #3: The Sacrilege (1992) and #4: The Temple of the Muses (1992), police-procedural mystery novels set in ancient Rome. ROBERTS, KEITH (JOHN KINGSTON) (1935- ) UK writer and illustrator resident in the south of England, where most of his best fiction is set. After working as an illustrator and cartoon animator, he began publishing sf with "Anita" and "Escapism" for Science Fantasy in 1964; several of his early stories were written as by Alistair Bevan. He served as associate editor of SCIENCE FANTASY 1965-6 and edited its successor SF Impulse for the whole of its run (Mar 1966-Feb 1967). His first novel, The Furies (1966), is the most orthodoxly structured and told of all his work, sf or otherwise, most of his later novels being fixups told from a brooding, slantwise, intensely visual point of view. The Furies is a traditional UK DISASTER tale, in which a nuclear test goes awry, inspiring an onslaught of space-spawned giant wasps which ravage England and come close to eliminating mankind. Beyond a certain sultriness of tone, it could have been written by any of a dozen UK specialists in disaster.With his second book, KR came fully into his own as a writer. PAVANE (coll of linked stories 1968; with "The White Boat" added, rev 1969 US) superbly depicts an ALTERNATE WORLD in which - Elizabeth I having been assassinated, the Spanish Armada victorious and no Protestant rise of capitalism in the offing - a technologically backward England survives under the sway of the Catholic Church Militant. The individual stories are moody, eloquent, elegiac and thoroughly convincing. The Inner Wheel (coll of linked stories 1970) deals with the kind of gestalt SUPERMAN theme made familiar by Theodore STURGEON's MORE THAN HUMAN (fixup 1953) and is similarly powerful, though tending to a rather uneasy sentimentality, perhaps endemic to tales of such relationships but also typical of KR's handling of children and women. Anita (coll of linked stories 1970 US; exp 1990 US) is fantasy; the stories had appeared much earlier in Science Fantasy. The Boat of Fate (1971), an historical novel with a Roman setting, shares a painterly concern for primitive landscapes with The Chalk Giants (coll of linked stories 1974; cut 1975 US), whose separate tales elegantly embody a cyclical vision of the future of the island of Britain. The protagonist of the framing narrative (seen in the UK edition only) drives to the south coast to escape an indistinct disaster, goes into hiding, and (depending on one's reading) either cycles the rest of the book through his head or can be seen as himself emblematic of the movement the tales portend, from post- HOLOCAUST chaos through God-ridden savagery back to a state premonitory of his own wounded condition.KR's early short stories were assembled in Machines and Men (coll 1973) and The Grain Kings (coll 1976), both being excerpted in The Passing of the Dragons (coll 1977 US). The title story of the second volume fascinatingly describes life on giant hotel-like grain harvesters in a world of vast farms; in the same volume, "Weihnachtsabend" (1972), perhaps KR's finest single story, depicts an alternate world in which the Nazis have won WWII ( HITLER WINS), and expands upon certain savage myths implicit in that victory. Later work was assembled in Ladies from Hell (coll 1979), The Lordly Ones (coll 1986) and Winterwood and Other Hauntings (coll 1989), the limited edition of which also contained, bound-in, The Event (1989 chap). As in his later novels, these stories increasingly display an entangled - though sometimes searching - dis-ease with human nature and sexuality, with the course of history and with the fate of the UK.KR's first novel after a gap of some years was Molly Zero (1980), in which the classic sf tale of the growth of an adolescent is - typically for KR - subverted by a sense that the DYSTOPIAN world into which the young female protagonist enters is dismayingly corrosive; it is a sense which variously governs the shadowy escapades of the eponymous heroine of Kaeti & Company (coll of linked stories 1986), Kaeti's Apocalypse (1986 chap) and Kaeti on Tour (coll 1992), and the life of the haunting femme fatale depicted in Grainne (1987). In mood or venue, these books have little of the feel of sf; Kiteworld (fixup 1985), on the other hand, invokes the atmosphere of earlier work in its depiction of a Britain dominated by religious fanatics, and its constrictive rendering of the life of the crews who man giant kites to guard the frontiers against demons.As an illustrator, KR did much to change the appearance of UK sf magazines, notably Science Fantasy, for which he designed all but 7 of the covers from Jan 1965 until its demise (as SF Impulse) in Feb 1967, and also NEW WORLDS for a period in 1966. His boldly Expressionist covers, line-oriented, paralleled the shift in content of these magazines away from GENRE SF and FANTASY towards a more free-form, speculative kind of fiction. He later did covers and interior illustrations for the book editions of New Worlds Quarterly ed Michael MOORCOCK, for some of whose novels he has also designed covers. He has illustrated several of his own 1980s titles. [JC]Other works: A Heron Caught in Weeds (coll 1987 chap); The Natural History of the P.H. (1988 chap), nonfiction, the initials referring to the "Primitive Heroine" who appears throughout KR's work; The Road to Paradise (dated 1988 but 1989), associational; Irish Encounters (dated 1988 but 1989 chap).See also: ANDROIDS; BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; CYBERNETICS; ESP; HIVE-MINDS; INTERZONE; NEW WRITINGS IN SF; RELIGION; SOCIOLOGY; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES. ROBERTS, LIONEL R.L. FANTHORPE. ROBERTS, MICHELE (BRIGITTE) (1949- ) UK poet and novelist, poetry editor of Spare Rib 1975-7. Her novels all tend to FABULATION in their expression of an articulate FEMINIST aesthetic, but 2 are of genre interest: The Wild Girl (1984) vigorously displaces the reminiscences of Mary Magdalene, and The Book of Mrs Noah (1987) similarly engages its heroine in myth-rich concourse with the female icons which engender the stories that make the world ( MYTHOLOGY). [JC] ROBERTS, TERENCE Pseudonym of Ivan Terence Sanderson (1911-1973), UK-born US writer and illustrator on the natural sciences, as in Living Treasure (1941), about wildlife around the Caribbean. As TR his sf novel was Report on the Status Quo (1955), a DISASTER story set in 1958-9, when the world is seen to reel under great floods and WWIII. As Ivan T. Sanderson he wrote several books with a relevance to PSEUDO-SCIENCE, including Abominable Snowmen (1961; cut 1968) on cryptozoology, Uninvited Visitors: A Biologist Looks at UFOs (1967) and Invisible Residents (1970) about UFOs and related Fortean matter ( Charles FORT), Things (1967) and More "Things" (1969) about unexplained mysteries, and the summative Investigating the Unexplained (1972). [PN] ROBERTS & VINTER NEW WORLDS; SCIENCE FANTASY. ROBERTSON, E(ILEEN) ARNOT Working name of UK writer and broadcaster Eileen Arbuthnot Robertson (1903-1961), best known for such non-sf novels as Four Frightened People (1931), whose protagonists find themselves making their way through a tropical jungle. It was written to contrast with her sf novel Three Came Unarmed (1929) which, in a striking attack on modern civilization, exposes 3 (Homo superior) enfants sauvages to contemporary England, which destroys them. [JC] ROBERTSON, J.R. [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. ROBERTSON, MORGAN (ANDREW) (1861-1915) US writer, almost always on nautical themes; many of his stories are sf or fantasy. The fantasy tales, typical of their maritime venues, tend to the mystical, the fog-girt, the occult and the morose. His sf is similar, though future- WAR tales enliven the tone on occasion. MR is perhaps best remembered for Futility, or The Wreck of the "Titan" (1898 in untraced US mag as "Futility"; 1912 UK; vt with additional material, coll The Wrecking of the Titan, or Futility: Paranormal Experiences Connected with the Sinking of the Titanic 1914 US), which proved uncannily predictive in telling the tale of a great new ship called the Titan which steams at an arrogant pace into a iceberg and sinks. [JC]Other works: Spun Yarn (coll 1898); "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Tales of the Sea (coll 1899); The Three Laws and the Golden Rule (coll 1900); Down to the Sea (coll 1905); Land Ho! (coll 1905); Over the Border (coll of linked stories 1914); The Grain Ship (coll of linked stories 1914).See also: GREAT AND SMALL. ROBERT WEINBERG PUBLICATIONS Robert E. WEINBERG. ROBESON, KENNETH House name for authors writing the Doc Savage series as it appeared 1933-49 in DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE, published by STREET & SMITH. The Robeson name is most strongly associated with Lester DENT, who wrote all but 43 of the Doc Savage stories; other authors involved in that initial run included William G. Bogart, Harold A. Davis, Laurence Donovan, Alan Hathaway and Rymon Johnson. 3 stories - The Man of Bronze: Doc Savage and his Pals in a Novel of Unusual Adventure (1933; vt Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze 1964), The Land of Terror (1933; vt Doc Savage: The Land of Terror 1965) and The Quest of the Spider (1933; vt Doc Savage: The Quest of the Spider 1972) - were early published in book form. Three decades later the series was brought to life again when BANTAM BOOKS began their republication of the entire run in book form. Variously released as individual titles or in omnibus format, the sequence began with the first title above listed, Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, in 1964 and ended, complete, 182 stories later with Doc Savage Omnibus #13 (omni 1990). An entirely new sequence was then initiated, with Will MURRAY writing as KR, #1 being Doc Savage: Python Isle * (1991).The enormously wealthy Doc Savage - aided by 5 sidekicks who specialize in various crafts and sciences at the borderline of sf - devotes his life to combating criminal conspiracies, almost all masterminded by the kind of charismatic villain later given definitive form by Ian FLEMING in the James Bond books. Doc Savage himself clearly influenced the creation of SUPERMAN, and stands at the heart of Philip Jose FARMER's Wold Newton Family sequence, either in his own name or disguised, with 2 titles - Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973; rev 1975) and Doc Savage: Escape from Loki (1991) - devoted directly to him. As the original Doc Savage tales are of only peripheral sf interest, we do not list them. R. Reginald's Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature: A Checklist, 1700-1974 (1979) provides coverage of the book reprints to the end of 1974; and Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, 1975-1991: a Bibliography (1992), by Reginald with Darryl F. MALLETT and Mary Wickizer Burgess, gives a more complete analysis of the entire run.The house name KR was used also on the PULP MAGAZINE The Avenger, another Street & Smith crime-busting hero series, with rather fewer sf elements. This was an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Doc Savage stories. Most of the Avenger series (many also reprinted as paperback books in the 1970s) were the work of Paul ERNST; the final dozen titles of the 1970s run, from The Man from Atlantis (1974) on, were newly written by Ron GOULART. Other writers associated with the Kenneth Robeson name were Norman A. Danburg and Emile Tepperman. In 1991, Will MURRAY (who see for further titles) began a new series of Doc Savage tales, also as by KR, beginning with Python Isle* (1991). [JC/PN]About the author: The Man behind Doc Savage: A Tribute to Lester Dent (1974) by Robert E. WEINBERG; Bigger than Life: The Creator of Doc Savage (1990) by Marilyn Cannaday. ROBIDA, ALBERT (1848-1926) French illustrator, lithographer and writer. AR was the most important and popular of 19th-century sf illustrators, and may even be said to have founded the genre, though he was clearly working in the tradition of such French fantastic artists as Grandville (Jean Gerard; 1803-1847) and Gustave Dore (1832-1883). Always interested in DYSTOPIAS and SATIRE, he illustrated works by Francois RABELAIS, CYRANO DE BERGERAC, Jonathan SWIFT and Camille FLAMMARION among others, but his most important works had texts by himself. These were very often first published as periodical-series, each instalment being slim, and then later in most cases as books. AR took up sf themes with his gently satirical homage to Jules VERNE's Voyages extraordinaires with Voyages tres extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul, a 100-part periodical beginning June 1879. It was later collected as 5 books (all 1882): Le roi des singes ["King of the Monkeys"], Le tour du monde en plus de 80 jours ["Round the World in More than 80 Days"], Les quatre reines ["The Four Queens"], A la recherche de l'elephant blanc ["In Search of the White Elephant"] and S. Exc. M. le Gouverneur du Pole Nord ["His Excellency the Governor of the North Pole"]. A more prophetic work was Le vingtieme siecle ["The 20th Century"], a periodical in 50 parts beginning Jan 1882. There followed another series appearing later as La vie electrique ["The Electric Life"] (1883), set in 1955. AR's ironically half-amused but pessimistic view of the likely nature of future WAR (many of his predictions proved all too true) appeared in #200 of the humorous magazine La Caricature (1883) as "La guerre au vingtieme siecle" ["War in the 20th Century"], set in 1975, and in a book with the same title but different contents, La guerre au vingtieme siecle (1887), set in 1945. A TIME-TRAVEL fantasy, serialized in the magazine Le petit francais illustre in 1890, Jadis chez aujourd'hui ["The Long-Ago is with Us Today"], features a scientist resuscitating Moliere and other literary figures in order to show them the Universal Exhibition of 1889, which bores them. L'horloge des siecles ["Clock of the Centuries"] (1902) is one of the earliest treatments of the time-reversal theme later used by, for example, Philip K. DICK in Counter-Clock World (1967), Brian W. ALDISS in An Age (1967; vt Cryptozoic! US) and Martin AMIS in Time's Arrow (1991). AR continued to produce quite prolifically, his last work being another future fantasy entitled Un chalet dans les airs ["Castle in the Air"] (1925).The texts to the above works are generally undistinguished. The ILLUSTRATIONS, however, mostly in a vein of detailed caricature, are consistently inventive and amusing. AR worked mostly with lithographic pencil and crayon, achieving a haphazard but impressive vigour. The figures are very much those of Victorian Europe, dressed in the fashions of the time, and involved in various busy scenes with a huge variety of modernistic devices. Among his hundreds of predictions were the videophone and germ warfare. His machines and WEAPONS were usually well designed - some may actually have been practicable - although his flying machines look distinctly un-airworthy. The ironic intelligence of his work is rather undermined by his inability to imagine the future except in terms of more and more gadgetry: social mores remain frozen in the Victorian mould. AR had a strong influence on the future-war genre. [PN/JG]See also: FRANCE; TRANSPORTATION. ROBINET, LEE Robert Ames BENNET. ROBINETT, STEPHEN (ALLEN) (1941- ) US writer and lawyer who began publishing sf as Tak Hallus (apparently Persian for "pen name") with "Minitalent" for ASF in 1969. His first novel, Mindwipe! (1969 ASF as by Tak Hallus; 1976 Canada) as by Steve Hahn, is unexceptional, but Stargate (1974 ASF as by Tak Hallus; 1976) intriguingly combines HARD SF and detective modes in the tale of two great corporations and their quarrel over the eponymous MATTER TRANSMITTER. Along with Frederik POHL's GATEWAY (1977), this novel was important in establishing the commercial stargate (which can be variously defined as a matter-transmission aperture or as a discontinuity or as a wormhole extension of a singularity - so long as the phenomenon allows profitable and instantaneous contact to be made between one part of the Universe and another) as an essential instrument of modern sf. The Man Responsible (fixup 1978) again focuses on the relationship between crime and sf, the story dealing this time with a 21st-century world in which computer projections pass as human. SR's stories, in which a sharp wit is allowed free and satirical play, are assembled in Projections (coll 1979). It is a matter of serious regret that SR ceased publishing around 1980. [JC] ROBINSON, CHARLES HENRY (1843-1930) US writer whose Longhead: The Story of the First Fire (1913) capably runs the gamut of prehistoric-sf themes from the discovery of fire to the first hints of civilization ( ORIGIN OF MAN). [JC] ROBINSON, E(DWARD) A. (? -? ) US writer in whose The Disk: A Tale of Two Passions (1884; vt The Disk: A Prophetic Reflection 1884 UK), with G(eorge) A. Wall, a series of inventions - optical cables capable of harnessing the Sun's light, imperishable food, disease-eliminating injections - plays second fiddle to a tale of sexual passions. The inventions are effective. [JC] ROBINSON, ELEANOR (? - ) US writer in whose first novel, Chrysalis of Death (1976), a disastrous primordial germ changes people into beasts. A brave doctor fights the menace; there is soap opera and sex. The Silverleaf Syndrome (1980; vt The Freak 1985) was less noticeable. [JC] ROBINSON, FRANK M(ALCOLM) (1926- ) US writer, also active in publishing, who began writing sf stories in 1950 with "The Maze" in ASF and was for a time fairly prolific, soon publishing his first (and for decades his only) solo novel, The Power (1956). This effectively combines sf and thriller in the story of the search for a malignant SUPERMAN with undefined powers, including the ability to seem different to everyone who looks at him. The protagonist, himself paranormally gifted, kills the bad superman and contemplates being a good one. It was filmed as The POWER in 1967. FMR then fell relatively silent-fewer than half the stories assembled in A Life in the Day of . . . and Other Short Stories (coll 1981) were written after The Power - and concentrated on editorial jobs, working for a variety of publications including Rogue (1959-65) and Playboy) (1969-73). In the 1970s he changed direction and, in collaboration with Thomas N. SCORTIA, produced a series of DISASTER novels which, though sf devices and explanations are occasionally invoked, most closely resemble the TECHNOTHRILLER. The first of these, The Glass Inferno (1974), was filmed - along with Richard Martin Stern's The Tower - as The Towering Inferno (1974); further titles were The Prometheus Crisis (1975), which deals with the failure of a vast nuclear reactor, The Nightmare Factor (1978), about biological warfare, The Gold Crew (1980) and Blow Out! (1987). The Great Divide (1982), by FMR with John Levin, is set in the NEAR FUTURE, when a coup threatens the USA. FMR's concentration on these lucrative but unchallenging books tended to blur the early critical sense that he was a sharp and incisive writer, and The Dark Beyond the Stars (1991) came as a welcome reminder of his gifts. It is - perhaps rather late in genre history - a GENERATION-STARSHIP tale, told with much of the claustrophobia and dramatic irony typical of POCKET-UNIVERSE narratives. In keeping with its late composition, the ironies dominate: the family romance that the protagonist must decode in order to mature is unfruitful, and the ship turns homeward. The book itself was a welcome signal of its author's own return to the genre. [JC]See also: ESP. ROBINSON, JEANNE [r] Spider ROBINSON. ROBINSON, KIM STANLEY (1952- ) US writer who began writing sf stories with "Coming Back to Dixieland" and "In Pierson's Orchestra", both published in Orbit 18 (1975) ed Damon KNIGHT. He has not been prolific in shorter forms, publishing only about 10 stories before gaining his PhD in English at the University of California in 1982. In revised form, his thesis was later published as The Novels of Philip K. Dick (1984); thoroughly researched, at ease with the protocols of academic writing while at the same time showing an acute understanding of 1950s sf, it remains one of the most useful studies of Philip K. DICK's thorny oeuvre.KSR became widely known with the publication of his first novel, THE WILD SHORE (1984), released as one of Terry CARR's Ace Specials. The first book of a thematic trilogy set in various versions of Orange County on the Pacific coast south of Los Angeles, and later assembled with its siblings as Three Californias (omni 1995), THE WILD SHORE lucidly examines the sentimentalized kind of US sf pastoral typically set after an almost universal catastrophe. Sheltered from the full DISASTER, Orange County has become an enclave whose inhabitants espouse a re-established US hegemony, but whose smug ignorance of the world outside is ultimately self-defeating. In The Gold Coast (1988), Orange County several decades hence is seen through the lens of DYSTOPIA; a similar array of characters - similarly related to one another - must grapple with a polluted, corrupt, overcrowded, ecologically devastated world. Under new names the same characters find themselves, in Pacific Edge (1990 UK), breathing the air of UTOPIA. In this world Orange County has benefited from restrictions on corporate size and strict controls over land use and POLLUTION. Although the novel shows the near impossibility of imagining a living utopia, a sense of earned freshness and relief permeates its pages. As a whole, the trilogy may be read as three versions of the same story, each nesting within the other; structurally adventurous and searching, the Orange County trilogy remains at the moment KSR's strongest accomplishment, though the Mars trilogy (see below) will almost certainly come to seem even more substantial.Other novels are varyingly successful. Icehenge (fixup 1984) strikingly conflates three incompatible readings of the significance of an artifact found on Pluto, exploring a range of issues from epistemology to the nature of historical tradition. The Memory of Whiteness (1985) less successfully attempts to suggest analogues between MUSIC theory and the structure of the Universe, while at the same time conducting its musician hero - who is, typically of KSR's protagonists, an almost constantly active character - on a guided tour of the Solar System. Escape from Kathmandu (1988 chap), later expanded as Escape from Kathmandu (coll of linked stories 1989), set in a stress-ridden mystical Nepal, amusingly exploits KSR's own experience as a mountaineer.Other stories appear in THE PLANET ON THE TABLE (coll 1986), The Blind Geometer (1986 chap; with 1 story added, coll 1989 dos) - a later but lesser magazine version won the 1987 NEBULA for Best Novella - and Remaking History (coll 1991), which includes all the stories published in the slightly earlier A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions (coll 1991 chap), and which was later published as Remaking History (omni 1994), in which version it incorporates THE PLANET ON THE TABLE; Down and Out in the Year 2000 (coll 1992 UK) gathers together The Blind Geometer and A Short Sharp Shock plus tales from Remaking History. Green Mars (1985 IASFM; 1988 chap dos) prefigures the long-projected Mars trilogy, which treats that planet as a realistic habitat for the human species; the first volume, RED MARS (1992 UK), which won the 1993 Nebula, ranges magisterially over the early years of TERRAFORMING, COLONIZATION and disruption; the sequence as a whole - also comprising Green Mars (1993), which won the 1994 HUGO, and is not textually related to Green Mars; and Blue Mars - is projected to extend over 200 years of civilization on MARS. A Short Sharp Shock (1990) carries its athletic and ultimately clear-eyed protagonist into a soul-defining trek across an endless sea-girt peninsula which is freely symbolic of death, or of the nature of life, or simply of the path a person must follow to fill out a human span.In a somewhat contrived attempt to contrast him to CYBERPUNK writers, KSR has been described as a Humanist; he has himself disparaged as foolishly reductive this use of Humanism as a label. What in fact most characterizes the growing reach and power of his work is its cogent analysis and its disposal of such category thinking. He is at heart an explorer. [JC]Other works: Black Air (1983 FSF; 1991 chap); Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias (anth 1994).About the author: A Checklist of Kim Stanley Robinson (1991 chap) by Tom Joyce and Christopher P. STEPHENS.See also: ACE BOOKS; ALTERNATE WORLDS; DEFINITIONS OF SF; HISTORY IN SF; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; JOHN W. CAMPBELLMEMORIAL AWARD; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MATHEMATICS; MESSIAHS; NANOTECHNOLOGY; NUCLEAR POWER; OUTER PLANETS; PHILIP K. DICK AWARD. ROBINSON, PHILIP BEDFORD (1926- ) UK writer who has worked in India. In Masque of a Savage Mandarin (1969) the deracinated protagonist takes symbolic revenge upon the world via the systematic destruction, by electrical means, of a victim's brain. [JC] ROBINSON, ROGER (1943- ) UK computer programmer and bibliographer, active in UK fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive BIBLIOGRAPHY of one of the most prolific sf writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive. Criticized at first for its failure to annotate its findings - so that, for instance, pseudonyms used for sf could not be distinguished from others - it has shown itself accurate and comprehensive. By sourcing each attribution, so that readers can weigh the reliability of the ascriptions, it aspires to a greater methodological sophistication than is often found in sf scholarship. [JC] ROBINSON, SPIDER (1948- ) US-born writer who became a Canadian Landed Immigrant in 1975. His first story was "The Guy with the Eyes" for ASF in 1973, inaugurating his long-running Callahan series of CLUB STORIES. He has sometimes written tales as by B.D. Wyatt. The first few years of his career were honour-laden. He shared with Lisa TUTTLE the 1974 JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer; topped the 1977 Locus Poll for Best Critic, mainly for his Galaxy Bookshelf column for Gal June 1975-Sep 1977; received a 1977 HUGO for the ASF publication (as "By Any Other Name") of the first 4 chapters of his first novel, Telempath (1976 US); and won both Hugo and NEBULA in 1978, along with his wife and collaborator Jeanne Robinson, for "Stardance", which became the nucleus of STARDANCE (1979 US) with Jeanne Robinson. (In 1983 he won another Hugo, for "Melancholy Elephants" [1982]. ) At this high point of his career, his punchy optimism about the human condition and his adroit use of generic materials to express that optimism seemed to have established him as a legitimate heir to Robert A. HEINLEIN, a writer he deeply admired. Telempath, a complicated story set in a post- HOLOCAUST Earth after a decimating virus plague, cleverly promulgates a sense that the surviving humans, in conjunction with the telepathic Muskies - gaseous beings imperceptible before the plague - can earn cohabitation with a vast empathic net of species. STARDANCE similarly presents its audience with a protagonist - this time a dancer too big for Earth work - who helps propel humanity upwards into a Galaxy rich with communicating species.The Callahan sequence makes use of the capacity of the club story to reassure both participants and readers, and conveys a sense of real community (as in the tv series Cheers) through a wide range of tales - sf and fantasy predominating - which reveal human and alien frailties while simultaneously affirming the group. The series comprises Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (coll 1977 US), Time Travelers Strictly Cash (coll 1981 US) and Callahan's Secret (coll 1986 US), most of the stories from these 3 vols being assembled as Callahan and Company: The Compleat Chronicles of the Crosstime Saloon (dated 1987 but 1988 US) and a smaller selection being issued as Callahan's Crazy Crosstime Bar (1989 UK). Callahan's Lady (coll 1989 US), set prior to the main series in a whorehouse run by Callahan's wife, assembles similar tales; further titles include Lady Slings the Booze (1992), The Callahan Touch (1993) and Off the Wall at Callahan's (coll 1994). Kill the Editor (1991 US) is also set in the whorehouse. SR's club stories differ from some older models mainly through the amount of action that occurs in the saloon itself, so that their ultimate effect is, at times, complex.The 1970s were the high point for SR's somewhat insistent cheer, and subsquent work has proven considerably grimmer in tone. Mindkiller: A Novel of the Near Future (1982 US) - for which the RECURSIVE Time Pressure (1987 US) serves as both prequel and sequel - complicatedly shifts time-schemes and identities in an attempt to depict a crime- and computer-ridden world; the succeeding volume, even less coherently, re-invokes the 1973 Nova Scotia of SR's own memories, introducing a nude time-traveller who nurses the psychically wounded protagonist back to the point at which he can begin to understand his significance in the scheme of things. SR's style in these later books - exclamatory and burdened with Heinleinesque exaggerations - does little to sustain their rollercoaster plots. Night of Power (1985 US), more controlled, aroused some negative response for its depiction of a Black-power revolt in New York City. His stories, on the other hand, have been more stable and consistent. Collections include Antinomy (coll 1980 US); Melancholy Elephants (coll 1984; with 1 story dropped and 2 added, rev 1985 US), his only book to be initially released by the feeble Canadian publishing industry; and True Minds (coll 1990 US). [JC]Other works: The Best of All Possible Worlds (anth 1980); Copyright Violation (1990 chap); Starseed (1991) with Jeanne Robinson.See also: ARTS; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; CANADA; DESTINIES; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; MUSIC. ROBINSONADE Daniel DEFOE's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) provides the original model for robinsonades - romances of solitary survival in such inimical terrains as desert ISLANDS (or planets) - and also supplies much of the thematic and symbolic buttressing that allows so many of these stories to be understood as allegories of mankind's search for the meaning of life, just as Crusoe's ordeal is both a religious punishment for disobedience and a triumphant justification of entrepreneurial individualism. Crusoe's paternalistic relation to the natives he eventually encounters has likewise been echoed in much modern sf, where until very recently human/ ALIEN relations tended to be depicted within the same code of mercantilist opportunism. A second important model for sf's numerous robinsonades may well be Johann WYSS's Der Schweizerische Robinson (1812-13; trans - perhaps by William Godwin - as The Family Robinson Crusoe 1814 UK; new trans as The Swiss Family Robinson 1818 UK) - itself imitated by tales like D.W. Belisle's The American Family Robinson (1853) - in which the element of the triumphant ordeal is broadened to include the testing of a full microcosm of social life - leading either to UTOPIAN speculations, to which the robinsonade has always been structurally attuned, or to the simpler, more active adventure of the COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS. However, the fundamental thrust of the robinsonade - its convincing celebration of the power of pragmatic Reason, and its depiction of the triumph, alone, over great odds, of the entrepreneur who commands that rational Faculty - continues to drive most of its offspring. [JC] ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS Film (1964). Schenck-Zabel/Paramount. Dir Byron HASKIN, starring Paul Mantee, Vic Lundin. Screenplay Ib Melchior, John C. Higgins, remotely based on Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel DEFOE. 109 mins. Colour.Haskin directed several sf films in the 1950s, including WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), and returned to the genre in 1964 with this interesting, futuristic version of Defoe's classic novel. After a spaceship crashlands on Mars, one of the two pilots (the other is killed) struggles to survive and to remain sane in the alien, barren landscape - here well played by California's Death Valley - his only companion his pet monkey. This section of the film is compelling; but, with the arrival of alien spaceships, the ROBINSONADE in a hostile environment gives way to SPACE-OPERA melodrama: the Earthman rescues one of the aliens' slaves, who becomes his Man Friday, and a conventional pursuit-and-escape story follows. The story resembles - but to no great degree-that of Rex GORDON'sNo Man Friday (1956; vtFirst on Mars). [JP/PN] ROBOCOP Film (1987). Orion. Dir Paul Verhoeven, starring Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Daniel O'Herlihy, Ronny Cox, Kurtwood Smith. Screenplay Edward Neumeier, Michael Miner. 102 mins. Colour.Dutch director Verhoeven here unusually made a successful transition from foreign art films - the violent medieval epic Flesh + Blood (1985) and the perverse thriller The Fourth Man (1983) - to a US populist blockbuster. A corrupt corporation in NEAR-FUTURE Detroit manufactures a prototype CYBORG (Weller) in which the head of a mortally wounded policeman is integrated with a powerful metal body. The brutal extermination of criminals and cleansing of the corrupt business community that follow are directed with a blend of technical skill, low cunning and genuine artistry that is both dismaying and breathtaking. The casual cruelties of the ongoing bloodbath seem merely a cynical exploitation of the worst aspects of audience voyeurism, but the film also contains a density of information about, and a sharp satirical observation of, this future world that are both rare and welcome in sf cinema. Verhoeven went on to direct TOTAL RECALL. The sequel, not dir Verhoeven, was ROBOCOP 2. [PN]See also: CINEMA. ROBOCOP 2 Film (1990). Orion. Dir Irvin Kershner, starring Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Belinda Bauer, Daniel O'Herlihy, Tom Noonan. Screenplay Frank MILLER, Walon Green from a story by Miller. 116 mins. Colour.Dismissed by most critics as an unimaginative retread of ROBOCOP, R2 nevertheless has merits. Its narrative clarity and dash, which deliver a vision of future Detroit as one of the deeper circles of Hell, a sort of DANTE-meets- DC COMICS, are a credit to the partnership of director Kershner (who made The EMPIRE STRIKES BACK [1980]) and screenwriter Miller (who wrote and illustrated the Batman GRAPHIC NOVEL The Dark Knight Returns [graph 1986]). These qualities partially redeem R2's simplistic repetition of the previous film's thematic concerns (anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism, casual slaughter and lots of cynicism about tv news coverage) in a story where the good CYBORG cop (Weller) is again pitted against the evil corporation (privatizing the police force and about to do likewise to City Hall) and their new, drug-crazed cyborg killer. Rob Bottin's cyborg designs are appropriately grotesque. [PN] ROBOCOP 3 Film (1992, but released late 1993). Orion. Dir Fred Dekker; screenplay Frank MILLER and Dekker based on a story by Miller based on characters created by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner; starring Robert Burke, Nancy Allen, Rip Torn, John Castle, Jill Hennessy and Remy Ryan. 104 mins. Colour.With each sequel, life has been leached from the original ROBOCOP (1987) scenario, remembered for its witty and satirical sadism, first by ROBOCOP 2 (1990) and then by RoboCop 3. (The only place for the concept to go was now television, and indeed Robocop: The Series was launched on TV in 1994 with an optimistic plan for a two-hour pilot and 21 episodes; a Canadian production, made in Toronto for syndication, it stars Richard Eden as Robocop and Yvette Napier in the Nancy Allen role, and is scripted by Neumeier and Miner who wrote the original movie; aimed at the youth market, it was not very well received, and was cancelled in its first season.)RoboCop 3 began with two problems. After the comparative failure of Robocop 2, it had to work on a much smaller budget; and with Robocop marketing franchises now aimed mainly at quite young children, the film too had to be aimed at the kids, and hence pruned of much of the previous violence, which is to remove much of the raison d'etre. This time the politically correct Robocop (now played by Burke rather than Peter Weller) takes the side of disenfranchised slum dwellers being evicted from Cadillac Heights, Detroit, by the Japanese corporation Kanemitsu, new owners of OCP, who plan to build the lavish "Delta City" in the area. Bonding with a cute computer-whiz girl child orphan (Ryan) and a pretty lady scientist (Hennessy), Robocop with the help of his new family-police officer Anne Lewis, played by Nancy Allen, having been early and conveniently eliminated- defeats the evil Japanese, their samurai androids, and their commando cohorts, the British "rehabs" led by Commander McDaggett (Castle). The casual xenophobia displayed by the film against the Japanese and British is breathtaking. Poor matte work disfigures the climax (Robocop flies!), but a perhaps surprising residue of entertainment remains. [PN] ROBOCOP: THE SERIES ROBOCOP 3. ROBOT JOX Film (1990). Empire. Dir Stuart Gordon, starring Gary Graham, Anne Marie Johnson, Paul Koslo, Robert Sampson, Hilary Mason. Screenplay Joe HALDEMAN, Dennis Paoli. 82 mins. Colour.The people ("jox") who pilot the future ROBOT colossi with which wars are settled in single combat are popular idols. The hero (Graham) is traumatized when he accidentally crushes a spectator stand and quits, but returns when the biologically engineered, test-tube created woman he loves (Johnson) endangers herself by entering the field of combat. A long-cherished project of Charles BAND's financially troubled Empire Pictures, and his most expensive, RJ was several years in the making and is disorientingly inconsistent in its production values: top-of-the-line effects by David Allen in the robot combat, but low-budget interiors and a few wobbly matte fringes. Gordon, scaling down his gore effects after RE-ANIMATOR (1985) and FROM BEYOND (1986), handles the subtly humorous pulp-sf angles very well and gives the film a pleasantly uncluttered comic-bookish look, while Haldeman's sf-writer touch can be traced in the neat background details (ad-campaigns for pregnancy, bigotry against "tubies") and in his distinctive blend of military-hardware expertise and anti- WAR attitudes, the latter being especially apparent in the surprisingly emotional climax. [KN] ROBOTS The word "robot" first appeared in Karel CAPEK's play R.U.R. (1921; trans 1923), and is derived from the Czech robota (statute labour). Capek's robots were artificial human beings of organic origin, but the term is usually applied to MACHINES. Real-life assembly-line robots are adapted to specific functions, but in sf - where the term overlaps to some extent with ANDROIDS - it usually refers to machines in more-or-less human form.Machines which mimic human form date back, in both fiction and reality, to the early 19th century. The real automata were showpieces: clockwork dummies or puppets. Their counterparts in the fiction of E.T.A. HOFFMANN - the Talking Turk in "Automata" (1814) and Olympia in "The Sandman" (1816) - present a more verisimilitudinous image, and play a sinister role, their wondrous artifice being seen as something blasphemous and diabolically inspired. The automaton in Herman MELVILLE's "The Bell-Tower" (1855) has similar allegorical connotations. Early-20th-century works are markedly different. William Wallace COOK's A Round Trip to the Year 2000 (1903; 1925), which features robotic "mugwumps", and the anonymous skit Mechanical Jane (1903) are both comedies, as is J. Storer CLOUSTON's Button Brains (1933), a novel in which a robot is continually mistaken for its human model and which introduced most of the mechanical-malfunction jokes that remain the staple diet of stage and tv plays featuring robots. (Robots are the most common sf device used in drama because they can be so conveniently and so amusingly played by live actors; the tradition extends to recent times in Alan Ayckbourn's Henceforward [1988].)Early PULP-MAGAZINE stories about robots are generally ambivalent. David H. KELLER's "The Psychophonic Nurse" (1928) is a cooperative servant, but no substitute for a mother's love. Abner J. Gelula's "Automaton" (1931) has lecherous designs on its creator's daughter and has to be destroyed. Harl VINCENT's "Rex" (1934) takes over the world and is about to remake Man in the image of the robot when his regime is overthrown. But the balance soon swung in favour of sympathy. The machines in Eando BINDER's "The Robot Aliens" (1935) come in peace but are misunderstood and abused by hostile humans; and saccharine sentimentality is also in the ascendant in "Helen O'Loy" (1938) by Lester DEL REY, in which a man marries the ideal mechanical woman, in "Robots Return" (1938) by Robert Moore WILLIAMS, in which spacefaring robots discover that they were created by humans and accept the disappointment nobly, in "Rust" (1939) by Joseph E. KELLEAM, which describes the tragic decline into extinction of mechanical life on Earth, in the anti-Frankensteinian parable "I, Robot" (1939) by Eando Binder, and in "True Confession" (1940) by F. Orlin TREMAINE and "Almost Human" (1941) by Ray CUMMINGS, both of which feature altruistic acts of robotic self-sacrifice. Isaac ASIMOV claims to have invented his famous "Laws of Robotics" (see below) in response to a technophobic "Frankenstein syndrome", but there is little evidence of one in the robot stories published around the time of "Strange Playfellow" (1940; vt "Robbie"). Robots are given higher status than mere humans in "Farewell to the Master" (1940) by Harry BATES and "Jay Score" (1941) by Eric Frank RUSSELL, the first of a series later published as Men, Martians and Machines (coll of linked stories 1956).The system of ethics with which Asimov's POSITRONIC ROBOTS were hardwired was enshrined in 3 famous Laws (devised in discussions with John W. CAMPBELL Jr, whom Asimov insisted was their co-creator): (1) a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; (2) a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; (3) a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. The laws emerged from "Reason" (1941); "Liar" (1941) became the first of many Asimov stories whose plots involve the explication of odd robot behaviour as an unexpected consequence of them. In "Liar" (as in many others) the logical unravelling is accomplished by the "robopsychologist" Susan Calvin. The early stories in the series - collected in I, ROBOT (coll of linked stories 1950) - culminated in "Evidence" (1946), in which a robot politician can get elected only by convincing voters that he is human, but does the job far better than the man he replaces. In C.L. MOORE's "No Woman Born" (1944) a dancer whose mind is resurrected in a robot body quickly concludes that the robot condition is preferable to the human. The robot servants who survive mankind in Clifford D. SIMAK's CITY (1944-52; fixup 1952) are the perfect gentlemen's gentlemen rather than mere slaves. One cautionary note was sounded by Anthony BOUCHER, whose stories "Q.U.R." and "Robinc" (both 1943 as by H.H. Holmes) champion "usuform robots" against anthropomorphous ones; the stated reasons are utilitarian, but Boucher's religious faith - he was a devout Catholic - may have influenced his opinion. The most notable comic robot in pulp sf - outside the works of the prolific Ron GOULART, which are infested by logically malfunctioning robots of every conceivable variety, not exclusively with comic intent - is the narcissistic machine in Robots Have No Tails (1943-8; coll of linked stories 1952) by Henry KUTTNER (as Lewis Padgett). After 1945, when the atom bomb provoked a new suspicion of technology, attitudes to robots in sf became more ambivalent again. In 1947 Asimov published his first sinister-robot story, "Little Lost Robot", and Jack WILLIAMSON produced the classic "With Folded Hands", in which robot "humanoids" charged "to serve man, to obey, and to guard men from harm" take their mission too literally, and set out to ensure that no one endangers their own well being and that everyone is happy, even if that requires permanent tranquillization or prefrontal lobotomy. Many writers did not relinquish their loyalty to machines; Asimov and Simak remained steadfastly pro-robot, and Williamson relented somewhat in his sequel to "With Folded Hands", The Humanoids (1949) - although the ending of the novel may have been suggested by John W. CAMPBELL Jr rather than being a spontaneous expression of Williamson's own technophilic tendencies - but most robot stories of the 1950s involve some kind of confrontation and conflict. Robots kill or attempt to kill humans in "Lost Memory" (1952) by Peter Phillips (1920- ), "Second Variety" (1953) by Philip K. DICK, "Short in the Chest" (1954) by Idris Seabright (Margaret ST CLAIR), "First to Serve" (1954) by Algis BUDRYS, The Naked Sun (1956) by Asimov and "Mark XI" (1957; vt "Mark Elf") by Cordwainer SMITH. The mistaken-identity motif takes on sinister or unfortunate associations in Asimov's "Satisfaction Guaranteed" (1951), Dick's "Impostor" (1953), Walter M. MILLER's "The Darfsteller" (1955) and Robert BLOCH's "Comfort Me, My Robot" (1955). Robot courtroom dramas include Simak's "How-2" (1954), Asimov's "Galley Slave" (1957) and del Rey's "Robots Should Be Seen" (1958). Man-robot boxing matches are featured in "Title Fight" (1956) by William Campbell Gault, "Steel" (1956) by Richard MATHESON and "The Champ" (1958) by Robert Presslie. The robot is an instrument of judgement in "Two-Handed Engine" (1955) by Kuttner and C.L. MOORE. Black comedies involving robots include several stories by Robert SHECKLEY, notably "Watchbird" (1953) and "The Battle" (1954), although Sheckley's classic story in this vein was the later "The Cruel Equations" (1971). One story which deviates markedly from the pattern is Boucher's Catholic fantasy "The Quest for St Aquin" (1951), in which a perfectly logical robot emulates Thomas Aquinas and deduces the reality of God; but in the main robot stories of the 1950s reflected profound anxieties concerning the relationship between Man and machine. Asimov's Caves of Steel (1954), which deals in some depth with its hero's anti-machine prejudices and his mechanized environment, brings this anxiety clearly into focus.As post-Hiroshima anxiety began to ebb away in the late 1950s, a more relaxed attitude to the robot became evident, humour and gentle irony coming to the fore in such stories as those in Harry HARRISON's War with the Robots (1958-62; coll 1962), Brian W. ALDISS's "But Who Can Replace a Man?" (1958), Fritz LEIBER's The Silver Eggheads (1961) and Poul ANDERSON's "The Critique of Impure Reason" (1962). The old sentimentality returned to the robot story in full force in Simak's "All the Traps of Earth" (1960), and soon reached new depths of sickliness in Ray BRADBURY's "I Sing the Body Electric!" (1969). The rehabilitation of the robot was completed by Barrington J. BAYLEY's study in robot existentialism, The Soul of the Robot (1974; rev 1976), and its sequel, The Rod of Light (1985), and by Asimov's "That Thou Art Mindful of Him" (1974) and "The Bicentennial Man" (1976), which took the robot's philosophical self-analysis to its logical conclusion, ending with the identification of the robot as a thoroughly "human" being. Asimov later set out to integrate his robot stories into the Future History of his Foundation series in such novels as THE ROBOTS OF DAWN (1983) and Robots and Empire (1985); he also wrote a series of juvenile robot stories in collaboration with his wife Janet ASIMOV, begun with Norby the Mixed-Up Robot (1983), and lent his name to a series of SHARED-WORLD novels set in Isaac Asimov's Robot City, begun with Odyssey (1987) by Michael P. KUBE-MCDOWELL. Janet Asimov carried the family tradition forward in Mind Transfer (1988), which explores the possibilities of robot SEX alongside philosophical discussions of robotic "humanness". Other exercises in robot existentialism are featured in Sheila MACLEOD's Xanthe and the Robots (1977) and Walter TEVIS's angst-ridden Mockingbird (1980).Robot philosophy of a less earnest but cleverer kind is extensively featured in Stanislaw LEM's robotic fables, collected in The Cyberiad (coll 1965; trans 1974) and Mortal Engines (coll trans 1977). Robot RELIGION and MYTHOLOGY are featured in Robert F. YOUNG's "Robot Son" (1959), Roger ZELAZNY's "For a Breath I Tarry" (1966), Simak's A Choice of Gods (1972) and Gordon EKLUND's "The Shrine of Sebastian" (1973). The integration of the robot into human religious culture is celebrated in Robert SILVERBERG's "Good News from the Vatican" (1971), about the election of the first robot pope. Some humans, at least, are prepared to fight for the freedom of ex-colonial robots in James P. HOGAN's Code of the Lifemaker (1983). The awkward question of whether one would let one's daughter marry a robot is squarely addressed in Tanith LEE's The Silver Metal Lover (1982), and the problems of an orphaned robot trying to get by in a puzzling and hostile world are hilariously displayed in RODERICK (1980) and Roderick at Random (1983) by John T. SLADEK. The homicidal robot, although an endangered species, has not quite become extinct: a robot executioner is featured in Roger Zelazny's "Home Is the Hangman" (1975) and a robot psychopath whose "asimov circuits" have failed is the antihero of Sladek's Tik-Tok (1983). The killer-robot, however, made its most successful comeback during the 1980s and 1990s in movies rather than books ( CINEMA for listing of examples). The "paranoid android" Marvin (actually a robot), with his "brain the size of a planet", is a major character in the various versions of Douglas ADAMS's Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy saga, and for a time attained cult-hero status. The writer whose work confirms the identification of Man and robot most strongly is Philip K. Dick, who usually preferred the term "android". His most notable stories using humanoid machines to address the question of what the word "human" can or should mean are DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (1968), "The Electric Ant" (1969) and We Can Build You (1969-70; 1972). "Someday," he said in his essay "The Android and the Human" (1973), "a human being may shoot a robot which has come out of a General Electrics factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was the human's beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them." This irony is explored in the character Jonas, in Gene WOLFE's The Book of the New Sun (1980-83), a robot who gradually acquires human prostheses.Anthologies of robot stories include The Robot and the Man (anth 1953) ed Martin GREENBERG, The Coming of the Robots (anth 1963) ed Sam MOSKOWITZ, Invasion of the Robots (anth 1965) ed Roger ELWOOD, and The Metal Smile (anth 1968) ed Damon KNIGHT. Science Fiction Thinking Machines (anth 1954) ed Groff CONKLIN has a section on robots. [BS]See also: AUTOMATION; COMPUTERS; CYBERNETICS; CYBORGS; INTELLIGENCE; TECHNOLOGY. ROBU, CORNEL (1938- ) Romanian lecturer in literature (at Cluj-Napoca University) and sf critic, some of whose many articles have appeared in English, including "A Key to Science Fiction: The Sublime" in FOUNDATION #42 (1988). He ed the 1st reprint and critical edition (1986), with afterword in English, of the early Romanian sf novel In anul 4000 sau O calatorie la Venus ["In the Year 4000, or A Voyage to Venus"] (1899) by Victor Anestin, and also ed the anthology of Romanian sf Timpul este umbra noastra: Science-fiction romanesc dinultimele doua decenii: Antologie comentata ["Time is Our Shadow: Romanian Science Fiction 1969-1989: Anthology with Commentary"] (anth 1991), with an afterword in English. A more general work is Panorama romanului romanesc contemporan: 1944-1974 ["Panorama of the Contemporary Romanian Novel: 1944-74"] (1974) with Ion Vlad. For this encyclopedia CR wrote the entry on ROMANIA and contributed ideas to that on SENSE OF WONDER. [PN] ROCHESTER, GEORGE E. [r] SCOOPS. ROCHON, ESTHER (1948- ) Canadian writer who began publishing sf with "L'Initiateur et les etrangers" ["The Initiator and the Strangers"] for Marie-Francoise in 1964, publishing stories frequently and cofounding the journal imagine . . . ( CANADA) in 1979. With her first novel, En Hommage aux araignees ["In Praise of Spiders"] (1974; rev as a juvenile vt L'Etranger sous la ville ["The Stranger under the City"] 1986), she began the Vrenalik sequence of tales set in an ALTERNATE-WORLD archipelago, a venue of the sort used by many Quebecois writers to express the St Lawrence River's domination of the geography of Quebec, just as some English-speaking Canadian writers tend to set their tales on the shores of glaciated lakes. L'Epuisement du Soleil ["The Draining of the Sun"] (1985), part of which first appeared as Der Traumer in der Zitadelle ["The Dreamer in the Citadel"] (1977 Germany), most of the stories assembled in Le Traversier ["The Ferry"] (coll 1987), L'Espace du diamant ["The Space of the Diamond"] (1990) and most of the stories assembled in Le Piege a souvenirs ["The Trap of Memories"] (coll 1991) are also set in this venue. Of her novels only Coquillage (1986; trans David Lobdell as The Shell 1990) is set outside the Vrenalik world, though it too is set on an ISLAND, where several human characters plunge into a profound sexual liaison with the eponymous ALIEN. Like most WOMEN SF WRITERS at work in Quebec today, ER often depicts characters who have to encounter and deal with the Other on their own territory and without going into outer space, which has stimulated FEMINIST and political readings of her work. In 1986 and 1987 she received the Grand Prix de la science-fiction et du fantastique quebecois. [LP/JC] ROCKETEER, THE (vt The Adventures of the Rocketeer) Film (1991). Walt Disney. Dir Joe Johnston, starring Bill Campbell, Jennifer Connelly, Alan Arkin, Timothy Dalton, Paul Sorvino. Screenplay Danny Bilson, Paul DeMeo. 108 mins. Colour.This enjoyable big-budget re-creation of the thrills of 1930s B-serials - more accurate but less popular than Steven SPIELBERG's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) - features gangsters, G-men, Nazis, pilots, movie stars, a dirigible, Howard Hughes (1905-1976) and (in thin disguise) Errol Flynn (1909-1959) and Rondo Hatton (1894-1946). The Flynn character, played with relish by Dalton, is the villain; the gangster boss (Sorvino) discovers his true loyalties ("I'm a hundred per cent American") when he realizes he has been helping Nazis steal an experimental rocket pack; there is an excellent re-creation of a Nazi propaganda cartoon. Unlike the greedy, cynical, individualistic Indiana Jones, the old-fashioned Rocketeer, the uncharismatic Campbell, is law-abiding and patriotic - and outshone by the scheming Dalton. [MK] ROCKETS The Chinese were using skyrockets as fireworks in the 11th century, and adapted them as WEAPONS of WAR in the 13th. Europeans borrowed the idea, but rocket-missiles were abandoned as muskets and rifles became more efficient. A 15th-century Chinese legend tells of one Wan Hu, who attached rockets to a chair, strapped himself in, and blasted off for the unknown. A similar notion was used by CYRANO DE BERGERAC in the first part of L'autre monde (1657), in which the hero straps 3 rows of rockets to his back, intending that as each set burns out it will ignite the next, so renewing the boost; the device proves impracticable.War rockets were used against the British in India at the end of the 18th century, and the British reinstituted rocket technology, using rocket missiles in the Napoleonic War and in the US War of 1812; their rockets used in an attack on Fort Henry in 1814 inspired the reference to "the rocket's red glare" in "The Star-Spangled Banner" by Francis Scott Key (1780-1843), who witnessed the battle. Rockets fell into disuse again with the development of better field artillery, but the possibility of using them as a means of TRANSPORTATION encouraged some early experiments with unfortunate animals as passengers.In 1898 Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY wrote a classic article, "The Probing of Space by Means of Jet Devices" (1903); he had earlier written "On the Moon" (1893), "Dreams of Earth and Sky" (1895) and other stories and essays collected in The Call of the Cosmos (coll trans 1963) in company with the didactic novel Outside the Earth (1920; trans 1960 as Beyond the Planet Earth). In the same period the US inventor Robert Goddard (1882-1945) - reputedly inspired by reading H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898)-also began thinking seriously about SPACE FLIGHT, and in 1911 he began experimenting with rockets. He was working towards a liquid-fuel stage rocket - a notion applied to the business of interplanetary travel in John MUNRO's romance A Trip to Venus (1897). Goddard launched the first liquid-fuel rocket in 1926. Meanwhile, the German rocket-research pioneer Hermann Oberth (1894-1989) - author of Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen ["The Rocket into Interplanetary Space"] (1921) - and others, including Willy LEY, formed a "Society for Space Travel". In 1928 Oberth was offered the opportunity to build a rocket by a German film company, which hired him as technical adviser for Fritz LANG's film Die FRAU IM MOND (1929); his experimental rocket was to be launched before the film's premiere as a publicity stunt, but the project collapsed. Oberth began anew with a number of assistants, including Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), and managed to get a number of rockets off the ground in 1931. The project was abandoned as Germany's economy crashed, but von Braun joined a rocket development project with the German Army while Ley emigrated to the USA. In 1937 the Army project acquired a large research centre at Peenemunde on an island in the Baltic, where von Braun and his staff developed the V-2 rocket bomb. This arrived too late to make any difference to the course of WWII, and von Braun fled to the Bavarian Alps in order to surrender to the USA rather than wait for the Russians. Goddard had spent WWII developing take-off rockets for US Navy aircraft.Von Braun went to work for a US research programme. The project developed the Jupiter rocket to launch the USA's first space satellite in 1958, and ultimately the Saturn rocket which carried the first men to the MOON. During this period a number of US and UK sf writers - most notably Arthur C. CLARKE, a leading member of the British Interplanetary Society founded by P.E. Cleator (1908- ) in the 1930s - were active and enthusiastic propagandists for the space programme. Even before WWII the sf PULP MAGAZINES had taken a considerable interest in rocket research - SCIENCE WONDER STORIES publicized an occasion when "The Rocket Comes to the Front Page" (Dec 1929) with an unsigned article that was probably by Hugo GERNSBACK, and ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION published such articles as Leo Vernon's "Rocket Flight" (1938). The UK TALES OF WONDER published Clarke's "We Can Rocket to the Moon - Now!" (1939). After WWII George PAL made the film DESTINATION MOON (1950), with script by Robert A. HEINLEIN (remotely based on his Rocket Ship Galileo [1947]). Ray BRADBURY became particularly fascinated by the mythology of the rocket and followed up his "I, Rocket" (1944) with the early Martian Chronicles episode "Rocket Summer" (1947) and the curious non-sf story "Outcast of the Stars" (1950; vt "The Rocket"). C.M. KORNBLUTH based his novel Takeoff (1952) on the ironic theme of a crackpot project to build an unworkable rocket which conceals a real attempt to build a practicable SPACESHIP - testimony to the ambivalence of contemporary attitudes to rocket research. As late as 1956 a newly appointed British Astronomer Royal, Richard Woolley, was reported to have declared that talk of space travel was "utter bilge", so encapsulating a considerable body of opinion which endured pugnaciously until the ascent of Sputnik - in 1957.There is no other historical sequence of events in which fact and fiction are so closely entwined, or which seems to justify so well the imaginative reach of HARD-SF writers. Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and Oberth were visionaries more closely akin to speculative writers than to their contemporary theorists. Rocket research has always been dependent on the practical demands of hot and cold wars, but it is surely true-as laboured in James A. MICHENER's pedestrian epic "faction" Space (1982) - that for some of the people involved the real objective was always that of Wan Hu, Cyrano, Munro and Tsiolkovsky. Pierre BOULLE's Garden on the Moon (1964; trans 1965), in which the German rocket scientists are entranced with the notion of cosmic voyaging even as they develop the V-2, probably has an element of truth in it. [BS]See also: ION DRIVE; PREDICTION; SPACE FLIGHT; SPACESHIPS. ROCKETSHIP X-M (vt Expedition Moon) Film (1950). Lippert. Prod/dir/written Kurt Neumann, starring Lloyd Bridges, Osa Massen, John Emery. 78 mins. B/w.This cheap movie was hastily made to beat the more illustrious DESTINATION MOON (1950) to the theatres. A rocket on its way to the Moon is diverted by a storm of meteors and lands on MARS instead. The astronauts find evidence that the planet has suffered an atomic war, and encounter a race of MUTANTS. In an unexpectedly downbeat ending the returning rocket crashes on Earth and all are killed. Some cineastes like this SPACE OPERA better than the more technological film on whose advance publicity it was designed to get a free ride - especially the atmospheric Mars sequences, tinted red in the film's original prints and well photographed by Karl Struss in the Mojave Desert.A German director who came to Hollywood in 1925, Neumann is best known for The FLY (1958); he also made KRONOS (1957). [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA. ROCKET STORIES US DIGEST-size magazine. 3 issues, Apr, July, Sep 1953, published by Space Publications, New York, ed Wade KAEMPFERT (Lester DEL REY for #1 and #2, Harry HARRISON for #3). RS was a companion magazine to FANTASY MAGAZINE/ FANTASY FICTION, SPACE SCIENCE FICTION and the 1952-4 SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES. All 4 magazines were closed down when the publisher lost interest. RS, slanted to the juvenile market, contained fiction of fair quality, including early work by Algis BUDRYS, but at the height of the SF-MAGAZINE boom, with well over 30 sf magazines being published in the USA, it was effectively invisible. [FHP/PN] ROCKLYNNE, ROSS Working name of US writer Ross Louis Rocklin (1913-1988) for his sf stories, most of which appeared in such magazines as ASF from the mid-1930s up to 1947, beginning with "Man of Iron" for ASF in 1935. He specialized in SPACE-OPERA plots constructed around sometimes ingenious "scientific" problems, such as how to escape from the centre of a hollow planet in "At the Center of Gravity" (1936), the first of the Colbie and Deverel series assembled with similar material in The Men and the Mirror (coll of linked stories 1973); the story is flawed by the fact that RR did not realize that a symmetrical hollow shell does not have an internal, centrally directed gravity field. A second series, The Darkness, was assembled as The Sun Destroyers (fixup 1973 dos); it features vast, nebula-like beings ( LIVING WORLDS) and follows their life-courses through millions of years from galaxy to galaxy without the intervention of mankind. RR had one of the most interesting, if florid, imaginations of the PULP-MAGAZINE writers of his time, and wrote very much better than most. He continued to publish sf, rather sporadically, up to 1954 (he was interested in DIANETICS at that time); and later made a formidable comeback with several stories in 1968, demonstrating that he had no difficulty at all in adjusting his narrative voice to the more sophisticated demands of the later period - as in "Ching Witch!", one of the most assured tours de force in Harlan ELLISON's Again, Dangerous Visions (anth 1972), an ironic tale about the curious morality of a man who, as a result of GENETIC ENGINEERING, has a lot of cat in him. [JC/PN]About the author: The Work of Ross Rocklynne: An Annotated Bibliography (1989 chap) by Douglas MENVILLE.See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; TIME PARADOXES; WAR. ROCKWOOD, ROY House name used on JUVENILE SERIES published by Cupples & Leon of New York, and on one occasion by the Mershon Company of New Jersey. The best of the RR titles are the first 6 vols (1906-13) in the Great Marvel sequence by Howard R. GARIS, who probably wrote from outlines by Edward STRATEMEYER. In his autobiography Ghost of the Hardy Boys Leslie McFarlane says he wrote some 1920s novels in the Dan Fearless series under the name RR. Other writers who worked under the RR name, which was used also on the 20 Bomba the Jungle Boy books (1926-38), remain unidentified. [JC]See also: CHILDREN'S SF; HOLLOW EARTH; OUTER PLANETS. ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, THE Film (1975). A Lou Adler-Michael White Production/20th Century-Fox. Dir Jim Sharman, starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O'Brien, Patricia Quinn, Little Nell (Laura Campbell), Jonathan Adams, Peter Hinwood, Meatloaf, Charles Gray. Screenplay Sharman, O'Brien, based on O'Brien's stage musical The Rocky Horror Show (1973). 101 mins. Colour. This UK film created little stir when first released in the USA, but by mid-1976 it was attracting large cult audiences at midnight showings; the phenomenon grew throughout most of the late 1970s. TRHPS became the cult movie of all time, with its audiences becoming part of the performance, dressed as favourite characters, singing along, shouting wisecracks at the screen, and so on. The phenomenon is analysed at length in Midnight Movies (1983) by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum.The film itself is not entirely mediocre - Curry's performance as transvestite Dr Frank-N-Furter from the Planet Transsexual in the Galaxy Transylvania is memorable for the energy of its polymorphous perversity, based largely on a lampooning of Mick Jagger - but it is ill paced, has some dreadful performances, and is too long. The story is about shocking the bourgeois, which is also its object; this was the era of androgynous singer David Bowie, when bisexuality, at least in personal appearance, was becoming fashionable in the more radical fringes of youth culture. Sarandon and Bostwick play the two normally dull young people seduced by the mad doctor in his gothic mansion after their car has broken down on a dark and stormy night.TRHPS, an example of RECURSIVE SF, begins with a song affectionately recalling the delights of early sf movies, "Science Fiction, Double Feature"; another of the better numbers is "The Time Warp", a song and dance. Sf references abound, especially to the FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER: the mad doctor has created an artificial man, Rocky Horror, as a sexual plaything. Eventually Frank-N-Furter is lasered down, and the Gothic mansion is warped back to its planet of origin by Riff Raff the butler (O'Brien), who turns out to be an alien. TRHPS is notable for summing up an entire generation's attitude to sf: it is presented not as a bold facing-up to the challenges of the future but as a campy nostalgia for the luridnesses of the past. [PN]See also: MUSIC. RODAN RADON. RODDENBERRY, GENE (1921-1991) US tv scriptwriter, producer, director and creator of STAR TREK. GR began writing in the late 1940s while working as a pilot for a commercial airline. In 1953 he sold his first tv script and in 1956 his first that was sf, a genre in which he had not previously been particularly interested. In 1954 he became a full-time tv writer. In 1963 he created and produced a series of his own - The Lieutenant - for MGM, and in the same year conceived Star Trek but had difficulty launching the project; and it was not to be until 1966 that the show reached tv screens. Star Trek was not a great success in terms of ratings and was ended in 1968, but over the next decade, partly as a consequence of reruns, the show built up a huge following.After Star Trek, GR spent much time trying to launch other tv sf series, but without success, although 4 pilot episodes appeared as made-for-tv films: GENESIS II (1973), PLANET EARTH (1974), The QUESTOR TAPES (1974) and STRANGE NEW WORLD (1975). In 1977, turning from sf to horror, GR wroteSpectre, a tv pilot, directed by Clive Donner, along the lines of KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER, with Robert Culp as a demonologist detective; this too failed to be sold as a series.Throughout the 1970s a Star Trek revival was continually announced, either as a tv series or as a theatrical film, but it was only after the success of STAR WARS (1977) that such a project became feasible. In 1979 GR finally produced STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE, dir Robert WISE, with the cast of the old series stranded among state-of-the-art special effects. The announced budget was much inflated by many years of development costs having almost nothing to do with the final film; without such irrelevant factors the film would have been the most successful of the ST movies. As it was, on the official figures, though commercially successful, it was by no means the blockbuster that Paramount had envisioned, and GR took a less personal interest in the ongoing sequels, of which there have been 5 to date, commencing with STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982); these eschew the daring but tedious mystical approach of Wise's film and revert to the cosy soap-and-sentiment basics of the original series. In 1987 GR cowrote and produced Encounter at Farpoint, the pilot episode of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION (1987-current), a sequel tv series set 80 years on in the Star Trek universe; he continued to serve as overall creative guide, but not on a day-to-day basis, and died shortly before his basic concept was spun off into a third tv series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (begun 1992).The Making of Star Trek (1968) by Stephen E. Whitfield and GR was actually written by Whitfield and The Making of Star Trek The Motion Picture (1980) by Susan Sackett and GR was written by Sackett. GR was also credited as author of the novelization Star Trek: The Motion Picture * (1979). [JB/KN/PN]About the author: Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry (1994) by David ALEXANDER; Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind"Star Trek"(1994) by Joel Engel. RODGERS, ALAN (1959 - ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with"The Boy who Came Back from the Dead" inMasques #2 (anth 1987) ed J.N. Williamson (1932- ), a strongly moving fantasy tale later assembled with other work in New Life for the Dead (coll 1991). AR's first novel, Blood of the Children (1989), is horror, but his second, Fire (1990), combines sf and horror in a NEAR-FUTURE story in which a fundamentalist US President threatens a nuclear attack against the USSR while at the same time a lab explosion unleashes a virus which raises the dead and a telepathic entity which takes on the aspect of the Beast of Revelation. The plot then thickens pyrotechnically. Night (1991) is horror. [JC] RODMAN, ERIC [s] Robert SILVERBERG. ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY US tv series (1970-72). A Jack Laird Production for Universal TV/NBC. Created Rod SERLING. 93 plays: the 1969 2-hour pilot had 3 plays; season 1, part of a mixture of dramas called Four-in-One, consisted of 6 50min episodes containing 2-3 playlets; season 2, under the Rod Serling's Night Gallery title, had 23 of the same sort of 50min episodes; season 3 had 16 25min episodes, each with 1 playlet. Colour.Created by Rod Serling - who in the early 1960s had made the series The TWILIGHT ZONE - RSNG was primarily made up of supernatural stories but did contain a small number of sf episodes; many of the plays were scripted by Serling from original stories by such writers as C.M. KORNBLUTH, Fritz LEIBER, H.P. LOVECRAFT and A.E. VAN VOGT, and Richard MATHESON scripted several other segments. One of the 3 plays in the pilot, starring Joan Crawford, was Steven SPIELBERG's debut; other directors included John BADHAM, Leonard Nimoy and Jeannot Szwarc. After a time Serling lost creative control and grew to dislike the series, the studio requiring more monsters and fewer subtleties; however, he continued to introduce it, strolling through a sinister art gallery and pointing to a relevant painting before each play began. RSNG was on the whole a disappointment after The Twilight Zone. 2 collections of stories by Serling were series spin-offs: Night Gallery * (coll 1971) and Night Gallery 2 * (coll 1972). Also relevant is Rod Serling's Night Gallery Reader * (anth 1987) ed Carol Serling (Serling's widow) with Martin H. GREENBERG and Charles G. WAUGH. [JB/PN] ROE, IVAN [r] Richard SAVAGE. ROESSNER, MICHAELA Working name of US writer Michaela-Marie Roessner-Herman (1950- ), whose first novel, the widely admired Walkabout Woman (1988), is a fantasy, though she received, all the same, the JOHN W. CAMPBELL award for that year; her second novel, Vanishing Point (1993) is, however, sf. Set in California 30 years after the mysterious disappearance of 90% of the human race, and climaxing in the edifice-like Winchester Mystery House in San Jose (a real building), the story concerns the efforts of the protagonist and others to plumb the depths of the mystery; but if there is a single explanation it is not-after a fashion typical of the sf writers who have come to maturity in the 1990s-vouchsafed the searchers, though the rhetoric of virtual particle physics is invoked, and hitches in the universe-wide unfolding of cosmological destiny are suggested, along with a sense that ALTERNATE WORLDS might be far more distressingly complex than normally depicted in sf. [JC] ROGER, NOELLE Pseudonym of Swiss writer Helene Dufour Pittard (1874-1953), whose sf novel, Le nouvel Adam (1924; trans P.O. Crowhurst as The New Adam 1926 UK), is about a wholly logical and unpleasant SUPERMAN created by gland transplants. Finally, after having invented a nuclear force field, he blows himself up. [JC]Other work: Celui qui voit (1926; trans Robert Lancaster as He Who Sees 1935 UK), occult fantasy.See also: ADAM AND EVE. ROGER CORMAN'S FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND. ROGERS, ALVA (1923-1982) US writer and artist, nicknamed "Red" for the colour of his hair and politics. A long-time sf fan, he drew the covers for a number of 1940s FANZINES as well as some for the (UK) AMERICAN FICTION series. His A Requiem for Astounding (1964), though nostalgic and largely uncritical, provides a valuable history, rich in story synopses, of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION before the name-change to Analog. [MJE/JC] ROGERS, HUBERT (1898-1982) Canadian illustrator who studied art at Toronto Technical School and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He began his professional career in 1925 in New York, painting covers for books and for various magazines, including Adventure and The ARGOSY . He entered sf publishing with a cover painting for ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION in 1939, and painted 58 covers and drew interior ILLUSTRATIONS for 60 issues of that magazine 1939-56. He and William Timmins dominated the covers of ASF during the 1940s (HR did all of them Apr 1940-Aug 1942), a period when his comparatively muted style gave the magazine something of the dignity John W. CAMPBELL Jr craved: more serious (and even solemn) than those of many of his colleagues, HR's covers epitomized the technological aspirations of ASF in its more high-minded mode. His cover painting for "Fury" (May 1947) by Lawrence O'Donnell (Henry KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE) is considered his premier painting, and is one of the best covers ever put on an sf magazine. HR also did jacket paintings for several hardcover books, including those for 3 Robert A. HEINLEIN novels from SHASTA. He left sf during the 1950s to become one of Canada's foremost portrait painters. [JG/PN] ROGERS, LEBBEUS HARDING (1847-1932) US businessman and writer whose The Kite Trust (A Romance of Wealth) (1900), which may have been self-published, follows the juvenile kite-inventors and founders of the eponymous compact into adulthood, enormous wealth, the discovery of new energy sources and the construction of transatlantic tunnels, while all the while an interplanetary spirit instructs the cast on the history of the Solar System. [JC] ROGERS, MELVA [s] Rog PHILLIPS. ROGERS, MICHAEL (ALAN) (1951- ) US novelist and rock critic whose first-published sf story was "She Still Do" as by M. Alan Rogers, for If in 1970. His first sf novel, Mindfogger (1973), features a hippy inventor whose mind-fogging device acts as a gentle hallucinogen; though the use to which he puts it is against an armaments company, we are left wondering if hip mind control is preferable to mind control by right-wing powers. Forbidden Sequence (1987) is a TECHNOTHRILLER about gene-splitting. [PN/JC] ROGERS, PAT [s] Arthur PORGES. ROGERSOHN, WILLIAM Dennis HUGHES. ROGOZ, ADRIAN [r] ROMANIA. ROHAN, MICHAEL SCOTT (1951- ) UK (Scottish) Oxford-educated law graduate and author, whose nonfiction books include an introduction to home computing and a study of the Viking era; he also reviews for Opera Now. He began publishing sf with stories like "The Insect Tapes" in Aries 1 (anth 1979) ed John Grant (Paul BARNETT). His first novel was Run to the Stars (dated 1982 but 1983), signed Mike Scott Rohan, a promising Scots-in-space thriller featuring relativistic WEAPONS and an alien message, with nasty Earth bureaucrats ready to attack their own space colony. Then, like several UK writers of the period, he began genre crossing; most of his fiction since has been FANTASY - the genre in which he seems most at home - beginning with The Ice King (1986; vt Burial Rites 1987 US) with Allan SCOTT under the joint pseudonym Michael Scot, a supernatural thriller involving Norse mythology. There followed the more notable The Winter of the World trilogy - The Anvil of Ice (1986), The Forge in the Forest (1987) and The Hammer of the Sun (1988) - set in an invented frozen world imagined in some depth; though the writing is sometimes floridly rhetorical. A young smith sets himself against the entropic Powers; quests follow; spring comes, but at a cost. MSR then made a partial return to a kind of sf, in the jaunty, romantic SCIENCE FANTASY Spiral trilogy, comprising Chase the Morning (1990),The Gates of Noon(1992) and Cloud Castles(1994), where real and magical ALTERNATE WORLDS(the coreand the spiral) intersect, and a computer program can become a spell. The series is intelligent, well thought-out, and surprisingly full of observations about near-future POLITICS. A second collaboration with Scott, A Spell of Empire: The Horns of Tartarus (1992), was published under their real names. But perhaps his finest work to date is the solo historical fantasy The Lord of Middle Air (1994), set partly in thirteenth-century Scotland (the Border area) and partly in a very convincing faery land, in which a young Scots chieftain encounters and has his life changed by the (real-life) magician Michael Scot. (MSR claims Michael Scot as an ancestor.) MSR has consistently grown in stature as a writer throughout his career. [PN] ROHMER, RICHARD H. (1924- ) Canadian writer whose novels almost invariably express a sense of fragile PARANOIA about the political and economic prospects for his native land, thinly stretched as it is along the US border. Ultimatum (1973) and its sequel, Exxoneration (1974), deal directly with Canadian-US conflicts in a NEAR-FUTURE frame. Exodus/UK (1975) and its sequel, Separation (1976; rev vt Separation Two 1981), turn inward to express a similar paranoia about separatism. Singletons that deal worriedly with similar material include Balls! (1979), Periscope Red (1980), Triad (1981), Retaliation (1982) and Starmageddon (1986). [JC] ROHMER, SAX Pseudonym of UK journalist and popular thriller writer Arthur Sarsfield Ward (1883-1959). He started writing in 1909 and published in Cassell's Magazine, Collier's Weekly, The Premier Magazine and numerous other early general fiction magazines and BOYS' PAPERS. SR capitalized on contemporary anxiety about the Chinese, generated by the Boxer Rebellion and the fictions of M.P. SHIEL and others, to produce many sensational novels about the Yellow Peril. Most famous is his series about Dr Fu Manchu, a malign scientific genius and leader of a secret Chinese organization bent on world domination. This VILLAIN appeared in The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu (1912-13 The Story Teller as "Fu-Manchu"; fixup 1913; vt The Insidious Dr Fu-Manchu 1913 US), The Devil Doctor (1914-15 Collier's Weekly as "Fu-Manchu & Co."; fixup 1916; vt The Return of Dr Fu-Manchu 1916 US), The Si-Fan Mysteries (1916-17 Collier's Weekly; fixup 1917; vt The Hand of Fu-Manchu 1917 US), Daughter of Fu Manchu (1931), The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) - filmed as The MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932) - Fu Manchu's Bride (1933 US; vt The Bride of Fu Manchu 1933 UK), The Trail of Fu Manchu (1934), President Fu Manchu (1936), The Drums of Fu Manchu (1938), The Island of Fu Manchu (1941), The Shadow of Fu Manchu (1948), Re-Enter Fu Manchu (1957; vt Re-Enter Dr Fu Manchu 1957 UK) and Emperor Fu Manchu (1959). The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other Stories (coll 1973) assembles various tales. The Book of Fu Manchu (omni 1929 containing 3 novels; exp to 4 novels 1929 US) features the first volumes of the sequence. Although these and other novels by SR are primarily occult thrillers, they contain many sf elements.Apart from this main series, SR wrote several others. The Sumuru series is about an oriental villainess: Nude in Mink (1950 US; vt Sins of Sumuru 1950 UK), Sumuru (1951 US; vt Slaves of Sumuru 1952 UK), Virgin in Flames 1952; vt The Fire Goddess 1952 US), Return of Sumuru (1954 US; vt Sand and Satin 1955 UK) and Sinister Madonna (1956). The Gaston Max series comprises The Yellow Claw (1915), The Golden Scorpion (1919), The Day the World Ended (1930), set in and around a fortress guarded by DEATH RAYS, and Seven Sins (1943). The Paul Harley series consists of Bat-Wing (1921), Fire-Tongue (1921) and 11 short stories. The Red Kerry series - Dope (1919) and Yellow Shadows (1925) - is not sf/fantasy.SR also wrote several stage plays, including an adaptation from C.J. Cutcliffe HYNE's Captain Kettle series. Several of his novels have been made into films ( The FACE OF FU MANCHU ) and the Dr Fu Manchu sequence was adapted by him into a popular RADIO series.Dr Fu Manchu was widely imitated, notably by Roland Daniels, Anthony RUD and Nigel Vane, and was a strong influence on the development of the more recent hero/villain quasi-sf thrillers written by Lester DENT, Ian FLEMING and many others. Two direct imitations were the short-lived magazines The MYSTERIOUS WU FANG and DR. YEN SIN. SR's only book under another name was a supernatural/theological novel, Wulfheim (1950) as by Michael Furey. [JE]Other works: The Sins of Severac Bablon (1914); Brood of the Witch Queen (1914 The Premier Magazine; 1918); Tales of Secret Egypt (coll 1918); The Orchard of Tears (1918); The Quest of the Sacred Slipper (1913-14 Short Stories as by Hassan of Aleppo; fixup 1919); The Dream Detective (coll 1920; with 1 story added 1925); The Green Eyes of Bast (1920); The Haunting of Low Fennel (coll 1920); Tales of Chinatown (coll 1922); Grey Face (1924); Moon of Madness (1927), not fantasy; She who Sleeps (1928); Yu'an Hee See Laughs (1932), not fantasy; The Emperor of America (1929); Tales of East and West (coll 1932 UK; same title, different stories, coll 1933 US); The Bat Flies Low (1935); White Velvet (1936), not fantasy; The Golden Scorpion Omnibus (coll 1938); The Sax Rohmer Omnibus (coll 1938); Salute to Bazarada and Other Stories (coll 1939); The Moon is Red (1954); The Secret of Holm Peel and Other Strange Stories (coll 1970).About the author: Sax Rohmer: A Bibliography (1963 chap) by Bradford M. DAY; Master of Villainy (1972) by Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer. Van Ash also wrote Ten Years Beyond Baker Street (1984), a novel in which Fu Manchu meets Sherlock Holmes.See also: CANADA; GOTHIC SF; PULP MAGAZINES; WEAPONS. ROKER, A.B. Samuel BARTON. ROLANT, RENE R.L. FANTHORPE. ROLE-PLAYING GAMES GAMES AND TOYS. ROLFE, FREDERICK (WILLIAM) (1860-1913) UK author and eccentric, known as much for claiming the name "Frederick, Baron Corvo" as for his writing. The 9 "Reviews of Unwritten Books" (1903 The Monthly Review) with Sholto Douglas is an early articulation of the concept of alternate history ( ALTERNATE WORLDS), if only in a nonfiction format (one of the reviews, for instance, being of "Machiavelli's Despatches from the South African Campaign").Hubert's Arthur (written 1908-12; 1935) with H.C.H. Pirie-Gordon as by Prospero and Caliban, in which King John fails to kill and is overthrown by his nephew Arthur, is an early alternate-history novel, although its late publication date precludes any influence on that genre. The Weird of the Wanderer (1912), again with Pirie-Gordon as by Prospero and Caliban, is a fantasy, but Hadrian the Seventh (1904), on which FR's reputation as an author almost solely rests, is a genuine NEAR-FUTURE sf novel, set in 1910. Dealing with the rise to the Papacy of a frustrated candidate for priesthood, the novel offers a number of predictions regarding the future of Europe, including a vision of the Russian Revolution. [GF]About the author: There are many biographies, including A.J.A. Symons's famous The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (1934). More recent, and more reliable, is Frederick Rolfe: Baron Corvo (1977) by Miriam J. Benkovitz. ROLLERBALL Film (1975). United Artists. Dir Norman Jewison, starring James Caan, John Houseman, Maud Adams, John Beck. Screenplay William Harrison (1933- ), based on his "Roller Ball Murders" (1973). 129 mins, cut to 125 mins. Colour.That one man who stands tall and proud can topple a corrupt system by his example is the moral of this sluggish big-budget movie. In a future run by corporations, ordinary citizens are (implausibly) kept happy by a brutal gladiatorial spectator "sport" played on rollerskates and motorcycles, and, to keep the proletariat in their place, designed as an allegory of the futility of individual effort. Caan plays the team leader who proves the bosses wrong by winning, even when they progressively break all the rules to try to kill him. It has the theme but none of the verve, or even the convincing violence, of an exploitation movie; the high moral tone of the script (and the classical music on the sound track) are ludicrously at odds with the film's fundamental (but incompetent) voyeurism. [PN] ROLLOVER Film (1981). IPC Films/Orion. Dir Alan J. Pakula, starring Jane Fonda, Kris Kristofferson, Hume Cronyn. Screenplay David Shaber, from a story by Shaber, Howard Kohn, David Weir. 115 mins. Colour.R has a banker (Kristofferson) and an oil-company chairman (Fonda) uncovering a conspiracy in which the Saudi Arabians have, with the help of US banks, been secretly dumping dollars and buying gold. Threatened with exposure, the Saudis withdraw all funds from the banks and a world financial collapse ensues, with apocalyptic consequences. R is an ironic, diagrammatic thriller in which US individualists - innocent, greedy and emblematic - are helpless against a powerful establishment (much as in Pakula's best film, The Parallax View [1974], which has a marginally sf brain-washing theme). Cold, difficult, sophisticated, anti-capitalist, R was a commercial flop; it would have done better 8 years later. The doomsday scenarios of sf, unlike those of the real world, seldom feature ECONOMICS as the catalyst - probably because most people find money-manipulation too complex a topic - but R, rather like the financial thrillers of Paul E. ERDMAN, is a notable exception. [PN] ROLLS, BRIAN [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. ROMANIA Romanian sf is over a century old. 1873 marked the appearance of the novelette "Finis Rumaniae" ["The End of Romania"] by the obscure writer Al. N. Dariu; two years later came a future UTOPIA, Spiritele anului 3000 ["Spirits of the Year 3000"] (1875) by Demetriu G. Ionnescu (the form of his name used by the statesman Take Ionescu [1858-1922]). The earliest sf writer proper in Romania was Victor Anestin (1875-1918), whose first novel was In anul 4000 sau O calatorie la Venus ["In the Year 4000, or A Voyage to Venus"]; 1914 marked the almost simultaneous appearance of two "classic" novels of Romanian sf: O tragedie cereasca ["A Sky Tragedy"] (1914), again by Anestin, and Un roman in Luna ["A Romanian on the Moon"] (1914) by Henri Stahl (1877-1942). All these belong to the tradition of the "astronomical" novel, as it was known before WWI.Between the Wars the range of themes widened, the most notable novels being no longer "astronomical": examples are Baletul mecanic ["The Clockwork Ballet"] (1931) by Cezar Petrescu (1892-1961) and Orasele innecate ["The Drowned Cities"] (1936) by Felix Aderca (1891-1962). There were also some valuable short stories, including "Groaza" ["Horror"] (1936), "Manechinul lui Igor" ["Igor's Mannequin"] (1938) and "Ochiul cu doua pupile" ["The Two-Pupilled Eye"] (1939), all by Victor Papilian (1888-1956); a scientific fairy-tale, "Agerul Pamintului" ["The Deft Giant of the Earth"] (1939) by I.C. Vissarion (1879-1951); and above all 2 sf novelettes set in India (see below), by Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), better known in the West for his studies in comparative religion; he was Professor of the History of Religion at the University of Chicago 1956-86, and author of fundamental works in this field, written in French and translated all over the world.As a writer of fiction, Eliade belonged entirely to Romanian literature: he became one of the nation's major writers before WWII, while still living in Romania, and, when abroad afterwards, continued writing fiction exclusively in Romanian. He wrote both realistic and fantastic fiction, the latter including some genuine masterpieces: the novels Domnisoara Christina ["Miss Christina"] (1936) and Sarpele ["The Snake"] (1937), the novelettes "La tiganci" (1959; trans as " With the Gypsy Girls"1973 Denver Review) and Pe strada Mantuleasa ["On Mantuleasa Street"] (1968 France), and many others, including Foret Interdite (1955 France; in original Romanian as Noaptea de Sanziene 1971 France; trans Mac Linecott Rickette and Mary Park Stevenson as The Forbidden Forest 1978 US), a huge novel in which the search for IMMORTALITY is parallelled to a myth-saturated history of Romania. 5 of his writings are (somewhat borderline) sf. From his rich knowledge of Indian culture (he studied at the University of Calcutta 1928-31), Eliade extrapolated hypotheses drawn from, for example, Yoga and Tantra in a sciencefictional manner, as in the title story of Secretul doctorului Honigberger (coll 1940; trans William Ames Coates as Two Tales of the Occult 1970 US; vt Two Strange Tales 1986); the title story (here trans as "Doctor Honigberger's Secret") is about time distortion and INVISIBILITY; the volume also contains "Nopti la Serampore" (1939) (here trans as "Midnight in Serampore"), in which time reversibility reduces individual lifespans to infinitesimal proportions compared to the great time-intervals of supra-individuality. The short story "Un om mare" ["A Big Man"] (written 1945; 1948) is about a giant and is partly reminiscent of H.G. WELLS's The Food of the Gods (1904); it is included in Fantastic Tales (coll trans E. Tappe 1969 UK). The last 2 of his works of sf interest are novelettes written in Paris much later, both on the theme of MUTANTS: the hero of "Tinerete fara de tinerete . . ." (written 1976; 1978 Germany), which appears in English as the long title story of Youth without Youth (coll trans 1989 UK), is a mutant who becomes young and immortal after a thunderbolt; and in "Les trois Graces" ["The Three Graces"] (1976) Eliade transforms an idea he found in the Apocrypha in a cruel story about a rejuvenation treatment given to three old women suffering from cancer - they become unhappy mutants. A further English-language collection of Eliade's stories is Tales of the Sacred and Supernatural (coll trans 1981 US).Postwar Romanian sf can be thought of in terms of 3 generations of writers. To the first of these (now called "the old generation") belong Ovidiu Surianu (1918-1977), Mihu Dragomir (1919-1964), Mircea Serbanescu (1919- ), Vladimir Colin (1921-1991), Adrian Rogoz (1921- ), I.M. Stefan (1922- ), Victor Kernbach (1923- ), Sergiu Farcasan (1924- ), Camil Baciu (1926- ), Georgina-Viorica Rogoz (1927- ), Horia Arama (1930- ), Ion Hobana (1931- ) and many others including Romulus Barbulescu (1925- ) and George Anania (1941- ), who collaborated 1959-77 on 6 sf novels and several short stories. This generation was able to publish in the bimonthly Colectia 'Povestiristiintifico-fantastice' ["The Collection of 'Scientific-Fantastic Stories'"], the longest-lasting Romanian sf review, with 466 issues 1955-74 (editor-in-chief Adrian Rogoz). During its last years this review also published the early stories of a number of the then young writers (now known as "the middle generation"): Miron Scorobete (1933), Leonida Neamtu (1934-1991), Constantin Cublesan (1939- ), Voicu Bugariu (1939- ), Gheorghe Sasarman (1941- ), Mircea Oprita (1943- ) and others. They continued their ascension in the period 1974-82, when the Romanian literary scene was deprived of any sf periodical. Starting in 1982 the "new wave" of the 1980s emerged, the younger generation of writers who have succeeded during the past decade in changing the landscape of Romanian sf. This was a period of new outlets for sf writing, including Almanah Anticipatia ["Anticipation Almanac"], with 8 annual vols each over 300pp (editor-in-chief Ioan Eremia Albescu), and some sporadically appearing magazines and FANZINES, the most regular being from Timisoara: Helion (editor-in-chief Cornel Secu) and Paradox (editor-in-chief Viorel Marineasa). Writers of this "young generation" include Marcel Luca (1946- ), Gheorghe Paun (1950- ), Mihail Gramescu (1951- ), Constantin Cozmiuc (1952-), Lucian Ionica (1952- ), Leonard Oprea (1953- ), George Ceausu (1954- ), Cristian Tudor Popescu (1956- ), Dorin Davideanu (1956- ), Ovidiu Bufnila (1957- ), Dan Merisca (1957-1991), Lucian Merisca (1958- ), Alexandru Ungureanu (1957- ), Danut Ungureanu (1958- ), Rodica Bretin (1958- ), Silviu Genescu (1958- ), Mircea Liviu Goga (1958- ), Stefan Ghidoveanu (1958- ), Ovidiu Pecican (1959- ), Viorel Pirligras (1959), Bogdan Ficeac (1960- ) and Mihnea Columbeanu (1960- ).Another writer who, like Eliade, cannot be accommodated into this generational classification is Ovid S. Crohmalniceanu (1921- ). He is contemporary with the "old generation", and as a literary critic has accompanied the whole sf movement since the 1950s. Suddenly this distinguished professor of Romanian literature burst forth as an sf writer in the 1980s - simultaneously with the turbulent young writers of the "new wave", yet quite distinct from them and from FANDOM - with 2 masterly volumes of short stories: Istorii insolite ["Unwonted Stories"] (coll 1980) and Alte istorii insolite ["Other Unwonted Stories"] (coll 1986).Though, naturally, each of these writers has a distinctive voice, the generational differences do have an effect. Ideologically shaped in the hard times of proletcult and "socialist realism", then of "socialist humanism", most of the "old generation" took an illusory refuge in the "humanistic credo" cynically imposed by an inhuman communist dictatorship. Most of the young writers of the "new wave", however, despite the even harder times of the 1980s, intuitively accepted the elementary truth that a humanistic sf is an oxymoron. Thus the older writers are generally more inclined to a hollow, programmatic optimism: sweetened visions and lyricized epic sf motifs, with antagonisms avoided and happy endings mandatory. The younger ones are more misanthropic and sarcastic; sentimental lyricism is mocked, and the full power of the epic is rediscovered. The result is a smouldering bitterness, a cruelty of perception, an acknowledged auctorial "ruthlessness" that recognizes conflict and does not flinch from unhappy endings.On the other hand, there is a national context to be considered as well as the international nature of sf itself, and this to a degree binds all the generations. Romanian sf writers - most of them, at least - are seductive storytellers, for palatable storytelling has always been praised in Romanian literature. Thus the spirit of "finesse" conflicts with the spirit of geometry, and extrapolation tends to be of only a loose logical rigour (although not so with Eliade and Crohmalniceanu). Romanian sf has a native propensity for analogy rather than extrapolation, soft sf rather than hard, psychology rather than ontology; the thrill of science itself, the true SENSE OF WONDER, is unusual in Romanian sf, though the sense of HUMOUR is all too common, with parody sometimes ebulliently outrunning its rather negligible objects.In place of thorough extrapolation is a rich harvest of allegories, parables and dystopian visions, most of them antitotalitarian. However, the best stories-including "Pianul preparat" ["The Prepared Piano"] (1966; rev 1974) by Horia Arama, "Evadarea lui Algernon" ["Algernon's Escape"] (1978) by Gheorghe Sasarman, "Merele negre" ["Black Apples"] (1981) by Mihail Gramescu, "Domenii interzise" ["Forbidden Domains"] (1984) by Leonard Oprea, "Omohom" (1987) by Cristian Tudor Popescu and "Deratizare" (1985) by Lucian Merisca - are not mere political pamphlets or moral essays but genuine stories, though equivocal and allusive. The habit of double-thinking and half-speaking has deep roots in history, and was exacerbated by the necessity of deceiving the obtuse but draconian censorship imposed by the Communist Party and the Romanian Secret Police. No matter how heart-relieving such Aesopian stories may be, they limit their writers (and readers) to a minor aesthetic. Now, with the risks diminished, Romanian writers - not only of sf - realize they have forgotten how to express themselves directly, if they have ever known; the Aesopian mode has become second nature, difficult to eliminate if they are to face the major aesthetic challenge of their art. [CR] Further reading: "Brief History of Romanian SF" by Florin Manolescu, in Romanian Review #5 (1988); "Milestones in Postwar Romanian Science Fiction" by Cornel ROBU in Foundation #49 (Summer 1990); "About the Stories and their Authors" in Timpul este umbra noastra ["Time is our Shadow"] (anth 1991) ed Robu; "Romanian 'Science Fantasy' in the Cold War Era" by Elaine Kleiner, in Science-Fiction Studies, Mar 1992. More information is available in Romanian: Virsta de aur a anticipatiei romanesti ["The Golden Age of Romanian Anticipation"] (anth 1969) ed Ion Hobana; Literatura S.F. ["Sf Literature"] (1980) by Florin Manolescu; Anticipatia romaneasca ["The Romanian Anticipation"] (1993) by Mircea Oprita. ROMANO, DEANE (LOUIS) (1927- ) US novelist and screenwriter, active in the latter capacity with scripts like "Angels' Flight" (1962). Some of his work has dealt with current investigations into parapsychology ( PSI POWERS), and his filmscript on this subject was novelized by Louis CHARBONNEAU as The Sensitives * (1968). DR's own sf novel, Flight from Time One (1972), also treated parapsychology, this time in the didactic tale of an elite squad of "astralnauts" whose members take on missions in their astral bodies. [JC]See also: ESCHATOLOGY. ROME, ALGER Collaborative pseudonym used by Jerome BIXBY and Algis BUDRYS, on "Underestimation" (1953). [PN] ROME, DAVID Pseudonym used by immigrant Australian tv writer David Boutland (1938- ) for his sf, the first example being "Time of Arrival" in Apr 1961 for NW, where many others of DR's 25 or so stories appeared over the next decade. His only sf book, Squat (1965), subtitled "Sexual Adventures on Other Planets", is not his best work. [PN]See also: GENERATION STARSHIPS. ROMERO, GEORGE A. (1940- ) US film-maker. A maverick working out of Pittsburgh rather than Hollywood, GAR changed the face of the HORROR-movie genre with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), an apocalyptic nightmare - its theme derived from Richard MATHESON's I Am Legend (1954) - in which the dead inexplicably return to eat the living. Having tackled a surprisingly wide variety of Vietnam-era social issues in this debut, GAR made a pair of "serious" films - There's Always Vanilla (1972; vt The Affair) and the witchcraft-themed Jack's Wife (1973; vt Hungry Wives; vt Season of the Witch) - before returning to the former panicked mood in The CRAZIES (1973; vt Code Name Trixie), in which a biological weapon is spilled in Pennsylvania and causes an epidemic of insanity. After filler work for tv - mainly profiles of sports personalities - GAR formed Laurel Entertainment in partnership with Richard Rubinstein, and relaunched his career with Martin (1978), an unorthodox, apparently non-supernatural vampire picture. He then made 2 impressive and rigorous sequels to Night of the Living Dead: DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978; vt Zombies) and DAY OF THE DEAD (1985). Throughout the trilogy, which is marked as sf not so much by its (conflicting) "explanations" for the crisis as by the concentration on the social, political and psychological outcome of the devastation of society, GAR has powerfully mingled black SATIRE with shock effects. Spin-offs have included: an anthology, The Book of the Dead (anth 1989) ed John Skipp and Craig Spector; a remake in 1990 ( NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD) dir special-effects man Tom Savini, scripted and exec-produced GAR; and a satire, Return of the Living Dead (1985), from a story by John Russo, coscripter of the original film, and dir Dan O'Bannon.Outside the trilogy, GAR has dir: Knightriders (1981), a personal film about alternative lifestyles; Creepshow (1982), an EC COMICS-style anthology film written by Stephen KING; MONKEY SHINES (1988, vt Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Terror), an understated and impressive movie based on Michael STEWART's Monkey Shines (1983), about an intelligent experimental monkey; one half of Two Evil Eyes (1990), which GAR adapted from Edgar Allan POE's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"; and The Dark Half (1991), a film version of the 1989 Stephen King novel, which was only released two years later. In addition, GAR has scripted episodes of the tv series Tales from the Darkside (1984-9) and the films Creepshow 2 (1987) and Tales from The Darkside: The Movie (1990). GAR left the Laurel Entertainment partnership with Rubinstein in the early 1990s, leaving Rubinstein in control. [KN]See also: CINEMA; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; MONSTER MOVIES; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES. ROMILUS, ARN A CURTIS WARREN house name used by Brian HOLLOWAY for 1 novel and Dennis HUGHES for 2. [JC] RONALD, BRUCE W(ALTON) (1931- ) US writer, advertising man and actor. His Our Man in Space (1965 dos) is a little reminiscent of Robert A. HEINLEIN's Double Star (1956) in its story of an actor unhappily spying on behalf of Earth. With John JAKES and Claire Strauch he wrote the musical comedy Dracula, Baby (1970); Jakes played Van Helsing in the premiere in Ohio. [PN] RONASZEGI, MIKLOS [r] HUNGARY. ROSCOE, THEODORE (1906-1992) US writer whose I'll Grind Their Bones (1936) is a locked-room mystery set in a future Europe about to go to war. Of fairly moderate genre interest are the Thibaut Corday stories, featuring the eponymous PULP hero in exotic adventures; they are assembled in The Wonderful Lips of Thibong Linh [and] The Bearded Slayer (coll c. 1939 UK), Monkey See, Monkey Do [and] Terror Stalks the Mangroves (coll c. 1939 UK), the second story being by Eustace L. Adams, and The Wonderful Lips of Thibong Linh (coll 1981), the latter title assembling earlier material. [JC]Other Works: A Grave Must be Deep (1989) and Z is for Zombie (1989), both titles reprints of pulp stories. ROSE, F(REDERICK) HORACE (VINCENT) (1876-? ) South African author, a periodic UK resident, whose The Maniac's Dream: A Novel of the Atomic Bomb (1946) was one of the first post-Hiroshima future- WAR novels to respond to the threat of nuclear HOLOCAUST, though in this case without much grounding in scientific realities. An earlier work, The Night of the World (1944), centres on a timeslip in an oasis peopled by figures from other ages. [JE/JC]Other works: Bride of the Kalahari (1940); Pharoah's [sic] Crown (1943).See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. ROSE, LAURENCE F. John Russell FEARN. ROSE, MARK (1939- ) US academic and writer whose assistance in preparing New Maps of Hell (1960 US) was acknowledged by its author, Kingsley AMIS. An apocalyptic post- HOLOCAUST short story, "We Would See a Sign" in Spectrum 3 (anth 1963) ed Amis and Robert CONQUEST, did not lead to a fiction career, and MR remains best known in the sf field for Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (1981) which, taking off from the DEFINITION OF SF as a form of romance in Anatomy of Criticism (1957 US) by Northrop Frye (1912-1991), redeploys the 19th-century confrontation between Man and Nature to define sf as expressing a conflict between the human and the nonhuman. Within the terms of this definition, which MR uses as a conceptual (and inevitably partial) illumination of the field, he couches some of the most elegantly literate practical criticism of selected texts the genre has yet seen. The anthologies Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (anth 1976) and Bridges to Science Fiction (anth 1980) with George R. Guffey and George Edgar SLUSSER contain, perhaps inevitably, less striking material. [JC]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF. ROSENBERG, JOEL (1954- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Like the Gentle Rains" for IASFM in 1982, but who has clearly felt more comfortable with tales of novel length. His first book, The Sleeping Dragon (1983), a SWORD-AND-SORCERY fantasy, begins the RECURSIVE Guardians of the Flame sequence, continued with The Sword in the Chain (1984) and The Silver Crown (1985) - these 3 assembled as Guardians of the Flame: The Warriors (omni 1985) - plus The Heir Apparent (1987) and The Warrior Lives (1989) - these 2 assembled as Guardians of the Flame: The Heroes (omni 1989) - plus The Road to Ehvenor (1991). Though this sequence, along with D'Shai (1991) and Hour of the Octopus (1994) in the projected D'Shai fantasy series, makes up the bulk of his production to date, it could be argued that JR's sf, beginning with Ties of Blood and Silver (1984), is central to his work. This sf adventure and Emile and the Dutchman (fixup 1986) belong very loosely to the Metzada sequence, which spans the Galaxy with anarchic verve. More controversially, Not for Glory (fixup 1988) and its sequel Hero (1990) focus directly upon the Jewish planet of Metzada, from which tough mercenaries (who rather resemble Gordon R. DICKSON's Dorsai) issue forth into combat; but these Israeli-like soldiers, and the Germans and French and Dutch who have rigidly maintained their own "racial" characteristics for centuries on their own planets, seem strangely stereotyped. It will be interesting to see what JR can do to sophisticate his ongoing galaxy. [JC] ROSENBLUM, MARY (1952- ) US medical researcher and writer who began publishing sf with "For a Price" for IASFM in 1990, and whose first 3 novels explore various reaches of the contemporary sf landscape, though her favoured venue remains the American West. The Drylands (1993), which is derived from several stories but does not duplicate earlier material, posits a NEAR FUTURE America quite strictly continuous with the present day: water in the North-West states has become a burning issue; agribusinesses have further impoverished rural areas; it is only with the introduction of a protagonist with PSI POWERS that MR slips into conventional genre tactics. Chimera (1993) somewhat less engagingly deals with the subject of VIRTUAL REALITY, via a not-unusual mystery couched in noir terms and a Net Conspiracy; her depiction of the actual inscapes of Virtual Reality are, on the other hand, powerfully evocative. The Stone Garden (1994) features a sculptor who encodes aesthetically moving emotional patterns into mysterious stones found in the asteroid belt; but the book itself once again depends on some precarious mystery-story plotting. MR's strengths are in the vigorous realism of her rendering of human relationships as they evolve under the stresses of the new worlds to come. [JC] ROSHWALD, MORDECAI (MARCELI) (1921- ) Polish-born Israeli writer and academic, variously resident also in the USA and the UK, whose sf novels Level 7 (1959 US) and A Small Armageddon (1962 UK) were both coloured by political concern about our nuclear civilization. In the first and better known tale, a military officer describes his feelings and duties from extremely deep within a great bomb shelter as the world is gradually demolished above him. In the second the crew of a nuclear submarine threatens to detonate its cargo unless its demands - for sex and money - are met, with farcically exaggerated results. The awful-warning content of MR's novels has perhaps paled with the years, but only because of humanity's survival - pro tem. [JC]See also: END OF THE WORLD; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; ISRAEL. ROSNY aine, J.H. Pseudonym of French-speaking Belgian writer Joseph-Henri Boex (1856-1940). His younger brother Justin shared the pseudonym J.H. Rosny with him 1893-1907, and some works published during that period are collaborative. Joseph-Henri used the name for solo writings before 1893, and after 1907 it was divided, Joseph-Henri taking the suffix "aine" and Justin "jeune". The elder Rosny is an important figure in the development of French speculative fiction, although only one of his novels, Le felin geant (1918 France; trans The Hon. Lady Whitehead as The Giant Cat 1924 US; vt Quest of the Dawn Man 1964 US) was translated into English during his lifetime. Damon KNIGHT translated 2 of his most important short stories: "Les xipehuz" (1887; trans as "The Shapes" in One Hundred Years of Science Fiction, anth 1968), in which prehistoric humans encounter inorganic ALIENS, and the PARALLEL-WORLDS story "Un autre monde" (1895; trans as "Another World" in A Century of Science Fiction, anth 1962). The former is also included, along with the fine END-OF-THE-WORLD story "La mort de la terre" (1910), in The Xipehuz and The Death of the Earth (coll trans George Edgar SLUSSER 1978). The most famous of JHR's many prehistoric fantasies, La Guerre du Feu (1909 France; cut trans Harold Talbott as The Quest for Fire: A Novel of Prehistoric Times 1967 US), was filmed as QUEST FOR FIRE (1981). A "translation" of L'etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle ["The Astonishing Journey of Hareton Ironcastle"] (1922 France) was produced by Philip Jose FARMER as Ironcastle (1976), but so drastically modified that it cannot be regarded as the same work. JHR's prehistoric romances - which include Vamireh (1892), Eyrimah (1893) and Helgvor du fleuve bleu ["Helgvor of the Blue River"] (1930) as well as above-mentioned titles - were reissued in France in 1990 by Editions Robert Laffont in a huge omnibus volume; many of his short sf and fantasy stories, plus his semi-mystical speculative essay on creation and EVOLUTION, La legende sceptique ["The Sceptical Legend"] (1889), and his short novel Les navigateurs de l'infini ["Navigators of Infinity"] (1925) are in a Marabout collection titled Recits de science-fiction ["Works of Science Fiction"] (coll 1975 Belgium). The story begun in Les navigateurs de l'infini is continued in the posthumous Les astronautes (1960 France). JHR's other sf works include La grande enigme ["The Great Enigma"] (1920 France) and Les compagnons de l'univers ["Companions of the Universe"] (1934), another lyrical meditation in the vein of La legende sceptique. [BS]About the author: "The Sf of J.H. Rosny the Elder" by J.P. Vernier, Science-Fiction Studies vol 2 #2 (July 1975).See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; BENELUX; BIOLOGY; COSMOLOGY; FRANCE; HISTORY OF SF; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; ORIGIN OF MAN; PERCEPTION; RELIGION. ROSS, BERNARD L. Ken FOLLETT. ROSS, DALLAS [s] Mack REYNOLDS. ROSS, DAVID D. (1949?- ) US writer who began publishing sf with his Dreamers of the Day sequence - The Argus Gambit (1989) and The Eighth Rank (1991) - which complicatedly traces the political and cultural consequences of a 21st-century ecological disaster. The seriousness with which he undertakes the task of underlining the nature of the problems faced by humanity goes some way to assuage the sense that DDR has not fully mastered the unstable relationship between generic plotting and didactic thematic material. [JC] ROSS, JAMES Hugh DARRINGTON. ROSS, JOSEPH Working name of US editor Joseph Wrzos (1929- ). He acted as Managing Editor of AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC 1965-7 while continuing to teach high-school English fulltime in New Jersey. He ed The Best of Amazing (anth 1967). [PN] ROSS, MALCOLM (HARRISON) (1895-1965) US writer and reporter, the protagonist of whose sf novel, The Man who Lived Backward (1950), lives from 1940 to 1865, dying just after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which he is therefore unable to prevent. [JC] ROSS, RAYMOND J. [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. ROSS, [Sir] RONALD [r] MEDICINE. ROSSITER, OSCAR Pseudonym of US physician and writer Vernon H. Skeels (1918- ), who received his MD in 1949 and whose first sf novel, Tetrasomy Two (1974), is set in a hospital where a seemingly helpless human vegetable turns out to be an amoral SUPERMAN preparing to eliminate the Solar System in order to accumulate the energy necessary to tour the Galaxy. The Australian film Patrick (1978) dir Richard Franklin is based on a remarkably similar notion. [JC]See also: INTELLIGENCE; PSI POWERS. ROSSOW, WILLIAM B. [r] Marjorie Bradley KELLOGG. ROSZAK, THEODORE (1933- ) US author of several works of cultural criticism who began writing sf with Bugs (1981), in which a frightened child telepath causes bugs to infiltrate computer systems and thereafter to eat people. A second novel, Dreamwatcher (1985), concerning PSI POWERS, blends fantasy and sf, as does the remarkable Flicker (1991) which, in a manner evocative of Steve ERICKSON's blackly surreal version of film America, describes secret horrors contained subliminally in 1920s and 1930s films made by a mysterious forgotten German director, horrors which themselves reveal a Secret History of the World. [JC] ROTH, PHILIP (MILTON) (1933- ) US writer who remains best known for Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a novel whose sophisticated and often comic treatment of sexual obsessions is fantastically furthered ( FABULATION) in The Breast (1972), the tale of the sudden and painful transformation of a man into a female breast; the psychosexual implications of the metaphor are clear, as is the debt to Franz KAFKA. The descent to Hell of "Trick E. Dixon" in Our Gang (1971) is arousing. [JC] ROTHMAN, CHUCK Working name of US writer Charles Warren Rothman (1952- ), who began publishing sf with "The Munij Deserters" for IASFM in 1982 and whose sf novel, Staroamer's Fate (1986), has a precognitive protagonist doomed by her talent to travel from world to world, shaping events as she goes. With his wife, Susan Noe Rothman, CR serves as joint secretary/treasurer of the SCIENCE FICTION POETRY ASSOCIATION. [JC] ROTHMAN, MILTON A. [r] Tony ROTHMAN. ROTHMAN, TONY (1953- ) US writer whose sf novel, The World is Round (1978), though suffering from excessive length and a confusingly overcomplicated story, creates a Big-Planet venue ( Jack VANCE) of some interest; he has also written some books popularizing physics, and several of the stories about the USSR assembled in Censored Tales (coll 1989 UK) are absurdist FABULATIONS. TR's father, Milton A. Rothman (1919- ), a physicist, also wrote some sf stories, as by Lee Gregor. [JC]See also: JUPITER. ROTSLER, WILLIAM (1926- ) US writer and artist who received a 1975 HUGO for his fan art; his cartoons may be remembered as much as his fiction. He began publishing sf with "Ship Me Tomorrow" for Gal in 1970 and, although he initially kept his own name for autonomous work - using the pseudonym John Ryder Hall and the BALLANTINE house name William ARROW for novelizations - all his novels since about 1980 have been TIES of one sort or another. His first novel, Patron of the Arts (1974), remains his best received; incorporating his best known and most praised short story, "Patron of the Arts" (1972), it describes in Wagnerian terms an all-encompassing artform, using holograms and other sf devices ( ARTS), but vitiates some of its speculative interest through a contrived action plot. WR's second novel, To the Land of the Electric Angel (1976), shares a similar setting - what seems to be an extrapolation of modern southern California - in a tale involving CRYONICS, the reawakening of the hero in a DYSTOPIAN future, gladiatorial contests and much more. The Zandra series - Zandra (1978) and The Hidden Worlds of Zandra (1983) - shares the same background, while The Far Frontier (1980) is set in nearby space. These later books are significantly less accomplished than their predecessors, and their large casts of routinely differentiated characters generate the impression that their author was attempting to work in a bestseller idiom dangerous to the creative mind. With Gregory BENFORD (whom see for details) WR contributed Shiva Descending (1980) to the the asteroid- DISASTER subgenre. [JC]Other works: Iron Man: And Call my Killer . . . Modok * (1979); Dr Strange: Nightmare * (1979); 2 Mr Merlin tv ties, Mr Merlin, Episode 1 * (1981) and Mr Merlin, Episode 2 * (1981); Star Trek II: Short Stories * (coll 1982); Blackhawk * (1982); Star Trek II: Biographies * (coll 1983); Star Trek II: Distress Call * (1983); Star Trek III: The Vulcan Treasure * (1984); Star Trek III Short Stories * (coll 1984); Goonies: Cavern of Horror * (1985), a film tie.As John Ryder Hall: Futureworld * (1976); Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger * (1977).As William Arrow: #1 and #3 of the Return to the Planet of the Apes books, based not on the films but on the later animated tv series: Visions from Nowhere * (1976) and Man, the Hunted Animal * (1976). ROTTENSTEINER, FRANZ (1942- ) Austrian sf critic, editor and literary agent; he has a PhD from the University of Vienna. He has edited the SF of the World series for Insel Verlag, the Fantastic Novels series for Paul Zsolnay Verlag, and the Fantastic Library series - now over 250 vols - for Suhrkamp Verlag. He writes in English as well as in German, his critical articles having appeared in SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES and elsewhere. He is particularly well known for his spirited promotion of the work of Stanislaw LEM, for whom he is literary agent, and for the contempt he has often expressed for much GENRE SF. His criticism is intelligent, polemical and left-wing, and best expressed in fairly academic formats; his popular illustrated history of sf, The Science Fiction Book (1975), is generally felt to be sketchy. In the same vein, but perhaps better, is The Fantasy Book: The Ghostly, the Gothic, the Magical, the Unreal (1978). In English he is also known for his collection of European sf, View from Another Shore (anth 1973); for his collection of "literary" fantasies by Jorge Luis BORGES and others, The Slaying of the Dragon: Modern Tales of the Playful Imagination (anth 1984); and for Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction (coll 1984) by Lem, ed and introduced by FR. Many of his critical writings in German appear in his own high-quality FANZINE, QUARBER MERKUR, from which the book Quarber Merkur (anth 1979) was collected. 2 books of essays ed FR are Uber H.P. Lovecraft ["On H.P. Lovecraft"] (anth 1984), and Die dunkle Seite der Wirklichkeit ["The Dark Side of Reality"] (anth 1987). Since 1989 he has been editing a serial guide in loose-leaf form in binders, 1250pp to Feb 1991: "Werkfuhrer durch die utopisch-phantastiche Literatur" ["Work Guide to Utopian and Fantastic Literature"].In German he has ed many anthologies of stories and essays about sf, including: Die Ratte im Labyrinth ["Rats in the Maze"] (anth 1971); the Polaris series, Polaris 1 (anth 1973), #2 (anth 1974), a special Soviet sf issue, #3 (anth 1975), #4 (anth 1978), a French sf issue, #5 (anth 1981), #6 (anth 1982), a Herbert W. FRANKE issue, #7 (anth 1983), #8 (anth 1985), #9 (anth 1985), old German sf, and #10 (anth 1986), a STRUGATSKI issue; Phantastiche Traume ["Fantastic Dreams"] (anth 1983); Phantastiche Welten ["Fantastic Worlds"] (anth 1984); Phantastiche Aussichten ["Fantastic Sights"] (anth 1985); Phantastiche Zeiten ["Fantastic Times"] (anth 1986); Lovecraft Lesebuch ["Lovecraft Reader"] (anth 1987); Seltsame Labyrinthe ["Strange Labyrinths"] (anth 1987); Der Eingang ins Paradies ["The Door into Paradise"] (anth 1988); Arche Noah ["Noah's Ark"] (anth 1989); Die Sirene ["The Siren"] (anth 1990); Phantastiche Begegnungen ["Fantastic Encounters"] (anth 1990). [PN]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; GERMANY. ROUCH, JAMES (? - ) UK author of the Zone sequence of sf adventures set during WWIII, waged in Germany: The Zone #1: Hard Target (1980), #2: Blind Fire (1980), #3: Hunter Killer (1981), #4: Sky Strike (1981), #5: Overkill (1982), #6: Plague Bomb (1986), #7: Killing Ground (1988), #8: Civilian Slaughter (1989) and #9: Body Count (1990). [JC] ROUSSEAU, VICTOR Working name of UK-born writer Avigdor Rousseau Emanuel (1879-1960), who also used the pseudonym H.M. Egbert on his sf, though not exclusively, and V.R. Emanuel for other work; born of a Jewish father and a French mother-as Sam MOSKOWITZ writes in Under the Moons of Mars (anth 1970) - he moved to the USA some time during WWI. After a non-genre novel, Derwent's Horse (1901), VR began writing sf in PULP MAGAZINES before WWI, stopping in 1941; much material was never collected, including the Surgeon of Souls series of 11 fantasy stories in Weird Tales (1926-7). In his first sf novel, The Sea Demons (1916 All-Story Weekly as V. Rousseau; 1924 UK) as by H.M. Egbert, invisible hive-like sea creatures threaten humanity ( INVISIBILITY), but a submarine finds and destroys the queen. The Messiah of the Cylinder (1917; vt The Apostle of the Cylinder 1918 UK), VR's best known work and told with his usual flamboyance and narrative verve, directly imitates the form of H.G. WELLS's When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), and harshly criticizes the atheistic world-state UTOPIA there depicted; it was seen, consequently, as a melodramatic critique of Wellsian socialism, though Wells's novel was, in fact, deeply ambiguous about the world it described, serving more as a pretext for VR's book than as an argument to be refuted. In VR's novel a brave protagonist destroys the future state into which he has been awoken from SUSPENDED ANIMATION, and restores aristocracy to the land. Draught of Eternity (1918 All-Story Weekly as V. Rousseau; 1924 UK) as by Egbert is a love story set in a ruined New York. Eric of the Strong Heart (1925 UK) is a lost-race tale ( LOST WORLDS). Perhaps mainly because of his heated style, VR remains of some interest. [JC]Other works: My Lady of the Nile (1923 UK) as by Egbert; Mrs Aladdin (1925 UK).About the author: "H.G. Wells and Victor Rousseau Emanuel" by Richard D. MULLEN in EXTRAPOLATION, Vol 8 #2 (1967).See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; HISTORY OF SF; INTELLIGENCE; MESSIAHS; POLITICS. ROWCROFT, CHARLES (?1795-1856) UK writer perhaps best known for his Australian adventure fiction assembled in Tales of the Colonies (coll 1843) and its successors. In his sf novel, The Triumph of Woman: A Christmas Story (1848), an inhabitant of sexless Neptune visits a German, with whose daughter he falls in love amid erudite discussions of Neptunian science. The plot then devolves into a satirical travelogue. [JC] ROWENA Professional name of US illustrator Rowena Morrill (1944- ); she and Victoria Poyser are among the few women who have had an impact on sf/fantasy art. Her ILLUSTRATION has appeared since the mid-1970s, primarily on paperback covers, more often FANTASY than sf; it is largely fantastical and often symbolic, but quite varied in style and subject matter. She has done several covers for novels by Piers ANTHONY. Her technique is polished and sometimes fastidiously detailed, though her human figures (often based on photographs) perhaps conform too much to a commercially acceptable prettiness, and some of her painting in the HEROIC-FANTASY vein of Boris VALLEJO has been accused of being "degrading to women". Unusually, she uses a combination of acrylics and oils rather than one or the other, and finishes with a high-gloss glaze. The Fantastic Art of Rowena (1983) has colour reproductions of 26 of her pieces. She has had a number of HUGO nominations. [PN/JG] ROWLAND, DONALD S(YDNEY) (1928- ) UK author of a very large number of pseudonymous works, relatively few of them sf; most were for ROBERT HALE LIMITED. For that firm (or for the highly similar house of Gresham) his SPACE OPERAS under his own name are Despot in Space (1973), Master of Space (1974), Space Venturer (1976) and Nightmare Planet (1976). [JC]As Fenton Brockley: Star Quest (1974).As Roger Carlton: Beyond Tomorrow (1975), Star Arrow (1975).As Graham Garner: Space Probe (1974), Starfall Muta (1975), Rifts of Time (1976).As Alex Random: Star Cluster Seven (1974), Dark Constellation (1975), Cradle of Stars (1975).As Roland Starr: The Omina sequence, being Operation Omina (1973), Omina Uncharted (1974), Time Factor (1975), Return from Omina (1976).As Mark Suffling: Project Oceanus (1975), Space Crusader (1975). ROWLEY, CHRISTOPHER (B.) (1948- ) UK-born US writer who has from the first specialized in efficiently written adventure-sf novels with a strong military component, beginning with the War for Eternity sequence - The War for Eternity (1983), The Black Ship (1985), The Founder (1989) and To a Highland Nation (1994) - which concentrates on warfare within our Solar System. The Vang sequence - Starhammer (1986), The Vang: The Military Form (1988) and The Vang: The Battlemaster (1990) - moves into deeper space and features a deadly ALIEN lifeform. In Golden Sunlands (1987) the humans on a colony planet are kidnapped to serve as cannon fodder in an artificial universe, but soon show their spunk. With George Snow (anon) he wrote the STAR WARS text Return of the Jedi * (1983 chap). [JC]Other works: The Bazil Broketail fantasy sequence comprising Bazil Broketail (1992), A Sword for a Dragon (1993) and Dragons of War (1994). ROWLOT LTD. AD ASTRA. ROY, ARCHIE Working name of Scottish professor of astronomy Archibald Edmiston Roy (1924- ), whose unremarkable sf adventures, all making use of PARALLEL WORLDS, include Deadlight (1968), The Curtained Sleep (1969) and All Evil Shed Away (1970). Sable Night (1973), The Dark Host (1976) and Devil in the Darkness (1978) are horror. [JC] ROYAL, BRIAN JAMES Gardner F. FOX. ROYAL PUBLICATIONS INFINITY SCIENCE FICTION; SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES. ROYCE, E.R. Dennis HUGHES. RUBEN, WILLIAM S. (? - ) US writer known only for Weightless in Gaza (1970 as Fred Shannon; exp vt Dionysus: The Ultimate Experiment 1977), in which NASA conducts sex experiments in space. [JC] RUBINSTEIN, GILLIAN (1942- ) Australian writer of sf for adolescents ( CHILDREN'S SF). Space Demons (1986) and its sequel, Skymaze (1989), deal with AI in interactive COMPUTER games ( GAMES AND TOYS) in which players enter a VIRTUAL REALITY. Space Demons: The Play * (1990) was an adaptation for the THEATRE by Richard Tulloch. Beyond the Labyrinth (1988) shows teenagers developing a relationship with an ALIEN anthropologist;Galax-Arena (1992) continues the theme in a story whose human protagonists are captured by aliens. GR uses sf devices as metaphors for exploring and resolving adolescents' painful personal relationships. At Ardilla (1991), not sf, is a rite-of-passage book about a growing girl. GR has edited After Dark (anth 1988) and Before Dawn (anth 1988). Her books for much younger children are Melanie and the Night Animal (1988), Answers to Brut (1988), Flashback: The Amazing Adventures of a Film Horse (1990) and Dog In, Cat Out (1991), the last being with illustrator Ann James. [JW]See also: AUSTRALIA. RUCKER, RUDY Working name of US writer, mathematician and computer programmer Rudolf von Bitter Rucker (1946- ), who has advanced degrees in MATHEMATICS from Rutgers University. Like many sf writers, he began very early to produce stories, but unlike most who became successful he had difficulty placing his work, in which mathematical concepts and diagrams tended to generate both plot and venue, making arduous demands upon his readers. "The Miracle", his first-published story, appeared in The Pegasus, an amateur magazine, in 1962; "Faraway Eyes", the second to reach print, appeared in ASF in 1980. Many of the stories assembled in The 57th Franz Kafka (col 1983) - which, along with RR's early poetry, later stories and nonfiction pieces, were further assembled in Transreal! (coll 1991) - never appeared in magazine form. It is, perhaps, no wonder. Any attempt to describe RR convincingly as a CYBERPUNK writer must founder on a simple distinction. Cyberpunk writers tended to describe the experience of living in a dense and desolate NEAR FUTURE in a CYBERSPACE which served as their career-goal and nirvana, but which they had no need to understand. For RR, on the other hand, the experience of living in a game-like world was much less important than the exercise of understanding its nature. The roots of his fiction lie not in GENRE SF or the film noir that clearly inspired much cyberpunk, but in the profound mathematical games of Lewis CARROLL, or of Edwin A. ABBOTT, the author of Flatland (1884), or of C.H. HINTON, author of Scientific Romances (colls 1886 and 1902), whose Speculations on the Fourth Dimension: Selected Writings of Charles H. Hinton (coll 1980) RR edited ( DIMENSIONS).The abstraction of RR's work cannot be denied, nor the daunting assertiveness of his adventuring mind. At the same time, his novels and stories are told with comic bravura - his work has been compared to that of the early Robert SHECKLEY - and a strange crystalline exuberance that makes any page of his easily identifiable. Moreover, his protagonists - even the sexually ravaged first-person narrators of several texts, sometimes named Bitter, who must in part be autobiographical - are beguilingly raunchy, vigorous and zany. For instance, the posthumous protagonist of his first novel to reach book form, White Light, or What is Cantor's Continuum Problem? (1980), displays an undeniable glee as he journeys through transreal spacetimes of crippling complexity. The thematic sequels to this novel, The Sex Sphere (1983) and The Secret of Life (1985), similarly combine HUMOUR and the chill of intellection as further worlds derived from higher mathematics take prickly shape. RR's first-written novel, Spacetime Donuts (1978-9 Unearth; full text 1981), provides a mockingly simplistic vision of a DYSTOPIAN near future as well as his first extended presentation of COMPUTERS, the second dominant concern in his work as a whole. This concern pervades his ROBOT series - which might be called the Ware books - comprising SOFTWARE (1982), which won the first PHILIP K. DICK AWARD, and Wetware (1988), which shared the same award in 1988, with at least one further volume projected; the first two have meanwhile been assembled as Live Robots (omni 1994). In these books a forbidding competence in the field of AI is lightened by a style occasionally reminiscent of John T. SLADEK. RR's other novels include Master of Space and Time (1984), very similar in tone to The Sex Sphere, and with autobiographical sequences deriving from the earlier-written nonfiction All the Visions: A Novel of the Sixties (1990 dos); the RECURSIVE The Hollow Earth (1990), an orthodox ALTERNATE-WORLD tale set in the 19th century, in which an inner world ( HOLLOW EARTH) can be entered from the South Pole, which is what Edgar Allan POE (who is treated with a remarkable lack of gaucheness) and the young protagonist eventually do; and The Hacker and the Ants (1994), a tale couched in thriller mode, and involving AIs and viral ants.In addition to several technical works of nonfiction, RR edited Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder (anth 1987) and Semiotext(e) (anth 1988) with Peter Lambourn Wilson and Robert Anton WILSON. He was reported as of 1991 to be involved in writing VIRTUAL-REALITY - which he preferred to call cyberspace-computer software. [JC]Other works: Light Fuse and Get Away (coll 1983 chap), poetry.Nonfiction: Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension (1977); Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite (1982); The 4th Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality (1984).Computer Software: CA Lab: Rudy Rucker's Cellular Automata Laboratory (1989); James Gleick's Chaos: The Software (1990).See also: BLACK HOLES; CYBERNETICS; ESCHATOLOGY; Marc LAIDLAW; Stephen LEIGH; OULIPO. RUD, ANTHONY (MELVILLE) (1893-1942) US author and PULP-MAGAZINE editor who contributed sf to Weird Tales, The Blue Book Magazine, etc. He is best known for the Sax ROHMER-esque fantasy The Stuffed Men (1935), which describes the effects of a fungus that grows within the human body; this is part of a hideous Oriental revenge. [JE] RUELLAN, ANDRE [r] FRANCE. RUMANIA ROMANIA. RUNAWAY Film (1984) Tri-Star/Delphi III. Dir Michael CRICHTON, starring Tom Selleck, Cynthia Rhodes, Gene Simmons, Kirstie Alley. Screenplay Crichton. 97 mins. Colour.Crichton again exercises his love/hate relationship with machines in this predictable but exciting thriller about a policeman whose job it is to deal with defective ROBOTS. He is pitted against an evil businessman who is deliberately making mechanical killers (by reprogramming household robots) and can deploy heat-seeking bullets personalized to their targets.Crichton's main theme, as ever, is that machinery tends always to go wrong; his subtext is that humans, too, are usually defective, thus creating the typical Crichtonian gloom that may have prevented him gaining lasting box-office success. However, he seems fond of his mutinous machines, and the best parts of this robot-saturated movie are affectionate observations of the little beasts at work. [PN] RUNCIMAN, JOHN [s] Brian W. ALDISS. RUNNING MAN, THE Film (1987). Taft Entertainment/Keith Barish Productions. Dir Paul Michael Glaser, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Conchita Alonso, Richard Dawson. Screenplay Steven E. De Souza, based on The Running Man (1982) by Richard Bachman (Stephen KING). 101 mins. Colour.In a near-future, semi-totalitarian, economically crippled USA, a framed cop (Schwarzenegger) is forced to star in the top-rating tv game show The Running Man, in which "criminals" are tracked by tv cameras as they desperately attempt to escape theatrically dressed assassin-athletes. He turns the tables, violently, as the oppressed masses cheer. The criticism of MEDIA exploitation of violence and pain (game shows as the opiate of the downtrodden) strongly resembles that in Le PRIX DU DANGER (1983), based on Robert SHECKLEY's short story "The Prize of Peril" (1958). As usual when moralizing about the nasty possibilities of our desire for vicarious thrills, TRM exploits the very voyeurism it purports to attack. The SATIRE against the media is crude but well done; the comic-book violence is strictly routine; Schwarzenegger is wooden. [PN] RUNYON, CHARLES W(EST) (1928-1987) US writer of thrillers and some sf who began publishing the latter with "First Man in a Satellite" for Super-Science Fiction in 1958. Pig World (1971) depicts a NEAR-FUTURE USA governed by a right-wing tyranny challenged by a vicious would-be demagogue. Soulmate (1970 FSF; exp 1974) is a novel of possession, the victim being a young prostitute. CWR's sf tends to be action-filled, without extensive displacement or speculative content. [JC]Other works: Ames Holbrook, Deity (1972); I, Weapon (1974). RUPPERT, CHESTER [s] Rog PHILLIPS. RURAL PUBLISHING CORPORATION WEIRD TALES. RURITANIA Imaginary countries are common in the literatures of the world, but only some can properly be called Ruritanian. In The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) by the UK writer Anthony Hope (1863-1933) a leisured and insouciant young Britisher of the 1890s travels on a whim, via Paris and Dresden, to the small, feudal, independent, German-speaking middle-European kingdom of Ruritania, located somewhere southeast of the latter city. Here, as a freelance commoner, he becomes embroiled in complex romantic intrigues involving swordplay, aristocratic flirtations, switches of identity, complicated dynastic politicking and threats to the monarchy; in the end, as from a dream, he returns to the West. (In the sequel, Rupert of Hentzau [1898], he goes back to Ruritania and dies.) Any tale containing a significant combination of these ingredients can be called Ruritanian. Only two elements are essential: the tale must provide a fairy-tale enclave located both within and beyond normal civilization; and it must be infused by an air of nostalgia - not dissimilar to that found in some lost-race novels ( LOST WORLDS). This belatedness of the true Ruritania might seem to exclude it from sf, whose ideological posture usually precludes the advertising of nostalgic enclaves; but UTOPIAS and DYSTOPIAS often take an initial Ruritanian cast (which often turns sour); the palace-politics which govern many GALACTIC EMPIRES owe more to Hope than they do to Edward Gibbon (1737-1794); and many post- HOLOCAUST novels, especially those set in a USA balkanized into feuding principalities, are clearly Ruritanian. Moreover, SCIENCE-FANTASY tales regularly discover Ruritanias at the world's heart.However pervasive the influence of Ruritania may be throughout later genre fictions, it is rarely explicit. However, Edmond HAMILTON's The Star Kings (1949; vt Beyond the Moon 1950) and Robert A. HEINLEIN's Double Star (1956) are clear reworkings of the plot of The Prisoner of Zenda; and Avram DAVIDSON's The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy (coll of linked stories 1975; exp vt The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy 1990) is set in an ALTERNATE-WORLD version of a Ruritanian 19th-century Europe.It could be argued that tales of this category, when set on a past or present Earth, should be called Ruritanian only if they are located somewhere along the mountainous border between Czechoslovakia and Poland, and that tales set in Balkan enclaves should be called Graustarkian, after the otherwise very similar Graustark (1901) and its sequels Beverly of Graustark (1904) and The Prince of Graustark (1914) by the US writer George Barr McCutcheon (1866-1928); but this would be both pedantic and unproductive. The terms are nearly indistinguishable. When UK writers refer to Ruritania and their US counterparts to the slightly less well known Graustark, they are referring to the same state of mind. [JC] RUSCH, KRISTINE KATHRYN (1960- ) US editor and writer who began publishing work of genre interest with "Sing" for Aboriginal Science Fiction in 1987; she won the 1990 JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer. Her work is strongly emotional in nature, focusing on critical experiences and rites of passage in the lives of characters existing in relatively conventional sf, fantasy and horror settings. Sometimes, as in "Story Child" (1990) - about a healing child in a post- HOLOCAUST society - this approach can lead her into sentimentality; but other pieces, such as "Trains" (1990) - in which a battered wife finds temporary happiness with a supernatural hipster - are genuinely moving. The Gallery of his Dreams (1991 chap) is a TIME-TRAVEL tale featuring the photographer Matthew B. Brady (c1823-1896), whose work illuminated the US Civil War. The White Mists of Power (1991), her first novel, is a fantasy. Afterimage (1992) with Kevin J. ANDERSON is sf.Despite this activity, KKR was considerably more prominent in the late 1980s for her editorial work as cofounder (with Dean Wesley SMITH) in 1987 of PULPHOUSE PUBLISHING, through which she edited the magazine/anthology series PULPHOUSE: THE HARDBACK MAGAZINE , which stopped with #11 in 1993, and The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine (anth 1991). While continuing to work at Pulphouse (her responsibilities lessened but still considerable), KKR in late 1991 became editor of The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, and soon edited, with Ed FERMAN, The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: a 45th Anniversary Anthology (anth 1994). With Smith she ed Science Fiction Writers of America Handbook: The Professional Writer's Guide to Writing Professionally (anth 1990), which is not well organized but is dense with information and advice. [NT/JC]Other works: Facade (1993); Heart Readers (1993 UK); Traitors (1993 UK); Alien Influences (1994 UK); Sins of the Blood (1994).See also: SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS. RUSE, GARY ALAN (1946- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Nanda" for ASF in 1972. Houndstooth (1975) features a spy dog with a computer implant that allows its human handlers to see through its eyes; The Gods of Cerus Major (1982), though perhaps somewhat mechanical in its ruthless piling-up of crises, demonstrates an intimate sense of genre device as the protagonist, on a test flight that goes wrong, encounters a variety of strangenesses on an unexplored planet. Morlac: The Quest of the Green Magician (1986) is fantasy. Death Hunt on a Dying Planet (1988), despite its inflamed title, rather soberly depicts the experiences of a woman who, awakened from SUSPENDED ANIMATION after 700 years, must make sense of a world whose cultures are in terminal dispute. [JC]Other works: A Game of Titans (1976), both associational. 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-like irreverent 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 RELIGION whose 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. RUSS, JOANNA (1937- ) US writer and academic who has taught at various universities since 1970; she has been a professor of English at the University of Washington since 1977. She began publishing sf in 1959 with "Nor Custom Stale" for The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, a journal to which she also contributed occasional book reviews for some years. (JR won the 1988 PILGRIM AWARD for her sf criticism.) Her early work is less formally innovative than the stories she began to publish in the 1970s, but The Hidden Side of the Moon (coll 1987), which assembles material from throughout her career, demonstrates how cogent a writer of GENRE SF she could have become. JR's first novel, Picnic on Paradise (1968), comprises the largest single portion of ALYX (coll 1976; vt The Adventures of Alyx 1985 UK), a series of tales about a time-travelling mercenary, tough, centred, autonomous and female; much of the initial impact of the sequence lies in its use of Alyx in situations where she acts as a fully responsible agent, vigorously engaged in the circumstances surrounding her, but without any finger-pointing on the author's part to the effect that one should only pretend not to notice that she is not a man. The liberating effect of the Alyx tales has been pervasive, and the ease with which later writers now use active female protagonists in adventure roles, without having to argue the case, owes much to this example ( WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION). JR herself became, in most of her later work, far more explicit about FEMINIST issues, though her muffled but ambitious second novel, AND CHAOS DIED (1970) tells from a male viewpoint of the experiences of a man forced by the psychically transformed human inhabitants of a planet on which he has crashlanded to endure the rewriting of his psychic nature as he perilously acquires PSI POWERS. His rediscovery of Earth in the latter part of the book is to satirical effect.It was with JR's third tale, THE FEMALE MAN (1975), which awaited publication for some time, that the programmatic feminist novel may be said to have come of age in sf. Stunningly foregrounding the feminist arguments which had tacitly sustained her work to this point, it presents a series of 4 ALTERNATE WORLDS, in each of which a version of the central protagonist enacts a differing life, all dovetailing as the plot advances. From psychic servitude to fully matured freedom - as represented by the female UTOPIA of the planet Whileaway - these lives amount to a definitive portrait of the life-chances of the central protagonist on Earth. Savage and cleansing in its anger, the book stands as one of the most significant uses of sf instruments to make arguments about our own world and condition.In its portrait of a dying woman on a planet without life, We who Are About to . . . (1977), an anti- ROBINSONADE, less vigorously moves to the pole of utter solitude. The Two of Them (1978) shivers generically between telling the realistic story of the oppression - and escape - of a young woman brought up on a planet whose religion is reminiscent of Islam, and deconstructing this generic material into the embittered dreams of a woman trapped on Earth.JR won the 1972 NEBULA for Best Short Story with "When it Changed", an earlier and perhaps even more devastating tale of Whileaway. Other short work of note - including "Daddy's Girl" (1975), a reprise of some of the themes of THE FEMALE MAN, and "The Autobiography of My Mother" (1975) - has appeared in The Zanzibar Cat (coll 1983; rev 1984) and EXTRA(ORDINARY) PEOPLE (coll 1984), the latter volume containing Souls (1982 FSF; 1989 chap dos), which won the 1983 HUGO for Best Novella. For 30 years, JR has been the least comfortable author writing sf, very nearly the most inventive experimenter in fictional forms, and the most electric of all to read. The gifts she has brought to the genre are two in number: truth-telling and danger. [JC]Other works: Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic (1978 chap), a juvenile; WomanSpace: Future and Fantasy Stories and Art by Women (anth 1981 chap) ed anon; On Strike Against God (1982), associational; How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983), an adversarial nonfiction study; Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays (coll 1985).About the author: Marilyn Hacker's introduction to the 1977 reprint of THE FEMALE MAN; Samuel R. DELANY's introduction to ALYX.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; ARKHAM HOUSE; AUTOMATION; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; ESP; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GOLEM; PARANOIA; PILGRIM AWARD; SEX; SOCIOLOGY; WOMEN SF WRITERS. RUSSELL, BERTRAND (ARTHUR WILLIAM) (1872-1970) UK mathematician, philosopher and controversialist who succeeded to the family title, becoming Third Earl Russell, in 1931. He was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Near the end of his immensely long career - he published his first essays in 1894, his first book being German Social Democracy (1896) - he published 3 books containing a series of fable-like tales: Satan in the Suburbs and Other Stories (coll 1953), Nightmares of Eminent Persons and Other Stories (coll 1954) and Fact and Fiction (coll 1961), all being assembled as The Collected Stories of Bertrand Russell (omni 1972). Somewhat after the manner of VOLTAIRE, these tales - some, like "The Infra-Redioscope" from the first volume and "Planetary Effulgence" from the last, are sf - didactically (though with grace) embody their author's sceptical attitude toward human ambitions and pretensions, and to the ideas with which we delude ourselves. [JC]Other works include: History of the World in Epitome, for Use in Martian Infant Schools (1962 chap).See also: AUTOMATION; DYSTOPIAS; RELIGION; SOCIOLOGY. RUSSELL, ERIC FRANK (1905-1978) UK writer. He used the pseudonyms Webster Craig and Duncan H. Munro on a few short stories and borrowed Maurice G. Hugi's ( Brad KENT) name for one other. His first story was "The Saga of Pelican West" for ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION in 1937, and he was the first UK writer to become a regular contributor to that magazine; he used a slick pastiche-US style in most of his stories. EFR was interested in the works and theories of Charles FORT, and based his first novel, Sinister Barrier (1939 Unknown; 1943; rev 1948 US), on Fort's suggestion that the human race might be "property", the owners here being invisible parasites which feed on human pain and anguish; it was featured in #1 of UNKNOWN, although it is straightforward sf and quite atypical of that magazine. His STAR TREK-like Jay Score series, about a crew of interplanetary explorers including a heroic ROBOT, appeared in ASF from 1941, and was collected in Men, Martians and Machines (coll of linked stories 1955).Some of EFR's best work was done in the years after WWII, including "Metamorphosite" (1946), "Hobbyist" (1947) and "Dear Devil" (1950). A series of bitter anti- WAR stories, including "Late Night Final" (1948) and "I am Nothing" (1952), culminated in the fine pacifist SATIRE ". . . And Then There Were None" (1951), subsequently incorporated into The Great Explosion (fixup 1962). EFR went on to write other stories in which militaristic humans are confronted by frustrating cultures, including "The Waitabits" (1955), although he pandered to John W. CAMPBELL Jr's human chauvinism in stories which confronted unimaginative humanoid ALIENS with awkwardly inventive humans, as in "Diabologic" (1955), The Space Willies (1956 ASF as "Plus X"; exp 1958 dos; rev vt Next of Kin 1959 UK), "Nuisance Value" (1957) and Wasp (1957 US; exp 1958 UK). The HUGO-winning anti-bureaucratic satire "Allamagoosa" (1955) is in much the same vein. EFR's stories of this quirky kind made a significant contribution to sf HUMOUR; and their continuing influence is reflected in Design for Great Day (1953 Planet Stories by EFR alone; exp 1995) with Alan Dean FOSTER, which works as an homage on Foster's part to EFR's contagious vision.EFR's remaining novels were more earnest than his ironic short fiction, and rather lacklustre by comparison. Dreadful Sanctuary (1948 ASF; rev 1951 US; rev 1963 US; further rev 1967 UK) is an improbable quasi-Fortean sf tale whose various versions include two markedly different endings. In Sentinels from Space (1951 Startling Stories as "The Star Watchers"; exp 1953 US) benevolent mature souls, who have emerged from the chrysalis of corporeality, keep watch over our immature species. Three to Conquer (1956 US) is about an INVASION of Earth by parasitic aliens who turn out to be more easily detectable - the protagonist being telepathic ( ESP) - than they had anticipated. With a Strange Device (1964; vt The Mindwarpers 1965 US) is a convoluted psychological melodrama cast as a crime story. His short fiction appears in various collections: Deep Space (coll 1954 US; cut vt Selections from Deep Space 1955 US), Six Worlds Yonder (coll 1958 dos), Far Stars (coll 1961), Dark Tides (coll 1962), Somewhere a Voice (coll 1965), Like Nothing on Earth (coll 1975) and The Best of Eric Frank Russell (coll 1978) ed Alan Dean FOSTER. He also wrote a series of essays on Great World Mysteries (coll 1957). [MJE/BS]About the author: Eric Frank Russell, Our Sentinel in Space: A Working Bibliography (last rev 1988 chap) by Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; EVOLUTION; GODS AND DEMONS; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; INVISIBILITY; MATTER TRANSMISSION; MONSTERS; ORIGIN OF MAN; PARANOIA; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; PERCEPTION; POLITICS; RELIGION; TIME TRAVEL; VILLAINS. RUSSELL, JOHN John Russell FEARN. RUSSELL, JOHN ROBERT (? - ) US writer whose first novel, Cabu (1974), translates a man to a violent new life on the planet Cabu. The planet featured in Ta (1975) boasts sentient plants. [JC]Other work: Sar (1974). RUSSELL, W(ILLIAM) CLARK (1844-1911) US-born UK writer and sailor (1858-66), most of whose prolific output dealt with sailors and the sea. Of sf interest are The Frozen Pirate (1887), in which a French pirate, frozen for years in cold climes, is resuscitated briefly and tells the narrator where there is some buried treasure, and The Death Ship, A Strange Story: An Account of a Cruise in "The Flying Dutchman" (1888; vt The Flying Dutchman 1888 US), which tries to add scientific verisimilitude to the legend. Other works of interest include some of the stories in Phantom Death and Other Stories (coll 1895). [JC]See also: CRYONICS; IMMORTALITY. RUSSEN, DAVID (? -? ) UK author of an extended book-review published in book form, Iter Lunare: Or, A Voyage to the Moon: Containing Some Considerations on the Nature of that Planet, the Possibility of getting thither, With Other Pleasant Conceits about the Inhabitants, their Manners and Customs (1703). The book reviewed was Selenarchia: The Government of the World in the Moon, the title given to the 1659 English translation of CYRANO DE BEGERAC's Histoire comique, par Monsieur de Cyrano Bergerac, contenant les etats et empires de la lune (1657). DR criticizes Cyrano on scientific grounds, and speculates on other possible systems for travel to the MOON, noting the likelihood of a lack of air on the way. A recent edn (1976) has an intro by Mary Elizabeth Bowen. [PN] RUSSIA Russian sf can trace its ancestry back to the 18th century, most of the earliest examples being UTOPIAS. Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov's Puteshestvie v zemlyu Ofirskuyu ["Journey to the Land of Ophir"] (written c1785; 1896) embodies the political and social reforms espoused by the liberal and progressive elements of Catherine the Great's aristocracy. The technological prophecies of "4338 i-god" (1840; trans as "The Year 4338" in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction anth 1982 ed Leland Fetzer), an unfinished fragment by Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky, an educationist, make him a pioneer of Russian PROTO SCIENCE FICTION. In contrast to the liberalism of this work is the Fourierist vision of utopian socialism to be found in the celebrated "Fourth Dream of Vera Pavlovna", part of the radical novel Chto delat? (1863 in Sovremennik; 1864; trans B.R. Tucker as What's to be Done? 1883 US; rev and cut 1961 US; new trans Nathan H. Dole and S.S. Sidelsky as A Vital Question, or What is to be Done? 1886 US) by Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889).As in most national literary traditions, Russian utopia had a twin sister, DYSTOPIA. In the 19th century there are several famous examples in the satirical fantasies of Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852). The merciless novel Istoriya odnogo goroda ["Chronicles of a City"] (1869-70) by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin still remains an unsurpassed classic of Russian dystopia in embryo. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) may also be considered a founding father of the dystopia with Zapiski iz podpolya (1864; trans by C.J. Hogarth as Letters from Underground 1913; vt Notes from Underground in coll trans Constance Garnett 1918), "Son smeshnogo cheloveka" (1877; trans S. Koteliansky and J. Middleton Murry as "The Dream of a Queer Fellow" 1915; vt "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man") and Besy (1871-2; trans Constance Garnett as The Possessed in Complete Works, 12 vols, 1912-20; new trans David Magarshack as The Devils 1953).Russian literature also has an impressive history of HARD SF, beginning with the first native interplanetary novel Noveisheye puteshestviye ["The Newest Voyage"] (1784) by Vassily Lyovshin and notably featuring the works of the astronautics pioneer Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY. As Russian society slowly came to terms with technological progress towards the end of the 19th century, its sf inevitably fell in love with "marvellous inventions".On the other hand, the influence of impending social change was also evident in the works of those leading MAINSTREAM WRITERS who turned to sf themes, sometimes with mixed feelings. Alexander Kuprin praised the coming revolution in "Tost" (1906; trans as "A Toast" in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction ed Fetzer) but feared it in "Korolevskii park" ["King's Park"] (1911); his main sf work is "Zhidkoe solntse" (1913; trans as "Liquid Sunshine" in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction ed Fetzer), a parody of Russian PULP-MAGAZINE sf complete with a mad SCIENTIST and super- WEAPONS. The prominent poet Valery Bryussov (1873-1924) anticipated giant domed computerized CITIES, ecological catastrophe and a totalitarian state in Zemlya ["Earth"] (1904), "Respublika Iuzhnogo Kresta" (1907; trans in The Republic of the Southern Cross and Other Stories, coll 1918 as by Valery Brussof) and "Posledniye mucheniki" (1907; trans as "The Last Martyrs" in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction ed Fetzer). The 3 stories appear in Bryussov's collection Zemnaia os' ["Earth's Axis"] (coll 1907). The popularity and influence of H.G. WELLS, whose works were translated into Russian from 1899 onwards, led to Alexander BOGDANOV's socialist utopia on MARS, Krasnaya zvezda (1908; trans Fetzer as "Red Star" in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction ed Fetzer) and its sequel Inzhener Menni ["Engineer Menni"] (1913), in which CYBERNETICS and the management sciences are foreseen in depth. Both these works are available in Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia (coll trans Charles Rougle 1984) ed Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites.Although Krasnaya zvezda is often considered the earliest book of authentically Soviet sf, the first post-revolutionary work was Vivian Itin's utopia Strana Gonguri ["Gonguri Land"] (1922). This went almost unnoticed, overshadowed by the success the same year of the interplanetary romance Aelita (1922; trans 1957) by Alexei TOLSTOY. This landmark of early Soviet sf, inspired by Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, tells of a Russian engineer and a Martian beauty involved in a Marxist revolution. Tolstoy also wrote Giperboloid inzhenera Garina (1925-6; 1933; rev 1939; trans 1936 as The Death Box; rev edn trans 1955 as The Garin Death Ray), in whose dictatorial mad scientist, inventor of a laser-like weapon, a proto-Hitler may be discerned. It is a good example of the subgenre known as the "krasnyi detektiv" ["Red Detective Story"]: stories of adventures abroad often involving assistance to world revolutionary movements, and often with a fantastic element such as a new WEAPON. Examples still in print are Marietta Shaginian's Mess-Mend (1924) and Lori L'en, metallist ["Laurie Lane, Metalworker"] (1925), Valentin Katayev's Povelitel' zheleza ["Iron Master"] (1924; 1925) and Ilya Ehrenburg's Istoriya neobychainykh pokhozhdenii Khulio Khurenito i ego druzei ["The Fantastic Adventures of Julio Jurenito and his Friends"] (1922), which depicts a future WAR conducted with ultimate "atomic" weapons.A theme born of revolutionary euphoria was the outward spread of communist humanity through the Universe, as in the works of the poetical movement known as the "cosmists", of which Bryussov (see above) was a member. Closer to home was the creation of various Earth-bound utopias, as in the works of the important Soviet writer Andrei PLATONOV, though he had an insight that prevented overoptimism; his mature novels were finally published in Russia only quite recently. Other authors' more naive socialist utopias, quite common in the 1920s, tend to be dull and overloaded with technological marvels, although Vadim Nikolsky's Cherez tysyachu let ["Thousand Years Hence"] (1927) depicts also a full-scale nuclear holocaust. Yan Larri's not entirely cheerful Strana shchastlivykh ["Land of the Happy"] (1930) was the last communist utopia until Ivan YEFREMOV's Tumannost Andromedy (1957; 1958; trans 1959 as Andromeda).A more caustic approach to utopia can be seen in Vladimir MAYAKOVSKY's brilliant play Klop (1928; trans Guy Daniels as The Bedbug 1960), in which this leading Soviet poet satirizes a dull, virtuous, overclean future without condoning the energetic, alcoholic prole who represents the present generation: Mayakovsky sees both extremes as undesirable. But even more radical was the attitude of Yevgeny ZAMIATIN's My (written 1920 and circulated in manuscript; 1st book publication in Czech trans 1922; 1st English trans Gregory Zilboorg as We 1924; 1st publication in Russian 1927 Czechoslovakia), which until the late 1980s was proscribed in the USSR. In this literary masterpiece, which anticipates the classic anti-utopias of Aldous HUXLEY and George ORWELL, the One State, after achieving its goals on Earth, plans to export its soulless doctrine across the Universe.The subjects of early Soviet sf vary from the classical "geographical fantasies" of academician Vladimir OBRUCHEV to the imaginary worlds of the novels of Alexander Grin (1880-1932). Obruchev wrote in the manner of Jules VERNE. His Plutoniya (1915; 1924; trans B. Pearce as Plutonia 1957) and Zemlya Sannikova (1926; trans Y. Krasny as Sannikov Land 1955 USSR) are scientifically credible HOLLOW-EARTH and LOST-WORLD novels, respectively. Grin began his writing career after his imprisonment and exile after the 1905 Revolution, having previously been largely an outdoorsman: lumberjack, fisherman, etc. His romances set in an ALTERNATE WORLD fed a strong appetite in Russia, especially after the 1917 Revolution when high fantasy was taboo, and they were printed in millions of copies. Containing many fantastic elements they include the stories in Shapka-nevidimka ["The Hat of Invisibility"] (coll 1908), the novels Alyie parusa ["Scarlet Sails"] (1923), Blistaiushchii mir ["The Shining World"] (1923), Doroga nikuda ["Road Nowhere"] (1930) and others.But the most prominent writer of pre-WWII sf was Alexander BELYAEV, the author of more than 60 books and certainly a good storyteller. His Chelovek-amphibiya (1928; trans L. Kolesnikov as The Amphibian 1959), Golova professora Douela ["Professor Dowell's Head"] (1925; exp 1938) and Ariel (1941) are known to all Soviet schoolchildren, being constantly reprinted. Perhaps because of his life as a bedridden invalid, his work focuses on heroes with superior abilities. Most of his novels are set in capitalist countries whose social and scientific mores are fiercely criticized. The "Red Detective Story" theme of world revolution virtually disappears in Belyaev, doubtless as a consequence of Trotsky's disgrace and exile in 1927.Magazines, particularly Vokrug sveta ["Round the World"] and Mir priklyuchenii ["Adventure World"], went on publishing sf throughout the 1920s, usually mad-scientist tales of adventures in the laboratory, or spy/adventure yarns about new weapons or exotic explosives. Such magazines were very popular: the circulation of Vsemirnyi sledopyt ["World Pathfinder"] rose 1926-9 from 15,000 to 100,000. But soon, in the 1930s, tighter Communist Party control of literature compelled sf writers to become more ideologically correct than hitherto. They were encouraged to direct their readers' attention to tasks close at hand (the "close-target" theory), to stress collective over individual effort, and to set their plots within the USSR. Georgy Adamov typifies the attitudes of the new cultural climate in Taina dvukh okeanov ["Secret of Two Oceans"] (1938), where scientific information is combined with a patriotic plot involving the thwarting of Japanese spies. The official belief that speculative fiction was an undesirable escape from reality lasted at least until Stalin's death in 1953, and thus books such as Vadim Okhotnikov's characteristically titled Na grani vozmozhnogo ["Frontiers of the Possible"] (1947), which focuses on new road-laying techniques and a new combine harvester, characterize the deeply unimaginative sf of the period. A striking exception to the ideological correctness of most Soviet speculative fiction was the borderline-sf satirical work of playwright and novelist Mikhail BULGAKOV. His work was suppressed in the mid-1920s, and a number of manuscripts written in the late 1920s and after were not published until much later, in the 1960s. His masterpiece is the fantasy Master i Margarita (written in the 1930s, unfinished at his death in 1940; 1966-7 cut magazine publication; 1973; trans Michael Glenny as The Master and Margarita 1967), a dark, vigorous philosophical parable about a visit to Moscow by Satan, with an interesting reinterpretation of the conflict between Christ and Pontius Pilate.The fading of Soviet sf in the late 1930s and the 1940s, partly due to the pressures of WWII and the hardships of the postwar years, was for some time hardly interrupted, despite the arrival on the scene of new authors, Viktor Saparin and Georgy Gurevich among them. Sf in the USSR was reborn only with the publication (virtually coinciding with the launch of Sputnik 1) of Ivan Yefremov's Tumannost Andromedy (1957 in the magazine Tekhhnika-molodezhi ["Technology for Youth"]; 1958; trans George Hanna as Andromeda 1959). This ambitious full-scale utopia, with its philosophical concept of a "Great Ring" of extraterrestrial civilizations in space, not only made its author a leader of Soviet sf but launched the decade of its Golden Age, giving inspiration to scores of gifted young authors. Others of Yefremov's books, such as Lezvie britvy ["The Razor's Edge"] (1963) and Chas byka ["The Hour of the Bull"] (1968; exp 1970), were also influential.The late 1950s saw a dramatic upsurge in Soviet sf publishing. For example, where the popular-science magazine Znaniye-sila ["Knowledge is Power"] printed only 1 sf story in 1953, in 1961 it printed 19, including 2 by Ray BRADBURY and part of SOLARIS (1961) by Stanislaw LEM. Writers demanded the freedom to speculate much more widely, to write "far" rather than "near" fantasy, as they put it. Encouraged by a more liberal literary climate and the example of Western work, now being translated in quantity, new and talented authors emerged and themes formerly TABOO began to appear in print: ALIENS, CYBERNETICS, ESP, ROBOTS and TIME TRAVEL, for example. Level-headed critics like Evgeny Brandis and Vladimir Dmitrievsky kept readers informed about developments abroad, and the names of Lem, Bradbury, Isaac ASIMOV, Robert SHECKLEY, Arthur C. CLARKE and dozens of others soon became familiar to Soviet sf fans.The spiritual leaders of Soviet sf during the following three decades were undoubtedly the STRUGATSKI brothers, Arkady and Boris. They stand out as the major talents among the writers who made their mark in the 1960s, and wrote far and away the most interesting and readable sf ever produced in the USSR (now almost all translated into English). Temporarily subdued during the 1970s, after clashes with the authorities, they were nonetheless permitted, as restrictions were relaxed in the late 1980s, to travel abroad for the first time as guests of honour to a World SF CONVENTION in the UK in 1987. Soviet sf is by no means confined to the Strugatskis' work, however, nor to that of their contemporaries like Genrikh ALTOV, Dmitri BILENKIN, Kir BULYCHEV, Mikhail EMTSEV and Eremey PARNOV, Sever GANSOVSKY, Viktor KOLUPAYEV, Vladimir SAVCHENKO, Vadim SHEFNER, and Evgeny VOISKUNSKY and Isai LUKODIANOV. In his collections Formula bessmertiya ["The Immortality Formula"] (coll 1963), Pupurnaya mumiya ["The Purple Mummy"] (coll 1965) and others, the former scientist Anatoly Dneprov imagines the social impact of technological breakthroughs, particularly in cybernetics and BIOLOGY. Ilya Varshavsky, a talented short-story writer, is famous for his sombre dystopian cycle about the imaginary state of Donomaga, Solntse zakhodit v Donomage ["The Sun Sets in Donomaga"] (coll of linked stories 1966), while the veteran writer Sergei Snegov made his name in sf with his philosophical SPACE OPERA, a trilogy on a Stapledonian scale; the trilogy's first novel has the Wellsian title "Lyudi kak bogi" ["Men like Gods"] (in Ellinskii sekret ["Hellenic Secret"] anth 1966); the second novel is "Vtorzheniye v Persei" ["Invasion into Perseus"] (in Vtorzheniye v Persei anth 1968); the third is "Kol'tso obratnogo vremeni" ["The Ring of Reversed Time"] (in Kol'tso obratnogo vremeni anth 1977). The first 2 were published together as Lyudi kak bogi (omni 1971), and all 3 in a separate omnibus, also entitled Lyudi kak bogi (omni 1982).The above are mostly known as writers of HARD SF, but most Russian sf of recent years has been SOFT SF. At the soft end of the scale is, for example, the otherwise mainstream author Gennady Gor, who turned to philosophical fantasies in collections like Glinyanyi papuas ["The Clay Papuan"] (coll 1966) and in the novel Pamiatnik ["The Statue"] (1972). Olga Larionova made a promising debut with the novella "Leopard s vershiny Kilimandzharo" ["The Leopard from Kilimanjaro's Summit"] (1965; reprinted in Ostrov muzhestva ["Courage Island"] coll 1971), which describes the problems caused through learning the date of one's own death. Vladimir Mikhailov demonstrated a mastery of the grand philosophical Bildungsroman in Dver's drugoi storony ["The Other Side Door"] (1974), Storozh bratu moemu ["My Brother's Keeper"] (1976) and its sequel Togda pridite, i rassudim ["Come Now and Let us Reason Together"] (1983). The latter two novels are ambitious space operas, raising serious metaphysical and religious questions unusual in Russian sf.There are dozens of promising names in the most recent generation of Soviet sf writers. Among them are the "brainstorming" author and scientist Pavel Amnuel - he emigrated to Israel in 1990 - whose collection Segodnia, zavtra i vsegda ["Today, Tomorrow and Forever"] (coll 1984), along with his near-future SUPERMAN novel , so far only in magazine form, "Vzryv"[ "Explosion"] (1990), has appealed both to readers and to critics. Vyacheslav Rybakov, also a scientist, has written interesting sf seriously concerned with social issues; his two books are Oshna na bashne ["Fire on the Tower"] (1990), a novel, and Svoyo oruzhiye["His Own Weapon"] (coll 1990); he has also worked in the cinema (see below). Other strong writers in the most recent generation include Andrei Lazarchuk, Andrei Stolyarov, Boris Shtern, Mikhail Uspensky; Eduard Gevorkyan, Vladimir Pokrovsky and Yevgeny and Lubov Lukin. Two other major features of Russian sf in recent decades have been the unexpected rise in the quality and amount of sf criticism and the growing interest (as in the West) shown by MAINSTREAM WRITERS in using sf themes. Among the better known works of criticism are the contributions of V. Bugrov, T. Chernyshova, Vladimir GAKOV, Julius KAGARLITSKI, R. Nudelman (since 1974 resident in Israel) and V. Revich. Sf by mainstream writers includes the powerful post- HOLOCAUST novella "Poslednyaya pastoral" (1987; trans 1987 as "The Last Pastorale" in Soviet Literature #8) by Ales Adamovich as well as works by C. AITMATOV, V. AKSENOV and V. VOINOVICH.The most prestigious Soviet sf award, the Aelita, was founded in 1981 by the Russian Federation Writers' Union and Ural'skii sledopyt ["Urals Pathfinder"] magazine. The latter is published from the city of Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk until 1991), so the ceremony is held there, annually. The winner is chosen by a panel of judges. Although instituted as an award for the best single sf work published in the previous year, it appears to have become a sort of "Life Achievement" trophy. Winners have been:1981: Alexander Kazantsev and the Strugatski brothers (tie)1982: Zinovii Yuriev1983: Vladislav Krapivin1984: Sergei Snegov1985: Sergei Pavlov1986: No award1987: Olga Larionova1988: Victor Kolupayev1989:Sever Gansovsky1990: Oleg Korabelnikov1991: Vladimir Mikhailov1992: Sergei DrugalAnother award, voted on by Soviet fandom generally, is the Velikoye Koltso (The Great Ring Award) also first given in 1981, and annually since, except while it was suspended in 1983, 1984 and 1985. Other awards are: Yefremov Award for life achievement in the field, presented since 1987; Start Award, presented since 1989 for the best first book of a new author; Bronzovaya Ulitka (The Bronze Snail Award) presented by Boris Strugatski for the best sf or fantasy of the previous year since 1992.There is a long history of sf CINEMA in the USSR, going back at least to AELITA (1924), the film version of Alexei Tolstoy's novel. There were quite a few sf films in the 1960s, nearly all of them strong on special effects and production design, but with conventionally socialist plotlines; the best known is TUMANNOST ANDROMEDY (1968; vt The Andromeda Nebula), based on Yefremov's novel but de-emphasizing its more radical speculations. Several Russian films of this period, including the well made PLANETA BUR (1962; vt Planet of Storms), were cannibalized and recut in the USA ( Roger CORMAN). More recently the outstanding director of Russian sf cinema was Andrei TARKOVSKY, whose sf films are SOLARIS (1971), STALKER (1979) and, marginally, Zhertvoprinoshenie (1986; vt Offret; vt The Sacrifice). Stalker is based on a novel by the Strugatskis, and the film Otel U pogibshchego alpinista (1979; vt Dead Mountaineer Hotel), made by the Estonian director Grigori Kromanov, is based on one of their novellas. A recent and widely publicized film (shown on US tv) is Pisma myortvovo cheloveka (1986; vt Letters from a Dead Man) dir Konstantin Lopushansky, who wrote the script with Vyacheslav Rybakov and Boris Strugatski, about retreat into a bunker after a nuclear DISASTER while orphaned children remain above ground. There is also a 1989 film based on a Strugatski novel, TRUDNO BYT' BOGOM ["Hard to be a God"]. There are two Soviet film versions of Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950): Golosa pamyati ["Voices of Memory"] (1980), with Nikolai Grinko good as the ROBOT, and a cartoon version, Budet laskovyi dozhd ["There Will Come Soft Rains"] (1984). A more recent Bradbury adaptation is VEL'D (1987).A joint Soviet-Polish coproduction was a successful adaptation from Stanislaw Lem, Doznaniie pilota Pirksa ["The Investigation of Pirx the Pilot"] (1979), dir Marek Pestrak, with rather sophisticated design and special effects. Also notable is a 2-part feature film for young adults by an enthusiastic director of sf, the late Richard Viktorov, comprising Moskva-Kassiopeya ["Moscow-Cassiopeia"] (1973) and its sequel Otroki vo Vselennoi ["Teenagers in the Universe"] (1974), which comes across like a combination of Robert A. HEINLEIN's juvenile novels and Joe DANTE's EXPLORERS (1985). An earlier film by Viktorov was CHEREZ TERNII - K ZVYOZDAM (1980; vt Per Aspera ad Astra), about ecological catastrophe. The most recent Soviet film in the sf/fantasy genre has become something of a cult movie, the HEROIC-FANTASY Podzemelie ved'm ["Witches' Dungeon"] (1990), dir Sergei Morozov, and based on a novel by Kir Bulychev, who also wrote the screenplay. [VG/AM/IT/PN]Further reading: Several anthologies of Russian sf stories have been published in English translation, including the Moscow Foreign Language Publishing House anthologies A Visitor from Outer Space (anth 1961; vt Soviet Science Fiction US), The Heart of the Serpent (anth 1961; vt More Soviet Science Fiction US) and Destination: Amaltheia (anth 1962), and the 3 Mir anthologies Everything but Love (anth 1973), Journey across Three Worlds (anth 1973) and The Molecular Cafe (anth 1968). Anthologies published in the UK and USA include: Vortex (anth 1970) ed C.G. Bearne; Last Door to Aiya (anth 1968) and The Ultimate Threshold (anth 1970) ed Mirra GINSBURG; Russian Science Fiction (anth 1964), Vol II (anth 1967) and Vol III (anth 1969) ed R. MAGIDOFF; Path into the Unknown (anth 1966) ed anon; New Soviet Science Fiction (anth 1979) ed anon; World's Spring (anth 1981) ed Vladimir GAKOV; Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction: An Anthology (Seven Utopias and a Dream) (anth 1982) ed and trans Leland Fetzer; Aliens, Travelers, and Other Strangers (anth 1984) ed and trans (uncredited) Roger De Garis. View from Another Shore (anth 1973) ed Franz ROTTENSTEINER and Other Worlds, Other Seas (anth 1970) ed Darko SUVIN both contain stories by Soviet sf writers. For further scholarly and critical overviews see: Suvin's Russian Science Fiction 1956-1974: A Bibliography (1976) and "Russian SF and its Utopian Tradition" in his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979); Three Tomorrows: American, British and Soviet Science Fiction (1980) by John GRIFFITHS; Red Stars: Political Aspects of Soviet Science Fiction (1985) by Patrick MCGUIRE, which to a degree is updated and summarized by McGuire in his introduction to "Chapter 6: Russian SF" in Anatomy of Wonder (3rd edn 1987) ed Neil BARRON; Soviet Fiction since Stalin: Science, Politics and Literature (1986) by Rosalind J. Marsh. 2 interesting magazine articles are "Some Developments in Soviet SF since 1966" by Alan Myers (Foundation #19, 1980) and "Soviet Science Fiction and the Ideology of Soviet Society" by Rafail Nudelman (Science-Fiction Studies #47, 1989).See also: Alexander and Sergei ABRAMOV; N. AMOSOV, Y. DANIEL, V. DUDINTSEV; Abram TERTZ. RUSSO, JOHN [r] George A. ROMERO. RUSSO, RICHARD PAUL (1954- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Firebird Suite" for AMZ in 1981. His first novel, Inner Eclipse (1988), is a strongly atmospheric tale, illuminated by striking visual images, which describes a search for ALIEN intelligence on a jungle world whose major industry is the export of an extremely dangerous recreational drug. The protagonist, an empath who wants to abandon humanity (to whose violence and hypocrisy his talent bares him) in favour of the aliens, in the end achieves an ambiguous redemption. Subterranean Gallery (1989), which won the 1990 PHILIP K. DICK AWARD, is set in a city full of dropouts and underground artists in a NEAR-FUTURE USA filled with analogues of and references to the present (abortion has been banned; the country is fighting a Vietnam-style war in Central America; police fly "dragoncubs" which resemble helicopters and use "stunclubs" rather than nightsticks) and tells a convincing and richly characterized story of a man's search for meaning in creativity. At his best, RPR is a major exponent of "Humanist sf", a writer who uses relatively conventional settings as a backdrop against which to portray the failures and triumphs of solid, believable people.RPR should not be confused with Richard (Anthony) Russo (1946- ), editor of Dreams are Wiser than Men (anth 1987). [NT]Other works: Destroying Angel (1992), a near-future fantasy. RUSTOFF, MICHAEL (? -? ) UK writer, possibly pseudonymous, whose What Will Mrs Grundy Say? or A Calamity on Two Legs (A Book for Men) (1891) carries its protagonist via balloon to an unnamed (but nearby) planet where euthanasia is practised. The tale is told in a satirical vein. [JC] RUTH, ROD (1912-1987) US illustrator. Some of his early work was in animal ILLUSTRATION, a talent that served him well in sf also, where he created some very credible alien beasts. He became a staff artist for the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines in the late 1930s and is best known for his proficient and sometimes amusing black-and-white interior illustrations (1940-51)-mostly done with grease crayon - for about 100 issues of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, for which he also painted 4 covers. He left Ziff-Davis in 1950 and devoted himself primarily to wildlife illustration - for which he won several awards. After 25 years away from sf RR illustrated Science Fiction Tales: Invaders, Creatures and Alien Worlds (anth 1973) ed Roger ELWOOD and 2 other anthologies. RR also illustrated children's books and worked for 16 years on a comic strip, The Toodles. [JG/PN] RUTTER, OWEN (1889-1944) US-born UK writer whose Lucky Star (1929; vt Once in a New Moon 1935), filmed as Once in a New Moon (1935), tells of a small English community cast into space on a portion of the Earth, where they go about their village concerns until returning to the North Sea. The Monster of Mu (1932) is a LOST-WORLD tale featuring cruel priests of Mu and a monster which protects their island from intruders. [JC]Other works: The Dragon of Kinabalu (1923), a fantasy. RUYSLINCK, WARD [r] BENELUX. RYAN, CHARLES C(ARROLL) (1946- ) US editor and publisher. A newspaperman by profession, CCR is known in the sf world for the 2 SF MAGAZINES he has edited, GALILEO (1975-80) and ABORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION (1986-current), both of which at their peak reached surprisingly high circulations. In 1991, with John BETANCOURT, CCR founded the SMALL PRESS First Books, designed to publish limited-edition hardcovers of first books by writers discovered by Aboriginal Science Fiction. One of these was Letters of the Alien Publisher (coll 1991) ed CRR, collecting essays by the pseudonymous "alien publisher" of Aboriginal SF. Anthologies ed CRR are Starry Messenger: The Best of Galileo (anth 1979) and Aboriginal Science Fiction, Tales of the Human Kind: 1988 Annual Anthology (anth 1988 chap). [PN] RYAN, THOMAS J(OSEPH) (1942- ) Canadian writer in whose sf novel, The Adolescence of P-1 (1977 UK), a COMPUTER exceeds its design specifications, takes over most of its North American fellows, becomes sentient, and must decide the proper thing to do. As the title implies - and fortunately for the human cast - it moves towards adulthood. TJR should not be confused with the UK writer Thomas Ryan, whose Men in Chains (1939) verges on sf. [JC] RYDER, JAMES [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. RYMAN, GEOFF(REY CHARLES) (1951- ) Canadian-born writer who moved to the USA at age 11, and has been resident in the UK since 1973. He began publishing sf with "The Diary of the Translator" for NW in 1976, but began to generate significant work only with the magazine version of The Unconquered Country: A Life History (1984 INTERZONE; rev 1986), which won the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD and the World Fantasy Award. It is the story of a young woman forced by poverty and the terrible conditions afflicting her native land (clearly a transfigured Cambodia) to rent out her womb for industrial purposes (it is used to grow machinery). In the book GR demonstrated - as have Bruce MCALLISTER, Ursula K. LE GUIN and Lucis SHEPARD in various tales - that sf is capable of a mature response to the ordeal of Southeast Asia. That this response was a decade or more years belated confirms the depth of the trauma, as does the anguished saliency of GR's short text. It is included in Unconquered Countries: Four Novellas (coll 1994 US), which assembles most of his short fiction of interest.GR's first full-length novel, The Warrior who Carried Life (1985), is a quest FANTASYwhich, though pacifist, seems less subversive; but THE CHILD GARDEN: A LOW COMEDY (1987 Interzone as "Love Sickness"; much exp 1988), which won the ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD and the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD, complexly massages an array of themes-drugs, DYSTOPIA, ECOLOGY, FEMINISM, HIVE-MINDS, homosexuality, MEDICINE and MUSIC - into a long rich novel about identity and the making of great art. Set in a transfigured UK - in effect an ALTERNATE WORLD - the book stands as one of the sturdiest monuments of "Humanist" sf, despite some moments of clogged selfconsciousness. A non-sf novel, ostensibly about the life of the Kansas girl whose tragedy sparks L. Frank BAUM into creating the Oz books, "Was . . ." (1992; vt Was 1992 US), focuses on the 20th century, and the knot of memory and desire generated in the mind of an actor, dying of AIDS, by both the books and the 1939 film.GR has also written some sf plays, none published but most performed, including an adaptation of Philip K. DICK's The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). [JC]Other work: Coming of Enkidu (1989 chap).See also: GENETIC ENGINEERING; GOTHIC SF; INTELLIGENCE. RYMAN, RAS [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. RYVES, T(HOMAS) E(VAN) (1895- ) UK writer in whose Bandersnatch (1950) an adventurer travels - or is transported - into a future dominated by a highly mechanized scientific establishment, and by the bandersnatch scientism to which they give allegiance. Fortunately, he escapes this DYSTOPIA. [JC] |