SF&F encyclopedia (W-W)WADE, TOM W. (? - ) UK writer who published mainly with sf publishers John Spencer ( BADGER BOOKS) under various pseudonyms. As Victor Wadey he wrote two bad yet charming sf novels, A Planet Named Terra (1962) and its sequel The United Planets (1962). The distant planet confusingly called Terra is populated by the REINCARNATIONS of people from Earth, notably Elizabeth I, as space explorers from Earth discover to their amazement. He wrote Chaos in Arcturus (1953) and Chariot into Time (1953) under the house name Karl Zeigfreid as well as, fairly certainly, the remaining unidentified title listed in the Karl ZEIGFREID entry. Under the house name Victor LA SALLE he wrote Assault from Infinity (1953), The Seventh Dimension (1953) and Suns in Duo (1953). As TWW he wrote 2 later tales, The World of Theda (1962) and The Voice from Baru (1963). [JC/JGr] WADEY, VICTOR Tom W. WADE. WADSWORTH, PHYLLIS MARIE (? - ) UK author whose Overmind (1967) deals with ALIENS who contact humanity from another DIMENSION. [JC] WAGAR, W(ALTER) WARREN (1932- ) US academic (professor of history since 1971 at the State University of New York at Binghamton, which has since 1991 been Binghamton University) and writer. He has published sf - his first story being "Heart's Desire" for IASFM in 1984 - but his involvement in the field comes primarily through his many years of work on H.G. WELLS in books like H.G. Wells and the World State (1961) and H.G. Wells: Journalism and Prophecy, 1893-1946 (coll 1964). In these WWW concentrates upon a side of Wells not generally thought very congenial: the insistent, peremptory, secretly authoritarian proselytizer for a world UTOPIA. The image of Wells as a simple propagandist does not survive WWW's analysis. Later books, like Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (1982) and A Short History of the Future (1989; rev 1992), demonstrate the complexity and darkness that Wells, and others, brought to their prophecies; the 2nd vol is a literal recasting of one of Wells's favourite modes, the future history told as a nonfiction narrative, with illustrations. Terminal Visions, an important work of sf scholarship, is a social history of apocalyptic thought in literature, covering (but not confined to) GENRE SF. [JC]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF. WAHLOO, PER (1926-1975) Swedish writer, best known for his detective novels, mostly with his wife Maj Sjowall (1935- ); on some of his books his name appears as Peter Wahloo. His NEAR-FUTURE sf thrillers include Mord pa 31: a vaningen (1965; trans Joan Tate as Murder on the 31st Floor 1966 UK; vt The Thirty-First Floor 1967 US), which was filmed as KAMIKAZE 1989 (1982), Stalspranget (1968; trans Joan Tate as The Steel Spring 1970 UK), about a deadly plague in Sweden, and Generalerna (1965; trans Joan Tate as The Generals 1974 US), a trial novel set in a military DYSTOPIA. [JC] WALDO An item of sf TERMINOLOGY originated by Robert A. HEINLEIN in his short novel Waldo: Genius in Orbit (1942 ASF as "Waldo"; a title story of Waldo & Magic, Inc. [coll 1950]; 1958). The eponymous hero suffers from a crippling wasting of the muscles, and invents a number of remote-control devices, also called waldoes, to amplify the power of his feeble muscular movements. The term has since come into general use in technology to describe a whole range of remote-control devices, now commonplace. It has expanded in meaning to include devices for handling radioactive or other dangerous materials in isolation from the handler, and those concerned with fine and precise rather than powerful movements. [PN] WALDROP, HOWARD (1946- ) US writer, an important member of the Texas-based school of sf writers, much of whose work is set in the South. His first sf story was "Lunch Box" (1972) for ASF. His first novel, The Texas-Israeli War: 1999 (1974) with Jake SAUNDERS, makes little capital of its transpositions of genres and nationalities. In 1976, however, he began to produce more characteristic work, including a wildly elaborate collaboration with Steven UTLEY, "Custer's Last Jump" (1976) - an ALTERNATE-WORLD story in which powered flight has reached the USA in time for the Civil War and the Indian Wars - and "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" (1976), an accomplished post- HOLOCAUST story in which Native American trials of strength are conducted with ageing bulldozers. There were several more collaborations with Utley, and these along with HW's solo work have been regularly anthologized.HW is one of the few contemporary sf writers whose work is mostly short fiction. He has never been especially prolific, and his stories mine the same rich vein of alternate history almost too repeatedly, but his combination of deadpan humour and genuine scholarship (in both academic history and popular culture) has won him a loyal readership. Although his yoking together of disparate material sometimes appears crazed, with hindsight it is often strangely logical. Only HW would have written - it was his first solo novel - an alternate history (featuring 4 alternate worlds) with time travel from a dystopic future, Amerindian Mound Builders, Aztec Invaders, ancient Greek merchants in power-driven boats and much more, in Them Bones (1984); it is both astonishing and moving. His only other novel (really a novella) is A Dozen Tough Jobs (1989), a tall tale retelling the labours of Hercules in a late 1920s Mississippi setting; it says a little about ancient Greece and a lot about Black workers and rednecks.The strain of putting the pieces together sometimes shows, but at his (moderately regular) best HW has been one of the unforgettable sf voices of the 1970s and 1980s. Among his memorable pieces - somewhere between FABULATIONS and GENRE SF - are "Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me" (1976), "The Ugly Chickens" (1980), about how the dodo became extinct in the Deep South, which won a NEBULA, "Ike at the Mike" (1982), "Flying Saucer Rock & Roll" (1985), "Night of the Cooters" (1987) - describing what the Martians which had landed in Texas were doing while their counterparts, as featured in WAR OF THE WORLDS, were ravaging England - "Do Ya, Do Ya Wanna, Wanna Dance?" (1988) ( MUSIC) and "Fin de Cycle" (1991). It took a surprisingly long time for any collections to appear. The first 2 were Howard Who? (coll 1986) and All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past (coll 1987), assembled as Strange Things in Close-Up: The Nearly Complete Howard Waldrop (omni 1989 UK); the 2nd collection was reissued with A Dozen Tough Jobs included as Strange Monsters of the Recent Past (omni 1991). His 3rd collection was NIGHT OF THE COOTERS: MORE NEAT STORIES (coll 1990), republished with A Dozen Tough Jobs as Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stuff (omni 1991 UK). [PN]See also: GOTHIC SF; HOLLOW EARTH; HUMOUR; LOST WORLDS; OMNI; TIME TRAVEL. WALKER, ALICE (1944- ) US writer best known for novels like The Color Purple (1982), exploring from a FEMINIST perspective the fate of being Black in the USA. One of the protagonists of The Temple of My Familiar (1989), an extremely long FABULATION, is immortal or has suffered numerous incarnations, and the tales she tells embody a savage indictment of racism and patriarchal dominance over the centuries. Counteracting this, deep memories of a benign matriarchy also emerge, though shrouded in myth. [JC] WALKER, DAVID (HARRY) (1911-1992) Scottish-born writer, a Canadian citizen from 1957, best known for sentimental evocations of Scottish spirit like Geordie (1950), later filmed. Winter of Madness (1964) is a NEAR-FUTURE drama and The Lord's Pink Ocean (1972) a tale of POLLUTION and DISASTER in which all but one of the world's oceans die. [JC] WALKER, HUGH Pseudonym of German writer Hubert Strassl (1941- ), whose Darkness sequence - featuring a character who first creates a wargame and then becomes absorbed within it - is Reiter der Finsternis (1975; trans Christine Priest as War-Gamers' World 1978 US), Das Heer der Finsternis (1975; trans Christine Priest as Army of Darkness 1979 US), Boten der Finsternis (1976; trans Christine Priest as Messengers of Darkness 1979 US) and Damonen der Finsternis ["Demons of Darkness"] (1978). [JC]See also: VIRTUAL REALITY. WALKER, PAUL (1921- ) US writer and critic in whose sf novel, Who Killed Utopia? (1980), the first murder to have taken place for a century brings suspicion upon the poet/computer at the heart of things. PW contributed book reviews to Gal in 1978, and in the same year published a collection of postal interviews, Speaking of Science Fiction: The Paul Walker Interviews (coll 1978). [JC] WALKHAM, WALTER [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. WALL, G.A. [r] E.A. ROBINSON. WALLACE, DOREEN Working name of UK writer Dora Eileen Agnew Wallace Rash (1897- ), author of much popular fiction over a 65-year career. Forty Years On (1958) is set in the fens of Eastern England on the Isle of Ely (in fact not an island but a marsh-surrounded hill surmounted by the famous cathedral) after a nuclear HOLOCAUST. Here, under pastoral guidance, a chaste rural Fabian socialism soon takes control. The narrator visits other - visibly less blessed - parts of the fragmented UK, where cannibalism and US pop songs create general misery among the survivors, mostly working-class, who continue pertinaciously to attempt to breed. [JC]About the author: Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists (1989) by Susan J. Leonardi. WALLACE, (RICHARD HORATIO) EDGAR (1875-1932) UK author, playwright and editor, best known for his thrillers. EW used his experiences of the Boer War in the future- WAR novels Private Selby (1909 The Sunday Journal as "'O.C.' - A Soldier's Love Story"; 1912) and "1925": The Story of a Fatal Peace (1915). He featured the application of Pavlovian conditioning techniques to human beings in The Door with Seven Locks (1926) and "Control No. 2" (1934); impending world catastrophe in The Fourth Plague (1913), The Green Rust (1919; vt Green Rust 1920 US), "The Black Grippe" (1920) and The Day of Uniting (1921 Popular Magazine; 1926); the counter-Earth theme in Planetoid 127 (1924 The Mechanical Boy; as title story of coll 1929; 1986); and weird fiction in "The Stranger of the Night" (1910), "While the Passengers Slept" (1916) and Captains of Souls (1922 US). While working in Hollywood he assisted on the screenplay of KING KONG (1933), though his contribution may have been minimal - the novelization, King Kong * (1932), was by Delos Wheeler Lovelace (1894-1967) - and scripted a horror film, The Table, novelized as The Table * (1936) by Robert G. Curtis. [JE]Other works: The Council of Justice (1908); The Death Room (1909-29 var mags; coll 1986).See also: BOYS' PAPERS; HISTORY OF SF; WEAPONS. WALLACE, F(LOYD) L. (? -? ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Hideaway" for ASF in 1951, but was more strongly associated with Gal in the 1950s, the period of his greatest activity. Worlds in Balance (coll 1955 Australia) assembles 2 typical stories. Address: Centauri (1952 Gal as "Accidental Flight"; exp 1955), features volunteer cripples setting off for the stars, where they find redemption in being of use to the human race. [JC] WALLACE, IAN Pseudonym of John Wallace Pritchard (1912- ), US clinical psychologist and teacher who spent his working life - from 1934 until his retirement in 1974 - in professional education. As a writer he has been active mainly since 1967, though under his own name he published some nonfiction in the 1940s and the non-sf Every Crazy Wind (1952).Beginning with Croyd (1967), IW produced a remarkable series of sf novels, most of them more or less closely linked to a common background about 500 years hence, though the baroque contortions of his storylines tend to obliterate any sustained sense of continuity and often to make it very difficult to determine the precise era of the tale in question. This freewheeling dreamlike arbitrariness - as well as a startlingly inept sense of dialogue - has caused him more than once to be likened to A.E. VAN VOGT, though a sharp sense of humour has always been evident in IW's work. The common background to his books has a Solar System that dominates a large group of planets. Various ALIEN creatures - some godlike - participate in and impinge upon this central system. Transcendental TIME PARADOXES and loops abound, as do all the other appurtenances of the more intricate sort of SPACE OPERA, including HEROES.Of the 2 series sharing this background, the St Cyr Interplanetary Detective sequence is the more approachable. The individual titles - The Purloined Prince (1971) set in AD2470 (although this and other dates, while provided in the texts, are of little help in tales involving TIME PARADOXES and the like), Deathstar Voyage (1969) set in AD2475, and The Sign of the Mute Medusa (1977) set in AD2480 - tend like most detective novels to accept the nature of the world as a given and to concentrate upon problem-solving plots. Each book features Claudine St Cyr, an ace officer whose missions embroil her in complicated dilemmas on various planets; TIME TRAVEL is not eschewed, but is kept relatively straightforward. Of greater interest - but more taxing - is the Croyd sequence, comprising by order of event Z-Sting (1979), set in AD2475, Heller's Leap (1979), set in AD2494 and involving St Cyr, Croyd, set in AD2496, Dr Orpheus (1968), set in AD2502, A Voyage to Dari (1974), set in AD2506, Pan Sagittarius (1973), set in AD2509, and Megalomania (1989), set subsequently. In the earlier-published volumes, IW generally managed to control his tendency to create heavy-handed exercises in what might be called Gamine Baroque; Croyd and Dr Orpheus are among the most exhilarating space-opera exercises of the post-WWII genre. Croyd himself, the effective ruler of the human worlds for much of the series, frequently has to withstand - or initiate - radical changes in the rules that ground the Universe, and as a result must constantly busy himself with matter of cosmogonic grandeur. In Dr Orpheus, for instance, he must combat a plot on the part of distant but approaching aliens desperate to implant their fertile eggs in humans. The aliens have, in an earlier time, given the egomaniacal Dr Orpheus the use of an IMMORTALITY drug, anagonon, which has the side-effect of forcing those who take it to obey anyone whom they intuitively recognize as their hierarchical better - e.g., Orpheus himself - and thus, according to the aliens' plan, the human race should now be ripe for implantation. Croyd's counteroffensive involves a great deal of paradoxical time travel, including a sojourn in ancient Greece. Even at its most exciting moments, the story is conveyed at a contemplative remove, permitting the reader to enjoy its intricacies with relative calm. Of those books not identified with any series, only The Rape of the Sun (1982) seems clearly not to inhabit the basic and voluminous shared Universe. The World Asunder (1976) is connected to Pan Sagittarius, and The Lucifer Comet (1980), a successful tale, is attached by a tangle of strings to Croyd.The dreamlike tone of IW's work is retrospective in effect, rather than wish-fulfilling as with Van Vogt; it is only when this central calm declines to something approaching indifference - however laced with mysticism and occult plot turns - that IW's novels become inconseqential. [JC]See also: BLACK HOLES; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; GALACTIC EMPIRES. WALLACE, JAMES G.J. BARRETT. WALLACE, KING (? -? ) US writer whose sf novel, The Next War: A Prediction (1892), not untypically for its time and place of origin, plays on White fears of Negro uprisings. After failing to poison all US Whites, the Blacks lose the ensuing rebellion and disperse into the hinterlands, where they become extinct. [JC]See also: POLITICS. WALLEY, BRYON S. [s] Orson Scott CARD. WALLING, WILLIAM (HERBERT) (1926- ) US writer whose sf novel is No One Goes There Now (1971), in which a distorted human culture on a colony planet finds itself confronting ALIENS who will not abide our games of violence. He is not to be confused with William A. Walling, an academic critic, one of whose books is referred to under Mary SHELLEY. [JC] WALLIS, B. [r] George C. WALLIS. WALLIS, DAVE (1917- ) UK writer, possibly pseudonymous, of the near-future DYSTOPIAN fantasy Only Lovers Left Alive (1964), in which the mass suicide of the adult population leaves teenagers on their own in what rapidly becomes an anarchic UK. The book expressed contemporary PARANOIA about scooter gangs, adolescent violence, teen sex, loud music and funny hairstyles, yet, significantly, retained faith in the fundamental decency of human beings: it was not wholly pessimistic. [JC/JGr]See also: BOYS' PAPERS. WALLIS, GEORGE C. (1871-1956) UK writer, printer (before WWI) and cinema manager who began writing sf and historical and adventure fiction in 1896 for the penny weekly adult magazines and then, from the turn of the century, for the "slick" magazines. Around 1903 he began to write almost exclusively for the BOYS' PAPERS, ceasing around 1912. With the genesis of GENRE-SF magazines in the 1920s he began to write again, with "The World at Bay" as by B. and G.C. Wallis (the "B" was his cousin and literary agent) for AMZ (1928). During 1938-41 he had 9 SPACE OPERAS published in Tales of Wonder. Only 3 of his early sf and fantasy novels were reprinted as books: Children of the Sphinx (1901), a historical fantasy set in Egypt, A Corsair of the Sky (1910-11 Lot-O'-Fun; 1912) as by Royston Heath, in which an airborne pirate declares war on the world, and Beyond the Hills of Mist (1912 Lot-O'-Fun; 1913), in which a Tibetan lost race ( LOST WORLDS), equipped with aircraft, plans world domination. Other early novels, some in serial form, were "The Last King of Atlantis" (1896-7 Short Stories), in which an ancient MS describing the destruction of ATLANTIS is found in a UTOPIAN world of the future, "The World Wreckers" (1908 Scraps), a future- WAR story influenced by George GRIFFITH, "The Terror from the South" (1909 Comic Life), in which an Antarctic lost race becomes belligerent, and "Wireless War" (1909 Comic Life), with A.J. Andrews, another future-war novel. GCW also published at least 7 sf short stories 1896-1904, including "The Last Days of Earth: Being the Story of the Launching of the 'Red Sphere'" (1901 The Harmsworth Magazine), an END-OF-THE-WORLD tale set in AD13,000,000, and "The Great Sacrifice" (1903 The London Magazine), in which benevolent Martians save us from ourselves. GCW was probably the only Victorian sf writer to continue to publish after WWII. His last novel was The Call of Peter Gaskell (1947), in which yet another lost race, this time Incan, plots to conquer the world. He is interesting not as a good writer but because he so exactly typifies the themes of Victorian sf and the longevity of their sales appeal. [JE/PN]See also: FAR FUTURE; SUN. WALLIS, G(ERALDINE JUNE) McDONALD Writing name of US writer and actress Hope Campbell (1925- ), who acted under her own name and as Kathy McDonald, and has written non-sf under her own name and as Virginia Hughes, concentrating on juveniles. The Light of Lilith (1961 dos) and Legend of Lost Earth (1963 dos), both as by GMW, are unremarkable but adequately stirring examples of adventure sf. Both are set initially on other planets but focus, in the end, on a threatened or desirable Earth. [JC] WALSH, J(AMES) M(ORGAN) (1897-1952) Australian-born writer who moved to the UK; he wrote primarily mystery stories, some as by Stephen Maddock. His Vandals of the Void (1931), its sequel, "The Struggle for Pallas" (1931 Wonder Stories Quarterly), and Vanguard to Neptune (1932 Wonder Stories Quarterly; 1952) are fairly routine early SPACE OPERAS, the first of which sees an attack by MERCURY on Venus, Mars and Earth. The Secret of the Crater (1930) as by H. Haverstock Hill (1939) has fantasy elements; the AMZ serial "The Terror out of Space" (1934) is also as by Hill. [PN]Other works: Secret Weapons (1940).See also: AUSTRALIA; OUTER PLANETS; PUBLISHING. WALTER, W(ILLIAM) GREY (1910-1977) UK writer and pioneer, between 1936 and 1956, of the development and use of electroencephalography in the UK; his early popular study, The Living Brain (1953), was influential in its time. His sf novel, Further Outlook (1956; vt The Curve of the Snowflake 1956 US), affords illustrative, fundamentally OPTIMISTIC views of future HISTORY up to AD2056 through the use of a TIME MACHINE. [JC] WALTERS, GORDON [s] George LOCKE. WALTERS, HUGH Pseudonym of UK writer Walter Llewellyn Hughes (1910- ) for his fiction, all CHILDREN'S SF, and all restricted for many years to his Chris Godfrey of U.N.E.X.A. sequence of interplanetary adventures: Blast Off at Woomera (1957; vt Blast Off at 0300 1958 US), The Domes of Pico (1958; vt Menace from the Moon 1959 US), Operation Columbus (1960; vt First on the Moon 1960 US), Moon Base One (1961; vt Outpost on the Moon 1962 US), Expedition Venus (1962), Destination Mars (1963), Terror by Satellite (1964), Journey to Jupiter (1965), Mission to Mercury (1965), Spaceship to Saturn (1967), The Mohole Mystery (1968; vt The Mohole Menace 1969 US), Nearly Neptune (1969; vt Neptune One is Missing 1970 US), First Contact? (1971), Passage to Pluto (1973), Tony Hale, Space Detective (1973), Murder on Mars (1975), Boy Astronaut (1977 chap), The Caves of Drach (1977), The Last Disaster (1978), The Blue Aura (1979), First Family on the Moon (1979), The Dark Triangle (1981) and School on the Moon (1981). Chris Godfrey starts as a boy, but grows up and advances through the ranks of U.N.E.X.A. - the United Nations Exploration Agency, the "organization responsible for the exploration of the Universe"-until he becomes Director, from which point he supervises younger characters, like the mechanic Tony Hale, who dominate the action of later books. [JC]Other works: P-K (1986).See also: MERCURY. WALTHER, DANIEL (1940- ) French editor and writer who began publishing short stories in 1965, and proved an eclectic author and easy stylist who could switch from HARD SF to HEROIC FANTASY. Requiem pour demain ["Requiem for Tomorrow"] (coll 1976) shows him at his most experimental, gathering work which reminded critics of Harlan ELLISON; Les Quatre Saisons de la Nuit ["The Four Seasons of the Night"] (coll 1980) assembles dark fantasies. Mais l'espace . . . Mais le temps ["What about Space? What about Time?"] (1972) is a long novella blending space technology and MAGIC. He ed Les soleils noirs d'Arcadie ["Black Suns of Arcadia"] (anth 1975), a manifesto for the NEW WAVE. His first novel, L'Epouvante ["Dread"] (1979) remains untranslated; "The Gunboat Dread", the story from which it was derived, appeared in Maxim JAKUBOWSKI's Travelling towards Epsilon (anth 1976). As the editor of the Club du Livre d'Anticipation he published US heroic fantasy in translation, including work by C.J. CHERRYH, who reciprocated by bringing the early vols of his FAR-FUTURE Swa sequence to the USA. Le Livre de Swa (1982; trans Cherryh as The Book of Shai 1984 US) and Le Destin de Swa (1982; trans Cherryh as Shai's Destiny 1985 US) are intricately composed post- HOLOCAUST dramas of some moral complexity in which young Swa (Shai) confronts and attempts to bring together the various raging factions of a balkanized world. [MJ/JC]See also: FRANCE. WALTON, BRYCE (1918-1988) US writer, prolific under his own name and others in several genres, including tv work. He wrote some sf as Paul Franklin, Kenneth O'Hara and Dave Sands, though his first story, "The Ultimate World" for Planet Stories in 1945, was as BW. He contributed actively to the magazines until about 1960, less frequently thereafter. Sons of the Ocean Deeps (1952) faces a failed space cadet with the chance to mature in the benthos, which he grippingly does. [JC] WANDREI, DONALD (1908-1987) US writer and editor, founder with August DERLETH in 1939 of ARKHAM HOUSE, formed initially to publish the work of H.P. LOVECRAFT, whom both admired deeply. DW resigned his interest in the firm after WWII - when he also stopped writing new fiction - and after Derleth's death in 1971 declined to resume it. As a writer he was justifiably best known for his FANTASY and weird stories, beginning with "The Red Brain" (1927 Weird Tales), a tale that incorporates a bungled sf premise about the nature of matter into a narrative whose deepest effect is one of chill horror at the cosmos. Later sf work, much of it in ASF in the 1930s, is similarly compounded of disparate ingredients, and the tales assembled in the posthumous Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei (coll 1989) share the sense of the grotesqueness of the world espoused in that first story. In addition to some unremarkable verse, gathered in Ecstasy and Other Poems (coll 1928 chap), Dark Odyssey (coll 1931 chap) and Poems for Midnight (coll 1965), he published a collection of fantasy, The Eye and the Finger (coll 1944), a Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos tale, The Web of Easter Island (1948) - probably his finest single work, making, as usual in DW's work, opportunistic use of sf devices (in this case travel between the DIMENSIONS) to colour the horror - and Strange Harvest (coll 1965). With Derleth he selected the contents of the first Arkham House Lovecraft collections and ed 3 vols of Lovecraft's Selected Letters: 1911-1924 (coll 1965), 1925-1929 (coll 1968), and 1929-1931 (coll 1971).DW's brother, Howard Wandrei (1909-1956), was an illustrator and the author of some fantasy stories under his own name, and as by Robert Coley and H.W. Guernsey. [JC]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; COSMOLOGY; END OF THE WORLD; GREAT AND SMALL; PARALLEL WORLDS; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS. WANDREI, HOWARD [r] Donald WANDREI. WAR One of the principal imaginative stimuli to futuristic and scientific speculation has been the possibility of war, and the possibility that new TECHNOLOGY might transform war. This stimulus was particularly important during the period 1870-1914 and in the years following the revelation of the atom bomb in 1945.Antique futuristic fictions such as the anonymous Reign of George VI, 1900-25 (1763) anticipate little change in the business of war; here King George, sabre in hand, leads his cavalry in the charge. In the mid-19th century, however, awareness of technological change spread rapidly. Herrmann LANG was able to envisage very different patterns of future combat in The Air Battle (1859), and many new technologies were displayed during the US Civil War (1861-5) and observed by representatives of various European nations. When the German Empire was consolidated after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 the strength and firepower of the new German Army inspired an urgent campaign for the reform and rearmament of the British Army. The case was dramatized by Sir George CHESNEY in The Battle of Dorking (1871 chap), a drama-documentary illustrating the ease with which an invading German army might reach London. It caused a sensation, and initiated a debate which continued until WWI itself broke out ( INVASION). A new subgenre of fiction had been inaugurated, and future-war stories were established as a brand of popular romance; the development of the subgenre, well documented in I.F. CLARKE's Voices Prophesying War, 1763-1984 (1966), featured such successful alarmist works as Erskine CHILDERS's The Riddle of the Sands (1903) and William LE QUEUX's The Invasion of 1910 (1906), which made a great impact when it was serialized in the newborn Daily Mail. Many products of this glut of jingoistic fiction enthusiastically embraced the myth of a war to end war - enthusiastically mapped out in Louis TRACY's The Final War (1896)-and the popularity of this kind of fiction helped to generate the great enthusiasm which Britons carried into the real war against Germany when it finally came. The great bulk of this fiction was relatively mundane, envisaging quite modest alterations in tactics as a result of new TECHNOLOGY. The Captain of the Mary Rose (1892) by W. Laird Clowes (1856-1905), Blake of the Rattlesnake (1895) by Fred T. JANE and "Danger!" (1914) by Arthur Conan DOYLE are outstanding examples of the realistic school of speculation; and the most careful of them all, The Great War of 189 - : A Forecast (1893) by P.H. Colomb (1831-1899) and other military experts, instituted a tradition of drama-documentaries subsequently carried forward by Hector C. BYWATER's The Great Pacific War (1925) and, much later, The Third World War (1979) by General Sir John HACKETT and others.Airships and submarines were by far the most popular innovations in early future-war fiction. They were displayed to lavish effect by George GRIFFITH, the most extravagant of the subgenre's writers, in The Angel of the Revolution (1893) and Olga Romanoff (1894). The discovery of X-rays in 1895 encouraged writers to dream up more fanciful new WEAPONS; in Griffith's posthumously published The Lord of Labour (1911), the future war is fought with atomic missiles and disintegrator rays. The worst excesses of this subgenre are parodied in Michael MOORCOCK's The Warlord of the Air (1971) and The Land Leviathan (1974); Moorcock also edited a notable theme anthology of works from the period, published in 2 vols as Before Armageddon (anth 1975) and England Invaded (anth 1977). An ambitious but reasonably disciplined imagination was brought to bear by H. G. WELLS in "The Land Ironclads" (1903), The War in the Air (1908) and the atom-bomb story The World Set Free (1914). The British High Command, however, continued to the bitter end to show an extreme conservatism of imagination, refusing to believe in the potential of the tank, the submarine or the aeroplane until they were shown the way by the Germans.Future-war stories enjoyed a second heyday in the UK between the Wars, when the actual example of WWI caused many writers to believe that a new war might mean the end of civilization - a conviction bleakly expressed by Edward SHANKS in The People of the Ruins (1920) and Cicely HAMILTON in Theodore Savage (1922). This kind of anxiety intensified in such novels as Neil BELL's The Gas War of 1940 (1931 as Miles; vt Valiant Clay 1934 as NB) and John GLOAG's Tomorrow's Yesterday (1932), and became almost hysterical as Europe lurched towards a new war following Hitler's rise to power (see also HITLER WINS). Invasion from the Air: A Prophetic Novel (1934) by Frank McIlraith and Roy CONNOLLY, Day of Wrath (1936) by Joseph O'NEILL and Four Days War (1936) by S. Fowler WRIGHT all feature chilling accounts of cities devastated by aerial bombing with poison gas.US future-war fiction was not so prolific, nor-understandably, in view of the USA's very different experience of WWI - did it ever become so pessimistic. Frank R. STOCKTON's The Great War Syndicate (1889) and Stanley WATERLOO's Armageddon (1898) are mild by comparison with contemporary UK works, and the invasion of the USA by Asiatics, although a staple of pulp melodrama, never really seemed likely enough to inspire genuine alarmist fantasy. The bleakest visions of future war written in the USA before 1945 - Herbert BEST's The Twenty-Fifth Hour (1940) and L. Ron HUBBARD's Final Blackout (1940; 1948) - both describe the devastation of Europe. This situation changed dramatically, however, with the advent of the atom bomb, which bred an alarmism all of its own and inspired a new subgenre of stories concerning the HOLOCAUST AND AFTER.Wells's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898) was a logical extension of the more conventional 19th-century future-war story, as was Robert William COLE's story of colonial war against Sirian aliens in The Struggle for Empire (1900), but the other-worldly wars fought in most pulp interplanetary romance of the Edgar Rice BURROUGHS school were mostly fought with swords. The specialist sf pulps, however, embraced a more conscientiously futuristic outlook whereby interplanetary wars were to be fought by fleets of SPACESHIPS armed with marvellous ray-guns and the like. SPACE OPERA thrived on wars between races, worlds and GALACTIC EMPIRES. Wherever its HEROES went they found cosmic conflicts in progress, and they never felt inhibited about joining in. Such was the moral insight of pulp fantasists that these heroes hardly ever had the slightest difficulty in selecting the "right" side: it was handsome and honourable vs ugly and treacherous.The quest to discover bigger and more powerful weapons was driven to its limits in a few short years. Spectacular genocide became commonplace, as in Edmond HAMILTON's "The Other Side of the Moon" (1929), and stars were blown up in prolific quantity. War waged across time between ALTERNATE WORLDS was invented by Jack WILLIAMSON in THE LEGION OF TIME (1938; 1952). Anti-war stories like Miles J. BREUER's "The Gostaks and the Doshes" (1930) and Nat SCHACHNER's "World Gone Mad" (1935) were in a tiny minority until the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 helped encourage a new seriousness, most conscientiously displayed in John W. CAMPBELL Jr's ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, where A.E. VAN VOGT began chronicling The War Against the Rull (1940-50; fixup 1959). Ross ROCKLYNNE's "Quietus" (1940) made an issue of the dilemma which had been so easily sidestepped in the past: when visitors from elsewhere find two creatures locked in conflict, how do they choose which to help? After WWII, anti-war stories appeared far more frequently in the sf magazines; notable are several stories by Eric Frank RUSSELL, including "Late Night Final" (1948) and "I am Nothing" (1952), and several by Fritz LEIBER, including "The Foxholes of Mars" (1952) and "A Bad Day for Sales" (1953). More ironic approaches to the question include several stories in which war has become institutionalized as a spectator sport ( GAMES AND SPORTS), such as Gunner Cade (1952) by Cyril Judd (C.M. KORNBLUTH and Judith MERRIL) and Mack REYNOLDS's Mercenary from Tomorrow (1962 as "Mercenary"; exp 1968). Sf writers' reflections on WWII itself are assembled in The Fantastic World War II (anth 1990) ed Frank McSherry Jr and S.M. STIRLING, while notable stories of nuclear war are collected in Countdown to Midnight (anth 1984) ed H. Bruce FRANKLIN.Although the possibility of future wars on Earth and images of nuclear holocaust dominated the imagination of sf writers from 1945 through the 1950s, more exotic wars continued to be fought, and stories of interplanetary or interstellar war became a safer haven for militaristic adventures. The melodramatic excesses of space-opera warfare faded with the pulps, although they never entirely died out, and there grew up a more disciplined and more realistic notion of the kind of armies which might fight interplanetary and interstellar wars, and the kinds of weapons they might use. In this context a new tradition of militaristic sf grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, notable early examples being Robert A. HEINLEIN's STARSHIP TROOPERS (1959) and Gordon R. DICKSON's The Genetic General (1960; exp vt DORSAI! 1976). The latter began the long-running Dorsai series, which aspires to offer a serious commentary on the evolution and ethics of militarism and is still being extended through such novels as The Chantry Guild (1988). Other important early contributors to this tradition include Poul ANDERSON, as in The Star Fox (fixup 1965); it was most aggressively carried forward through the 1970s by Jerry POURNELLE in such novels as A Spaceship for the King (1973) and The Mercenary (1977). The initial historical context of this fiction was provided by the Korean War, where the intervention of UN troops embodied a new philosophy of military action and responsibility, but doubts about the role played by US forces were subsequently amplified in no uncertain terms by the progress of the Vietnam War. Ideas about the moral justifiability of war and the POLITICS of militarism became matters of fierce debate, exemplified in sf by such novels as Joe HALDEMAN's THE FOREVER WAR (fixup 1974), clearly modelled on STARSHIP TROOPERS but overturning many of the assumptions the earlier novel had taken for granted, and Norman SPINRAD's vivid and vitriolic The Men in the Jungle (1967). Spinrad went on to write The Iron Dream (1972), in which the fascist fantasies of one Adolf Hitler, who emigrated to the USA in the early 1930s and became a minor sf writer, superimpose all the CLICHES of pulp future-war fantasies on the rise of the Third Reich, the fighting of WWII and the "final solution" to the problem of the insidious "Dominators". The most successful mainstream anti-war novel of the 1960s, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), influenced sf stories like Barry N. MALZBERG's "Final War" (1968 as K.M. O'Donnell), which represents war as a surreal and purposeless nightmare.The polarization of the sf community by the political conflict over the Vietnam War was vividly illustrated by a pair of advertisements which appeared in GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION (June 1968), listing on facing pages those sf writers for and against the War. Memories of that war have continued to haunt sf, directly reflected in such anthologies as In the Field of Fire (anth 1987) ed Jeanne Van Buren Dann and Jack DANN and such novels as The Healer's War (1988) by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1947- ) and Dream Baby (1989) by Bruce MCALLISTER, and indirectly in such novels as Lucius SHEPARD's Life during Wartime (1987). Alongside these works, however, the tradition of militaristic sf has not only flourished since the Vietnam War's end but has become extraordinarily strident. David A. DRAKE, author of several horror stories reflecting his own experiences in Vietnam, has written numerous books about the heroic exploits of future mercenaries, including the Hammer's Slammers sequence: Hammer's Slammers (coll of linked stories 1979), The Forlorn Hope (1984), Rolling Hot (1989) and The Warrior (1991). These books helped initiate a fad that has been extrapolated in various anthologies and SHARED-WORLD series and in novels such as The Warrior's Apprentice (1986) and its sequels by Lois McMaster BUJOLD. Other fiercely militaristic sf novels of the 1980s include Christopher ANVIL's The Steel, the Mist and the Blazing Sun (1983) and Joel ROSENBERG's Zionist Not for Glory (1988). The annual series of anthologies begun with There Will Be War (anth 1983) ed Pournelle and John F. CARR, following Reginald BRETNOR's earlier anthology series The Future at War (3 vols 1979-80), has generated some controversy. This subgenre has merged with and absorbed various older materials, including Fred SABERHAGEN's Berserker series begun in 1963 and the episode in Larry NIVEN's Known Space future history expanded for The Man-Kzin Wars SHARED-WORLD series (3 vols 1988-90). Although the popularity of this kind of fiction can be largely accounted for simply as a love of melodrama, it does seem to reflect an innate aggression in US culture - a concept discussed at some length by H. Bruce Franklin in his excellent study of war as a theme in US imaginative fiction, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (1988). [BS] WARD, E.D. E.V. LUCAS. WARD, HENRY (1913?- ) Perhaps a pseudonym of a French writer - possibly Henri Louis Luc Viard (1921- ) as Donald H. TUCK claims. HW's sf novels are L'enfer est dans le ciel (trans Alan Neame as Hell's Above Us 1960) and Les soleils verts (1956; trans Neame as The Green Suns 1961). The latter book contains a detailed biography of HW in the introduction, claiming that he is a scientist educated at Cambridge in the UK and then Columbia in the USA, that at the request of the State Department he liaised between atomic research units in France and the USA in 1939-40 (which Viard at age 18 could not have done), and that he was later connected with the destruction of the V-Bomb centre at Peenemunde. However, this information may be a hoax to lend verisimilitude to the two books, both documentary-style thrillers involving conspiracy at high political levels involved with the investigation of implausible sf events vis a vis the space programme, aliens, the Suez conflict and PARALLEL WORLDS. HW appears as a character in both. [PN] WARD, HERBERT D(ICKINSON) (1861-1932) US writer, most of whose short stories of sf interest were political dramas whose venues were only marginally displaced from the late-19th-century USA, even though some of the tales assembled in A Republic Without a President, and Other Stories (coll 1891) were ostensibly set 100 years hence. The White Crown, and Other Stories (coll 1894) continued in the same vein, though the title story itself is a future- WAR tale of some interest. [JC]Other works: The Master of the Magicians (1890) with Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; A Dash to the Pole: A Tale of Adventure in the Ice-Bound North (1895). WAR GAME, THE Made-for-tv film (1965). BBC/Pathe Contemporary. Prod/dir/written Peter WATKINS. Narrators Michael Aspel, Dick Graham. 50 mins, cut to 47 mins. B/w.This pseudo-documentary about a nuclear attack on England and its aftermath in a small town in Kent was refused a showing by BBC TV, though made for them, on the grounds that it was too realistic and might disturb audiences - as it was designed to do. Since then it has had a wide theatrical release and won an Oscar. Though clumsily made, it is full of shattering images: the glare and concussion of the bomb; the raging firestorms; the hideously disfigured casualties; torment and slow death from radiation poisoning; mass cremations; buckets of wedding rings gathered from the dead; and execution squads, composed of uniformed constables, shooting looters. Its first UK tv showing was in 1985. [JB]See also: CINEMA. WARGAMES Film (1983). Sherwood Productions/MGM/UA. Dir John BADHAM, starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Ally Sheedy, Barry Corbin. Screenplay Lawrence Lasker, Walter F. Parkes. 113 mins. Colour.Teenager David (Broderick) attempts to use his computer to hack into the programs of a computer-games manufacturer. Accidentally - after a week's research from which he deduces a secret password that will give him access to the system - he breaks into WOPR, the giant Department of Defense computer with which the USA will, if necessary, direct the operations of WWIII. Unable to distinguish between game theory and real life, WOPR, in playing the game of Global Thermonuclear War with David, almost sets off Armageddon. The film is briskly directed, with an ingenious first hour and so engaging a narrative sweep that the gaping logical holes in its plot may become evident only at a second viewing. It is in fact silly, not least for the crudely drawn character of Falken (Wood), WOPR's creator, who thinks we all deserve to die anyway (like the dinosaurs), and appears to change his mind only because David's girlfriend (Sheedy) is cute; the metaphor of WAR as video game is both amusing and tritely reductive, and became an sf CLICHE in the 1980s ( CYBERSPACE). Badham is a good action director whose films often collapse into ethical confusion on any examination of their superficially liberal credentials.The novelization is WarGames * (1983) by David F. BISCHOFF. [PN]See also: CINEMA; VIRTUAL REALITY. WARHOON US FANZINE (1952-85), ed from New York and Puerto Rico by Richard Bergeron. From undistinguished early issues, W became a large, attractive, duplicated fanzine containing careful and literate articles on sf and FANDOM. John BAXTER, James BLISH and Robert A.W. LOWNDES were among the regular sf columnists, and Terry CARR, Bob SHAW, Harry WARNER Jr and Walt Willis were fan columnists. Occasional contributors included Robert BLOCH, Harlan ELLISON and Ted WHITE. In 1980 (though dated 1978), 10 years after #27, #28 was published; this was a 600+pp hardbound collection of the writings of Willis since 1947. It was almost certainly the largest fanzine issue ever published, its size being the reason for the hiatus. There were 3 further issues to June 1985. In 1962 W won a HUGO as Best Fanzine. [PR/RH] WARLAND, ALLEN [s] Donald A. WOLLHEIM. WARNER, HARRY (BACKER) Jr (1922- ) US journalist and sf fan, publisher of several FANZINES, including Spaceways and the long-lived Horizons, which has appeared regularly in FAPA since 1939. His history of sf FANDOM, All Our Yesterdays (1969), is an affectionate and thorough examination of individuals, fan organizations and fanzines in the 1940s. The 2nd part, A Wealth of Fable (3 vols, mimeographed 1976; exp 1992), continues the history through the 1950s. HW won HUGOS as Best Fan Writer in 1969 and 1972; and the 1992 version of A Wealth of Fable won the 1993 Hugo for Best Non-fiction title. [PR] WARNER, REX (1905-1986) UK writer and translator who remains best known for his earliest adult novels, The Wild Goose Chase (1937), The Professor (1938) and The Aerodrome (1941), political allegories some of whose devices relate to the KAFKA-esque side of sf ( ABSURDIST SF; FABULATION). In The Wild Goose Chase 3 brothers bicycle into a strange country in search of the eponymous goose, and encounter and participate in a revolution - which ultimately they cause to triumph - in a DYSTOPIAN society. The Aerodrome depicts within the allegorical confines of an aerodrome an attempt at violently remoulding human nature. Why Was I Killed? (1943; vt Return of the Traveller 1944 US) is an afterlife fantasy. RW was always clear about which side he stood on in these metaphysical conflicts, a didactic sidedness which sometimes quite evidently detracted from the imaginative power of his fiction. [JC]See also: HISTORY OF SF. WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST The AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN . WAR OF THE MONSTERS GOJIRA. WAR OF THE SATELLITES Roger CORMAN. WAR OF THE WORLDS 1. US RADIO play (30 October 1938). Part of the Mercury Theatre on the Air series of plays, WOTW was the most famous broadcast ever made; an adaptation by Howard Koch (1902- ) of H.G. WELLS's 1898 novel, it was produced by and starred Orson Welles (1915-1985), who gained immediate notoriety when a huge number of listeners believed that the play represented a live newscast of an actual INVASION from MARS. The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, with the Complete Script of the Famous Orson Welles Broadcast (1940) by Hadley Cantril (1906-1969) reports on a series of interviews begun by Princeton University a week after the broadcast, confirming that the panic was surprisingly widespread (Cantril estimates that well over a million listeners - more than 10% of the total audience tuned in - were actively frightened by the broadcast); but also demonstrates, by reprinting the original script, that neither Koch nor Welles could have intended to hoax the radio public. Though it was indeed presented in the form of a series of emergency newscasts, dramatic devices (the passage of hours, for instance, in a few minutes of radio time) were conspicuous even during the first half of the broadcast, which caused the most panic; the second half, after a brief programme break, was set several days later. A made-for-tv movie giving a somewhat exaggerated account of the night's events is The NIGHT THAT PANICKED AMERICA (1975), and what has become a national myth has been incorporated in several other films, including The ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION (1984) and SPACED INVADERS (1989). In 1991 the original play was broadcast on BBC radio. [JC/PN]2. Film (1953). Paramount. Prod George PAL. Dir Byron HASKIN, starring Gene Barry, Ann Robinson, Les Tremayne. Screenplay Barre Lyndon, based on THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898) by H.G. WELLS. 85 mins. Colour.Few details of Wells's novel remain. Following the success Welles had had in updating the story in 1938, the setting is changed to 1950s California. The Martian war machines are altered from walking tripods to flying saucers shaped (rather beautifully) like manta rays. A stereotyped Hollywood love interest is substituted for the original story of a husband searching for his wife. Despite indifferent performances, the film is well paced and generates considerable excitement, partly through the spectacular special effects. The wires supporting the war machines are too often visible, but as a whole the effects - Gordon Jennings was in charge - are very impressive, especially in the final attack on Los Angeles: the manta-shaped vehicles gliding down the streets with their snake-like heat-ray projectors blasting the surrounding buildings into rubble are among the great icons of sf CINEMA. The dazed conservatism of the human response to the Martians is true to Wells, as is the subtext suggesting that a retreat into religious piety is also an inadequate answer, though here Pal has it both ways: we are told that it was "God in his wisdom" who created the microbes that ultimately defeat the invasion. WOTW is George Pal's most successful film production.3. US tv series (1988-90). Ten-Four/Paramount, for syndication. Created Greg Strangis. Executive prods Sam Strangis, Greg Strangis. Prod Jonathan Hackett, starring Jared Martin, Lynda Mason Green, Philip Akin, Richard Chaves. Dirs included Colin Chilvers, Herbert Wright, Neill Fearnley, Armand Mastroianni, William Fruet. Writers included Greg Strangis, Tom Lazarus, Patrick Barry, D.C. FONTANA, Durnford King. 2 seasons; 100min pilot plus 41 50min episodes. Colour.The pilot episode, The Resurrection, tells us that the events described in the 1953 film were followed by a government hush-up and the storage of Martian bodies in barrels at a military base. A terrorist attack on the base breaches some barrels, and the Martians (no longer identified as such, now just vague ALIENS) come back to life (the microbes did not kill them but threw them into estivation, and have now been destroyed by radioactivity). They adopt the bodies of the terrorists. (Shapeshifting was not an alien skill in the earlier versions; WOTW borrows heavily from the tv series The INVADERS [1967-8], and the films of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS [1955, 1978].) Their human bodies damaged, so that they look like zombie refugees from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), the aliens again attempt to conquer the world, initially by jumping out at people and grabbing them with big flabby hands. Our heroes (male scientist, pretty female microbiologist, wisecracking Black man in wheelchair) have trouble convincing the powers-that-be that the aliens even exist, the destruction of Los Angeles three decades earlier having apparently gone unnoticed. The series had vigour if nothing else, and continued for 2 seasons with the usual variants on the INVASION theme. In season 2, now renamed War of the Worlds: The Second Invasion, the series eliminated some characters, added new ones, introduced alien-human miscegenation and made moral distinctions between good and bad aliens, but sagged anyway. [PN]See also: PARANOIA. WAR OF THE WORLDS - NEXT CENTURY, THE POLAND. WARP/WARPDRIVE/WARP FACTOR FASTER THAN LIGHT; SPACE WARP. WARREN, BILL Working name of William Bond Warren (1943- ), sf fan and film buff, author with Allan Rothstein of the RECURSIVE SF murder mystery Fandom is a Way of Death (1984 chap), set in and distributed at a World SF CONVENTION in Los Angeles. BW's extraordinarily useful and interesting film reference books, the most detailed and accurate available for the period, are Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties: Volume I: 1950-57 (1982) and Volume II: 1958-62 (1986), on both of which he was assisted in research by Bill Thomas. They are not, despite the title, restricted to US films, but include many foreign films released in the US ( CINEMA). BW has also written some sf and fantasy, starting with "Death is a Lonely Place" in Worlds of Fantasy #1 (1968). [PN] WARREN, CHAD [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. WARREN, GEORGE [r] Nick CARTER. WARRICK, PATRICIA S(COTT) (1925- ) US academic. Most of PSW's work has concentrated upon the themes explicated in the book version of her PhD thesis, The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980), supplemented by Machines That Think: The Best Science Fiction Stories about Robots & Computers (anth 1984) with Isaac ASIMOV and Martin H. GREENBERG. In essays published from the mid-1970s, and in Science Fiction: Contemporary Mythology (anth 1978) with Greenberg and Joseph D. OLANDER, she focused on the relationship between Homo sapiens and its CYBERNETIC offspring, a focus which led naturally to a concentration on the work of Philip K. DICK. After editing (with Greenberg) a collection of his work, Robots, Androids, and Mechanical Oddities: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick (coll 1984), she examined his whole career in Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick (1987), the most thorough study of his entire oeuvre yet published. [JC]Other works: Martin H. GREENBERG for other team anthology productions with PSW under his general editorship.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; COMPUTERS; SOCIOLOGY. WARRIORS OF THE WASTELAND George MILLER; 1990: I GUERRIERI DEL BRONX. WASON, SANDYS (c1870-? ) UK writer and-apparently - cleric whose sf novel, Palafox (1927), features an introduction by Compton MACKENZIE, a style mildly reminiscent of Ronald Firbank's, and a thought-reading machine. [JC] WASP WOMAN, THE Film (1959). Filmgroup/Allied Artists. Prod/dir Roger CORMAN, starring Susan Cabot, Michael Mark. Screenplay Leo Gordon, based on a story by Kinta Zertuche. 73 mins. B/w.One of Roger Corman's more routine efforts, this may have been rushed out to capitalize on the publicity received by The FLY (1958). Cabot plays well the ageing cosmetics executive who, in a successful attempt at rejuvenation, takes a form of royal jelly (from wasps not bees) prepared by loony apiarist Zinthrop (Mark). The side-effect is that she occasionally grows an unconvincing wasp's head and eats people. TWW is a shabby, rather unhorrifying film. [PN] WATCHMEN Perhaps the most famous of all GRAPHIC NOVELS, written by Alan MOORE and illustrated by Dave GIBBONS. W appeared initially as a 12-part COMIC (Sept 1986-Oct 1987 Watchmen), each part corresponding to a chapter of the full novel, which was published as Watchmen (graph 1987 US; with additional material 1988 US). The initial premise is ingenious: given a late-1930s USA where costumed SUPERHEROES exist, maintaining law and order on a vigilante basis, what sort of ALTERNATE WORLD might develop by the mid-1980s? The changes suggested are subtle: a modest increase in the rate of scientific development; a Western dominance of the political scene; and an initial acceptance of the superhero coterie, followed by a period of repression. The story takes place in 1985, as members of the second generation of superheroes attempt to trace the person who is murdering them, one by one. At the same time, a number of signs are pointing towards imminent nuclear war (and towards a secret plot to frighten the world out of nuclear madness), which some of the protagonists sense coming but which none of them know how to confront. An actual HOLOCAUST does take place, proving terminal for 2 million New Yorkers; but its effects prove ambiguously positive.W offers a satirical analysis of the human cost of being (or needing) a superhero, and a portrait of the kind of world in which one might exist. It also provides, en passant, an extremely sharp analysis of the psychological makeup (and needs) of those who read superhero comics. Moreover, the densely packed narrative is perfectly conveyed through word and image - Moore was at the height of his powers as an innovative figure in commercial US comics publishing, and Gibbons was equally primed to generate a sophisticated visual language, through which subtexts and subplots might interweave with (as rereading makes evident) the utmost clarity. By subjecting the fantasy worlds inhabited by comic-strip superheroes to the estrangements of adult-sf scrutiny, W worked as a threnody for some of the more childish visions of omnipotence which had crippled the genre; and by rendering visible some sf conventions, it turned the tables, to a degree, on the scrutinizing medium. W is one of the central sf novels of the 1980s. [JC] WATER, SILAS Noel LOOMIS. WATERLOO, STANLEY (1846-1913) US writer whose first sf novel, The Story of Ab: A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man (1897; vt A Tale of the Time of the Cave Men; Being the Story of Ab 1904 UK), a juvenile whose hero acquires the necessary inventions and culture to begin the march to civilization, is among the earliest romances of ANTHROPOLOGY. Further novels were Armageddon: A Tale of Love and Invention (1898), in which an Anglo-US supremacy over the rest of the world is achieved through the use of an armoured dirigible in a near-future WAR; and A Son of the Ages: The Reincarnations and Adventures of Scar, the Link: A Story of Man from the Beginning (1914), which carries Scar, via a sequence of REINCARNATIONS, through various significant moments in history, including a visit to ATLANTIS. SW was a routine stylist with a good nose for structure and idea. [JC]Other work: The Wolf's Long Howl (coll 1899), containing some marginal sf tales.See also: ORIGIN OF MAN. WATERS, T(HOMAS) A. (1938- ) US author who began writing sf with Love that Spy! (1968), a spoof TECHNOTHRILLER featuring a scientist named Niflheim who specializes in ultra-cold warfare. TAW's first sf of more orthodox interest was The Probability Pad (1970), a novel which concluded the trilogy begun in Chester ANDERSON's The Butterfly Kid (1967) and continued in Michael KURLAND's The Unicorn Girl (1969). This is a lightweight RECURSIVE tale involving the 3 authors as characters in Greenwich Village, along with a good deal of alien-inspired body duplication. A countercultural ethos also inspired the grimmer Centerforce (1974), in which motorcycle dropouts and commune dwellers combine in opposition to a NEAR-FUTURE police-state USA. [JC] WATKINS, PETER (1935- ) UK tv and film director. Educated at Cambridge, PW worked in documentary films from 1959. He made a reputation with two quasidocumentaries for BBC TV, Culloden (1964) and The WAR GAME (1965). He was one of the pioneers of the technique of staging historical or imaginary events as if they were contemporary and undergoing tv-news coverage. The WAR GAME (1965) adopted a cinema-verite manner to simulate the likely consequences of nuclear attack on the UK, and did this horrifyingly enough for the film to be denied a screening on tv, for which it was made, until 1985; it was successful when released in the CINEMA. His next film, PRIVILEGE (1966), has a pop star used as a puppet by a future government in a cunning propaganda plan for the manipulation of the nation's youth. GLADIATORERNA (1968; vt The Peace Game), made in Sweden, and PUNISHMENT PARK (1971) are both set in the future, and both use stories of channelled violence to argue a pacifist case, the latter more plausibly. An interesting paradox is that, while his theme is normally the use of mind control by future governments to channel the aggressive instincts of the people, and his purpose is to generate moral indignation at this cynical curtailment of our freedom, his own work equally uses the illusion of fact to present a propaganda fiction. Whether knowingly or not, he is fighting fire with fire. After its initial success, PW's work has been treated less kindly by critics, who do not doubt his sincerity but deprecate his methods; it is felt by some that he has thumped the same tub for too long. [PN] WATKINS, WILLIAM JON (1942- ) US writer and academic, associate professor of English at Brookdale Community College. His first sf novels, with Gene SNYDER, were Ecodeath (1972), a POLLUTION story in which the leading characters are called Snyder and Watkins and the plot is fast and furious, and The Litany of Sh'reev (1976), in which a healer with precognitive powers becomes involved in a revolution. WJW's solo books are similarly - and at times haphazardly - venturesome. Clickwhistle (1973) deals in a relatively sober vein with human/dolphin COMMUNICATION, but The God Machine (1973), in which political dissidents shrink themselves with a "micronizer" to escape a mechanized future, is insecurely baroque. What Rough Beast (1980) pairs an altruistic ALIEN with a world-class computer net to save erring humanity. The LeGrange League sequence - The Centrifugal Rickshaw Dancer (1985) and Going to See the End of the Sky (1986) - is adventure sf whose settings, and quality of writing, are negatively affected by helterskelter plotting. The Last Deathship off Antares (1989) is a tale of real intrinsic interest; despite the failings characteristic of all his work, the philosophical arguments underpinning a revolt of imprisoned humans aboard a prison ship are sharply couched, and WJW never allows the grimness of the conflict to slide into routine. He remains, however, a writer whose ideas are perhaps more interesting to describe than to read. [JC/PN]See also: ECOLOGY. WATSON, BILLY [s] Theodore STURGEON. WATSON, H.B. MARRIOTT H.B. MARRIOTT-WATSON. WATSON, HENRY CROCKER MARRIOTT Henry Crocker MARRIOTT-WATSON. WATSON, IAN (1943- ) UK writer and teacher who lectured in English in Tanzania (1965-7) and Tokyo (1967-70) before beginning to publish sf with "Roof Garden Under Saturn" for NW in 1969; he then taught Future Studies for 6 years at Birmingham Polytechnic, taking there one of the first academic courses in sf in the UK; he has been a full-time writer since l976.IW has published over 100 short stories, at a gradually increasing tempo and with visibly increased mastery over the form; his collections are The Very Slow Time Machine (coll 1979), Sunstroke (coll 1982), Slow Birds (coll 1985), The Book of Ian Watson (coll 1985 US), Evil Water (coll 1987), Salvage Rites (1989), Stalin's Teardrops (coll 1991) and The Coming of Vertumnus (coll 1994). It is as a novelist, however, that he remains best known. His first novel, THE EMBEDDING (1973) won the Prix Apollo in 1975 in its French translation, L'enchassement; although it is not necessarily his finest work, it remains the title by virtue of which his stature as an sf writer of powerful intellect - the natural successor to H.G. WELLS - is most generally asserted. Through a complex tripartite plot, the book engages in a searching analysis ( COMMUNICATIONS; LINGUISTICS; PERCEPTION) of the nature of communication through language; the Whorfian hypothesis that languages shape our perception of reality - a hypothesis very attractive, for obvious reasons, to sf writers - is bracingly embodied in at least two of the subplots: one describing a cruel experiment in which children are taught only an artificial language, and the other showing the ALIENS' attempt to understand Homo sapiens through an analysis of our modes of communication.Again and again, IW's novels reveal themselves to be very much of a piece, a series of thought experiments which spiral outwards from the same central obsessions about the nature of perception, the quest for what might be called the True Names that describe ultimate realities, and the terrible cost to human beings - in betrayals and self-betrayals - of searching for transcendence. The Jonah Kit (1975), which won the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD for 1978, describes the imprinting of human consciousness into whales, and the transcendental whiffs of alien INTELLIGENCES to which those consciousnesses become heir. The Martian Inca (1977) reverses the operation, as a transformative virus invades Earth. Alien Embassy (1977) foregrounds a constant IW preoccupation - his concern with the control of information and perception by the powers-that-be, generally governments - in a tale about the frustrated transformation of the human race. Miracle Visitors (1978) again combines speculations about perception and transcendence, in this case suggesting that UFOs work as enticements to focus human attention on higher states of communication. God's World (1979) reworks IW's ongoing concerns in yet another fashion, describing another ambivalent alien incursion, this time in the form of the "gift" of a stardrive which will take a selected team to the eponymous world, where they will undergo dangerous transfigurations.IW's first 6 novels, then, comprised a set of virtuoso variations on his central themes. His next, The Gardens of Delight (1980), conflates sf and fantasy to step sideways from the early work, describing a world whose transformative energies have resulted in an environment which precisely replicates the painting The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch (1460-1516). Under Heaven's Bridge (dated 1980 but 1981), with Michael BISHOP, shows the flavour of the latter writer's mind as its protagonist investigates an alien culture in terms more relevant to ANTHROPOLOGY than IW would alone have been inclined to employ; from 1980 on, his novels tended to show a greater inventiveness in plot and style, and some even attempted humour, though the impatience of his quick mind does not often make for successful light moments. Deathhunter (1981) suggests that humans give off a pheromone-like signal at the point of death, which attracts Death himself in the form of a mothlike insect ( ESCHATOLOGY). Chekhov's Journey (1983), perhaps his least enticing novel through its entanglement in too large a cast (IW has never been a sharp delineator of character), revolves around the Tunguska explosion of 1908. The Black Current trilogy-The Book of the River (fixup 1984), The Book of the Stars (1984) and The Book of Being (1985), all assembled as The Books of the Black Current (omni 1986 US) - was his major 1980s effort; in a world divided by a mysterious and apparently sentient river into two utterly opposed halves, the heroine Yaleen suffers rites of passage, uprootings, rebirths and transcendental awakenings as she becomes more and more deeply involved in a final conflict between the Worm and the Godmind, the latter's intentions being deeply inimical to the future of humanity. More expansive, and easier than his earlier books, the Black Current sequence has been, except for a tie (see listing below), IW's closest attempt to gain a wide readership.Subsequent books are if anything even more varied. Converts (1984) is a brisk comedy about EVOLUTION and the misuse of power. Queenmagic, Kingmagic (1986) is a slightly over-perky FANTASY based on chess and other board games. The Power (1987) and Meat (1988) are horror. Whores of Babylon (1988) is set in what may be a VIRTUAL-REALITY version of Babylon reconstructed in the USA, and details its protagonists' suspicions that a COMPUTER is generating them as well as the city. The Fire Worm (1988) is a complex and gripping tale in which the medieval Lambton Worm proves to be the alchemical salamander of Raymond Lully (Ramon Lull; c1235-1316). THE FLIES OF MEMORY (1988 IASFM; exp 1990) dazzlingly skates over much of the thematic material of the previous 20 books, as the eponymous aliens memorize bits of Earth so that the Universe can continue remembering itself, while various human protagonists embody linguistic concerns and dilemmas of perception. Space-opera antics continue en passant.IW's intelligent, polemical pieces about the nature of sf - many of which appeared in SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, FOUNDATION (for which he served as features editor 1976-91, sitting on the Council of the SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION for the same period) and VECTOR - throw some light on the intentions of his sometimes difficult fiction, and is also, in a sense, of a piece with it. As a whole, his work engages vociferously in battles against oppression - cognitive or political-while at the same time presenting a sense that reality, so far as humanity is concerned, is subjective and partial, created too narrowly through our perception of it. The generation of fuller realities - though incessantly adumbrated by methods ranging from drugs through linguistic disciplines, focused meditation, radical changes in education from childhood up, and a kind of enhanced awareness of other perceptual possibilities - is never complete, never fully successful. Humans are too little, and too much, for reality. IW is perhaps the most impressive synthesizer in modern sf; and (it may be) the least deluded. [JC/PN]Other works: Japan: A Cat's Eye View (1969 Japan), a juvenile; Orgasmachine (1976 France) with Judy Watson, a fable (never published in English) about the manufacture of custom-built girls; Japan Tomorrow (coll 1977), linked stories set in various projected Japanese futures; Kreuzflug ["Cruising"] (coll 1987 Germany, in German trans); 3 Warhammer 40,000 ties ( GAMES WORKSHOP): Inquisitor * (1990),Space Marine * (1993) and Harlequin * (1994 ); Nanoware Time (1991 dos US); the Books of MANA sequence, elaborately intricate tales based on the Finnish Kalevala saga and set on a colony planet, comprising Lucky's Harvest (1993) and The Fallen Moon (1994). As Editor: Pictures at an Exhibition (anth 1981); Changes: Stories of Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction about Startling Metamorphoses, both Psychological and Physical (anth 1983 US) with Michael Bishop; Afterlives: An Anthology of Stories about Life After Death (anth 1986 US) with Pamela SARGENT.About the author: The Work of Ian Watson: An Annotated Bibliography & Guide (1989) by Douglas A. Mackey.See also: ANTIMATTER; ARTS; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; COSMOLOGY; CYBERNETICS; DEVOLUTION; GAMES AND SPORTS; GAME-WORLDS; HISTORY IN SF; INTERZONE; MACHINES; MARS; METAPHYSICS; NEW WAVE; NEW WORLDS; NEW WRITINGS IN SF; PASTORAL; PHYSICS; PSYCHOLOGY; RELIGION; SF IN THE CLASSROOM; SEX; SOCIOLOGY; SUPERMAN; TIME TRAVEL; UFOS; UNDER THE SEA; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST. WATSON, JUDY [r] Ian WATSON. WATSON, RICHARD F. [s] Robert SILVERBERG. WATT-EVANS, LAWRENCE Working name of US writer Lawrence Watt Evans (1954- ), who began publishing sf in 1975 with "Paranoid Fantasy #1" for American Atheist as Evans, creating a hyphenated surname in 1979 to distinguish himself from another Lawrence Evans. He has written several scripts for MARVEL COMICS; a GRAPHIC NOVEL is projected, Family Matters. He has not been prolific as a short story writer, though "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers" (1987) won a 1988 HUGO. As a novelist, his work has been varied from the start, ranging from the somewhat overblown high FANTASY of his first sequence - the Lords of Dus series comprising The Lure of the Basilisk (1980), The Seven Altars of Dusaara (1981), The Sword of Bheleu (1982), The Book of Silence (1984),Taking Flight (1993) and The Spell of the Black Dagger1994 - through the genre-crossing War Surplus series - The Cyborg and the Sorcerers (1982) and The Wizard and the War Machine (1987) - which combines SWORD AND SORCERY, military sf and some speculative content about the CYBORG protagonist, and on to singleton sf novels like The Chromosomal Code (1984) and Denner's Wreck (1988). The latter is perhaps his most sustained tale: on the planet Denner's Wreck two kinds of humans - primitive descendants of a crashed starship and tourists posing as wilful gods - must come to some sort of mutual comprehension. Nightside City (1989) tends to submerge the HARD-SF challenge at its heart - to elucidate human actions on a slow-spin planet whose terminator is advancing fatally on the city of the title - in the palely conceived escapades of a female detective. Though LW-E's novels inhabit traditional venues, and their protagonists undergo traditional trials without much affecting the reader, his ingenuity is manifest. [JC]Other works: The Legend of Ethshar fantasy sequence, The Misenchanted Sword (1985), With a Single Spell (1987) and The Unwilling Warlord (1989); Shining Steel (1986); Nightmare People (1990), horror; Newer York: Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy About the World's Greatest City (anth 1991), ed; The Rebirth of Wonder (coll 1992); Crosstime Traffic (1992); Split Heirs (1993) with Esther Friesner (1951- ); Out of this World (1994).See also: ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE. WAUGH, CHARLES G(ORDON) (1943- ) US academic and anthologist, most of whose work has been in collaboration with Martin H. GREENBERG, either alone or with further collaborators. All titles shared solely with Greenberg, or with Greenberg and only Joseph D. OLANDER, are listed under GREENBERG. All titles shared also with "name" authors will be found under the "name" authors in question: Robert ADAMS, Poul ANDERSON, Piers ANTHONY, Isaac ASIMOV, David A. DRAKE, Joe HALDEMAN, Barry N. MALZBERG, Richard MATHESON, Robert SILVERBERG, S.M. STIRLING and Jane YOLEN. [JC]See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; CHILDREN IN SF; COMPUTERS. WAUGH, EVELYN (1903-1966) UK writer, known mostly for a series of black inter-War satires, such as Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), and for Brideshead Revisited (1945). Some of his early fiction, like Black Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1938), utilizes imaginary African countries for satirical purposes, and Vile Bodies (1930) ends in an apocalyptic Europe torn by a final war, but it was only in some post-WWII works that he wrote fiction genuinely making use of sf displacements. Scott-King's Modern Europe (1947 chap) satirizes post-WWII totalitarianism through the imaginary state of Neutralia. Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future (1953 chap)-also included in Tactical Exercise (coll 1954 US)-combines the chemical coercion of Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932) with the drabness and scarcity of the needs of life of George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) in a brief but savage attack on the joylessness of a Welfare State UK a few decades hence. Miles Plastic, his free will bureaucratically threatened, his lover co-opted by the state, takes refuge in "gemlike, hymeneal, auspicious" acts of arson. It is a book, like most of EW's work, in which humour only brings out the more clearly a radical despair. [JC]See also: DYSTOPIAS. WAY, PETER (1936- ) UK writer whose first novel, The Kretzmer Syndrome (1968), is a NEAR-FUTURE tale set in a bleak conformist UK susceptible to the theories of the eponymous scientist, who articulates PSYCHOHISTORY laws that risk translating the country into a rigid DYSTOPIA. Later novels, like Super-Celeste (1977), Sunrise (1979) and Icarus (1980), are TECHNOTHRILLERS. [JC] WAYMAN, TONY RUSSELL (1929- ) UK-born writer who spent some years in Singapore, where he was actively involved in film-making; he subsequently moved to the USA. He began writing sf with the Dreamhouse sequence - World of the Sleeper (1967 dos) and Ads Infinitum (Being a Second Tale from the Dreamhouse) (1971) - which tells 2 associated tales. The first features a man transported into another world - rather resembling Malaya, the basic plot having originally been the script for a Malayan film. The other places a similar character in a GAME-WORLD-like fantasy environment, Commercialand. Dunes of Pradai (1971), a complex PLANETARY ROMANCE of some speculative interest, is stifled by TRW's congested style. [JC] WEAPONS In the catalogue of possible technological wonders offered in the New Atlantis (1627; 1629), Francis BACON included more powerful cannon, better explosives and "wildfires burning in water, unquenchable". Such promises could not be left out if his prospectus were to appeal to the political establishment - his most important predecessor as a designer of hypothetical machines, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), had likewise sought sponsorship on the basis of his ingenuity as a military engineer.In the second half of the 19th century, when the effects of technological progress on society became the subject of widespread speculation, the advance of weaponry became one of the most important stimulants of the imagination. George CHESNEY's The Battle of Dorking (1871 chap) popularized the concern felt by a number of politicians that the UK's armaments had fallen considerably behind the times. In the new genre of popular fiction which it inspired, the future- WAR story, speculation about the weapons of the future soon became ambitious. In The Angel of the Revolution (1893) George GRIFFITH imagined a world war fought with airships and submarines, armed with unprecedentedly powerful explosives. The French artist Albert ROBIDA offered spectacular images of future weaponry in action in La guerre au vingtieme siecle ["War in the 20th Century"] (1887). Jules VERNE's Face au drapeau (1896; trans as For the Flag 1897) features the "fulgurator", a powerful explosive device with a "boomerang" action - a primitive guided missile. H.G. WELLS's "The Land Ironclads" (1903) foresaw the development of the tank, and bacteriological warfare was anticipated in T. Mullett ELLIS's Zalma (1895) and M.P. SHIEL's The Yellow Danger (1898).The discovery of X-rays and radioactivity in the last years of the 19th century gave a tremendous boost to the hypothetical armaments industry. The imagination of writers leaped ahead to imagine all kinds of weapons causing or using the energy of atomic breakdown. In The Lord of Labour (1911) George Griffith described a war fought with atomic missiles and disintegrator rays, and awesome rays have remained a standard part of the sf armoury ever since. During WWI William LE QUEUX attempted to raise morale with his account of the fight to develop a new ray to function as The Zeppelin Destroyer (1916). Percy F. Westerman's The War of the Wireless Waves (1923) was one of countless NEAR-FUTURE thrillers featuring arms races; here the British ZZ rays must counter the menace of the German Ultra-K ray.Criminal SCIENTISTS often armed themselves with marvellous rays or atomic disintegrators, as in Edmund SNELL's The Z Ray (1932), Austin SMALL's The Avenging Ray (1930 as by Seamark) and one of the earliest examples of Soviet sf, Giperboloid inzhenera Garina (1926; rev 1937; trans as The Deathbox 1936; new trans of rev edn vt The Garin Death Ray 1955 USSR) by Alexei TOLSTOY. Few actually succeeded in destroying the world, although Neil BELL's The Lord of Life (1933) almost did. Criminal scientists deployed more subtle agents, too: Sax ROHMER's Fu Manchu was especially adept with exotic poisons, and biological blights were used as threats in Edgar WALLACE's The Green Rust (1919), William Le Queux's The Terror of the Air (1920) and Robert W. SERVICE's The Master of the Microbe (1926). Others, not quite so egotistical, tried to use their weapons altruistically to force peace upon the world; they included the heroes of His Wisdom the Defender (1900) by Simon NEWCOMB, Empire of the World (1910; vt Emperor of the World UK) by C.J. Cutcliffe HYNE and The Ark of the Covenant (1924; vt Ultimatum) by Victor MACCLURE.Few early writers were aware of the differences which advanced weaponry might make to the nature of warfare, and only H.G. Wells, in Anticipations (1901), realized what an appalling difference very simple innovations like barbed wire might make. George Griffith recognized that aerial bombing would not discriminate between combatants and noncombatants, although he did not explore the political ramifications. After 1918, however, poison gases of various kinds became the major bugbear of UK future- WAR stories, deployed to bloodcurdling effect in such stories as Shaw DESMOND's Ragnarok (1926) and Neil Bell's The Gas War of 1940 (1931 as Miles; vt Valiant Clay 1934 as NB). It is perhaps surprising that the scientific romancers' pessimism about the likelihood of the Geneva Convention being observed in the next war proved largely unjustified. Other political fantasies of the period, including Harold NICOLSON's atom-bomb story Public Faces (1932) and John GLOAG's Winter's Youth (1934) - which features a kind of super-napalm called "radiant inflammatol"- also proved (mercifully) a little too cynical.The early pulp-sf writers took to superweapons-particularly rays - in a big way. E.E. "Doc" SMITH's The Skylark of Space (1928; 1946) features heat rays, infra-sound, ultraviolet rays and "induction rays", and an entire planet is aimed towards Earth at hyperlight speed in the Lensmen series. His contemporaries were hardly less prolific. John W. CAMPBELL Jr's "Space Rays" (1932) was so extravagant that Hugo GERNSBACK thought he must be joking and billed the story as a "burlesque", apparently offending Campbell sufficiently to deter him from submitting to WONDER STORIES again. In an era when fictional large-scale destruction could be achieved at the flick of a switch, an amazing example of restraint can be found in Thomas P. KELLEY's SPACE OPERA "A Million Years in the Future" (1940), which features SPACESHIPS armed with gigantic crossbows mounted on their prows. At the opposite extreme, Jack WILLIAMSON's The Legion of Space (1934; rev 1947) features the super-weapon AKKA, which obliterates whole space fleets at the push of a button, and Edmond HAMILTON was fond of disposing of worlds and stars with a similar casual flourish. After this there seemed no further extreme available, so innovation thereafter followed more modest paths. Two standard types of personal weaponry became CLICHES, the stun-gun and the BLASTER; modern space-opera heroes often carry modifiable pistols usable in either way, after the fashion of STAR TREK's "phasers". 20th-century developments have contributed only minor inspiration: T.H. Maiman's discovery of the laser in 1960 merely "confirmed" what sf writers had always known about DEATH RAYS, just as Hiroshima had "confirmed" what they already knew about atom bombs.WWII renewed fears about the destructive potential of war, but there was little room left for imaginative innovation, although mention must be made of the "doomsday weapon": an ultimate deterrent which, if triggered in response to attack, will annihilate life on Earth. Alfred NOYES's The Last Man (1940; vt No Other Man 1940 US) invokes such a weapon but leaves the destruction conveniently incomplete. US GENRE SF now began to reproduce the hysteria of earlier UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES in lamenting Man's propensity to make and use terrible weapons; superweapons were more often treated as ultimate horrors than as fancy toys. Notable examples of the new attitude are Bernard WOLFE's bitter black comedy on the theme of "disarmament", LIMBO (1952; vt Limbo '90 1953 UK), and James BLISH's story about nasty-minded ways and means of guiding missiles, "Tomb Tapper" (1956). Such stories initiated a tradition which extends through DR STRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1963) to such works as Marc LAIDLAW's Dad's Nuke (1985). The post-WWII years also saw the growth of a macabre interest in the subtleties of "psychological warfare", which sparked off many thrillers about "brainwashing"; the tradition is gruesomely extrapolated in Gregory BENFORD's Deeper than the Darkness (1970; rev vt as The Stars in Shroud 1978).This anxiety interrupted but never killed off either the more romanticized varieties of futuristic swashbuckling or the fantasies inspired by threats to the US citizen's constitutional right to bear weapons. A.E. VAN VOGT's Weapon Shops series of the 1940s made much of the slogan "the right to bear weapons is the right to be free". The intimacy of the relationship between HEROES and their weapons is related to the kind of simplistic power fantasy which underlies much SWORD AND SORCERY and much sf on the FANTASY borderline, but some writers, notably Charles L. HARNESS in Flight into Yesterday (1949; exp 1953; vt The Paradox Men 1955), have been ingenious in inventing technological reasons (in this case that FORCE FIELDS are less opaque to slow-moving objects) for the survival in advanced societies of swordplay a la Edgar Rice BURROUGHS. Such power fantasies are, of course, reflected in the PSYCHOLOGY of the actual arms race which obsessed the USA and the USSR for nearly half a century after 1945; this is parodied in Philip K. DICK's The Zap Gun (1967). Arms-race psychology reached a real-world climax in the 1980s with the sciencefictional SDI project, aptly dubbed "Star Wars" by those cynical about its practicability; the most respectful treatment it received may have been in David A. DRAKE's ALTERNATE-WORLD story Fortress (1987), but this text features an orbital launch facility protected by point defense wapons, which do not much resemble SDI proposals. The history of the US fascination with the idea of superweapons is detailed in H. Bruce FRANKLIN's War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (1988).Power fantasies involving "intimate weaponry" have made rapid progress in recent times. The futuristic suits of armour worn in Robert A. HEINLEIN's STARSHIP TROOPERS (1959) and the supertanks of Keith LAUMER's interesting Dinochrome Brigade series, collected as Bolo (coll of linked stories 1976; exp vt The Compleat Bolo 1990) are modest inventions compared to the more dramatic kinds of CYBORG-ization featured in Poul ANDERSON's "Kings who Die" (1962), Laumer's own A Plague of Demons (1965) and Gordon R. DICKSON's The Forever Man (1986). The relatively modest enhancements featured in the tv series The SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN are easily adaptable to routine power fantasy, but adaptations as intrusive as that featured in Anderson's "The Pugilist" (1973) - which brings a new perspective to the phallic symbolism of weaponry - belong in a different category.Modern sf has discovered various more subtle ways to fight wars. The dependence of modern society on sophisticated technologies opens up new opportunities for ingenious sabotage, as explored in Mack REYNOLDS's Computer War (1967) and Frederik POHL's The Cool War (1981). The ultimate defensive technology featured in Vernor VINGE's The Peace War (1984) turns out, however, to bring only temporary respite from more destructive conflict. Laser warfare, as described in Light Raid (1989) by Connie WILLIS and Cynthia FELICE, also turns out to be less clinical and coherent than might have been hoped, and the day of fabulously macho weapons, like the one featured in Roger McBride ALLEN's Farside Cannon (1988), is clearly by no means done. The most competent survey of the modern sciencefictional armoury is David LANGFORD's excellent War in 2080: The Future of Military Technology (1979), some of whose research was redeployed in the novel The Space Eater (1982), a then-state-of-the-art account of weapons technology which cheerfully ranges from the most gruesomely intimate to the most hugely destructive. [BS] WEAPONS OF DESTRUCTION VYNALEZ ZKAZY. WEAVER, MICHAEL D. (1961- ) US writer and systems programmer who began publishing sf with Mercedes Nights (1987), a dark CYBERPUNK-flavoured fable of cloning - the title is the plural of the name of the protagonist, Mercedes Night, a film star whose illegal CLONES are being sold as love-slaves. The 21st century, heated and hectic and violent, seems to be about to endure a World War IV. Set in the same universe, centuries later, My Father Immortal (1989) counterpoints the isolated spacefaring lives of the survivors of Earth's traumas with sequences depicting the lives of the "fathers" before the children left the planet. MDW's other main work is the Wolf-Dreams fantasy sequence: Wolf-Dreams (1987), Nightreaver (1988) and Bloodfang (1989), all assembled as Wolf-Dreams (omni 1989 UK). [JC] WEBB, JANE Jane LOUDON. WEBB, LUCAS Robert REGINALD. WEBB, RON [s] Sharon WEBB. WEBB, SHARON (LYNN) (1936- ) US nurse and writer who began publishing sf with a poem, "Atomic Reaction" for FSF in 1963 as by Ron Webb, and whose first story, "The Girl with the 100 Proof Eyes", also as by Ron Webb, appeared a year later in the same journal. She began to produce fiction regularly only at the beginning of the 1980s, after about a decade in nursing, which figured in her comeback story,"Hitch on the Bull Run" (1979), the first of the Terra Tarkington tales about a nurse engaged in escapades throughout the Galaxy, assembled as The Adventures of Terra Tarkington (fixup 1985). SW is perhaps better known for the Earth Song sequence-Earthchild (fixup 1982), Earth Song (1983) and Ram Song (1984) - in which the introduction of an IMMORTALITY process generates social upheaval, at first because the process must be initiated before the end of puberty, but in the long run because those who become immortal lose any capacity to create works of art. The protagonist of the sequence, a musician involuntarily subjected to the process, helps create, over a 100-century period, a world whose inhabitants can choose between the ability to make art and the chance to live forever. SW's subsequent novels - Pestis 18 (1987) and The Halflife (1989) - are medical horror thrillers, the first dealing with a deadly virus, the second with a government experiment in personality manipulation that goes wrong. [JC] WEBB, WILLIAM THOMAS [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. WEBER, DAVID (? - ) US writer of several sf adventures, all with Steve White: Insurrection (1990), set in a rebellion-torn Terran Federation, Mutineers' Moon (1991), a TIME-TRAVEL tale in which the rebels, along with their sentient spaceship, are transported into Earth's distant past, continuing their adventures in The Armageddon Inheritance (1993); and Crusade (1992), in which another spaceship, this time ancient, destabilizes a Galaxy-wide peace. His greatest solo success has been the Honor Harrington sequence of space operas, featuring a female protagonist in a series of military adventures which have been likened to C.S. FORESTER's Hornblower books, but which are far more action-oriented; the series comprises On Basilisk Station (1993), The Honor of the Queen (1993), The Short Victorious War (1994) and Field of Dishonor (1994). [JC]Other Works: Path of the Fury (1992). WEBSTER, [Captain] F(REDERICK) A(NNESLEY) M(ITCHELL) (1886-? ) UK writer, much of whose work related to athletics. His fiction typically concentrated on mysteriously sapient species ( APES AND CAVEMEN) in Africa who are persuaded to raise humans as their own. Of the CLUB STORIES assembled in The Curse of the Lion (coll 1922), "The Ape People", which posits a separate language of the apes, explores this theme, as does the not dissimilar Lord of the Leopards (1935). The Ivory Talisman (1930), Gold and Glory (1932), Lost City of Light (1934), Second Wind (1934), Mubendi Girl (1935), The Trail of the Skull (1937) and The Land of Forgotten Women (1950) are LOST-WORLD tales. [JC]Other works: The Odyssey of Husky Hillier (1924; vt Husky Hillier 1938); The Man who Knew (1927); Star Lady (1935) and its sequel, Son of Abdan (1936); When Strange Drums Sound (1935); Dead Venom (1937). WEBSTER, ROBERT N. Raymond A. PALMER. WEDGELOCK, COLIN Christopher PRIEST. WEEKEND Film (1968). Comacico/Copernic/Lira/Ascot Cineraid. Written/dir Jean-Luc Godard, starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Valerie Lagrange, Jean-Pierre Leaud. 103 mins. Colour.A FABULATION rather than sf proper, Godard's satirical and violent film contains sf elements in its allegory of the Decline of the West. The progression of the film is from social order through ever-worsening scenes of ENTROPY, mainly imaged in increasingly large-scale car smashes, to anarchy, paralleled by a stylistic shift from naturalism to near-Surrealism. One extraordinary tracking shot begins in the real world and moves into motorized apocalypse. The bickering middle-class couple who at the outset started off on a weekend drive to the country observe the road accidents and associated violence with cool detachment, as does the film itself. Disturbing, sometimes lovely, images proliferate. Finally the couple continue on foot and join some armed anarchists; then the woman eats the man. Godard's previous quasi-sf film was ALPHAVILLE (1965). [PN/JB]See also: CINEMA. WEEKLEY, IAN (GEORGE) (1933- ) UK writer whose sf novel, The Moving Snow (1974), rather prosaically describes how a family copes with climatic change that brings severe Arctic conditions to the UK. All in all they do quite snugly. [JC] WEHRSTEIN, KAREN [r] S.M. STIRLING. WEINBAUM, STANLEY G(RAUMAN) (1902-1935) US writer whose interest in sf dated from his youth (he published "The Lost Battle", depicting the end of WWI in 1921, in a school magazine, The Mercury, in 1917) but who did not begin to publish sf professionally until the 1930s, after selling a romance novel - "The Lady Dances" (1934) as by Marge Stanley - to a newspaper syndicate, and after a first sf novel, The Mad Brain, had been rejected. Although he did not graduate from the University of Wisconsin, he turned his two years spent there studying chemical engineering to good stead from the beginning of his sf career with "A Martian Odyssey" in WONDER STORIES in 1934; this broke new ground in attempting to envisage LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS in terms of strange and complex ecosystems with weird ALIEN lifeforms. Told in SGW's fluent style, it became immediately and permanently popular, ranking behind only Isaac ASIMOV's "Nightfall" (1941) as the favourite example of early GENRE-SF short fiction. Other SGW stories in this vein include "The Lotus Eaters" (1935), which features an interesting attempt to imagine the worldview of an intelligent plant, "The Mad Moon" (1935), "Flight on Titan" (1935) and "Parasite Planet" (1935). In a series of comedies featuring the eccentric scientist Van Manderpootz - including the ALTERNATE-WORLD story "The Worlds of If" (1935), "The Ideal" (1935) and "The Point of View" (1936)-he flippantly devised absurdly miraculous MACHINES. His "Brink of Infinity" (1936) is a rewrite of George Allan ENGLAND's mathematical puzzle story "The Tenth Question" (1916).SGW imported some of the methods and values of his early romantic fiction into sf in "Dawn of Flame", but could not sell it. It was first published as the title story of Dawn of Flame and Other Stories (coll 1936), a memorial volume put together by The Milwaukee Fictioneers ( SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS) - a FAN group which included, among others, Robert BLOCH, Ralph Milne FARLEY and Raymond A. PALMER - to express a sense that SGW's short innovative career had been of great significance in the growth of US sf. Nor could he sell a version with gaudier superscientific embellishments, "The Black Flame", which also appeared posthumously (1939 Startling Stories); both tales were combined in The Black Flame (fixup 1948). He continued to produce pulp-sf stories prolifically, including an early story of GENETIC ENGINEERING, "Proteus Island" (1936), and the superman story "The Adaptive Ultimate" (1935 as by John Jessel); he also collaborated on 2 minor stories with Farley. His premature death from lung cancer robbed pulp sf of its most promising writer, although the full measure of his ability became apparent only when his posthumous works appeared. The New Adam (1939) is a painstaking account of the career of a potential SUPERMAN who grows up as a kind of "feral child" in human society; it stands at the head of a tradition of stories which drastically altered the role allotted to superhumans in pulp sf. Another posthumously published sf novel was the psychological horror story The Dark Other (1950), an early exploration of the Jekyll-and-Hyde theme. All 22 of SGW's short sf stories are assembled in A Martian Odyssey and Other Science Fiction Tales (coll 1975) ed Sam MOSKOWITZ, which combines the contents of 2 earlier collections, A Martian Odyssey, and Others (coll 1949) and The Red Peri (coll 1952) and adds 1 previously uncollected piece; Moskowitz had previously ed a smaller collection, A Martian Odyssey and Other Classics of Science Fiction (coll 1962). The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum (coll 1974) contains 12 stories. The King's Watch (1994 chap) is a previously unprinted hardboiled detective tale. SGW, like his contemporary John TAINE, was occasionally slapdash in his work-which he produced at a very considerable rate - but the swift and smooth clarity of his style was strongly influential on the next generation of sf and fantasy writers. He was a central precursor of the GOLDEN AGE OF SF. [BS/JC]See also: ADAM AND EVE; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; BIOLOGY; COMICS; COMMUNICATIONS; ECOLOGY; HISTORY OF SF; ISLANDS; JUPITER; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; MARS; MYTHOLOGY; OUTER PLANETS; PSYCHOLOGY; PUBLISHING; VENUS. WEINBERG, ROBERT E(DWARD) (1946- ) US editor, publisher, bookseller and author of FANZINES focusing on his main interest, the PULP-MAGAZINE world. Much of his task as an editor and publisher has been to rediscover and reprint magazine stories from the pulps which would otherwise have disappeared utterly. His earliest work seems to have been bibliographical - e.g., An Index to Analog (January 1960 to June 1965) (c1965 chap) - and privately printed; other untraced titles have almost certainly survived. (A sign of his interest in ongoing bibliograpgical projects is the much later publication, through his Robert Weinberg Publications, of Mike ASHLEY's The Complete Index to Astounding/Analog [1981].) Further bibliographical and critical guides include The Robert E. Howard Fantasy Biblio (1969 chap) and its sequel, The Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard's Sword & Sorcery (1976 ), the valuable Reader's Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos (1969 chap; rev 1973 chap) with Edward P. Berglund, and The Hero-Pulp Index (1971 chap) with Lohr McKinstry. The climax of his bibliographical work is almost certainly A Biographical Dictionary of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists (1988), whose 279 entries cover the field very amply; though marred by some inaccuracies, it remains the central resource for researchers in the field.As the 1970s began, REW moved from privately produced pamphlets and fanzines into SMALL-PRESS publishing proper, becoming associated with T.E. DIKTY, who founded in 1972 both STARMONT HOUSE, for which REW worked for about a year (long before it actually began to issue books), and FAX COLLECTOR'S EDITIONS, in which REW's involvement was late and short-lived, though he issued 3 anthologies through the firm: Famous Fantastic Classics #1, 1974 (anth 1974) and #2, 1975 (anth 1975), and Far Below and Other Horrors (anth 1974; republished 1987 by Starmont). He also part-wrote and edited The Weird Tales Story (anth 1977), but by then he had left to found his own firm.Robert Weinberg Publications (1974-81) concentrated on the reprinting of weird and fantasy fiction. Series included the Pulp Classics, reprint booklets ed REW; out of the 22 published, those of direct genre interest include Pulp Classics #1: Gangland's Doom (1973 chap) by Frank Eisgruber Jr; #2: Captain Hazzard (1938 Captain Hazzard as "Python Men of Lost City"; 1974 chap) by Chester Hawk; #3: Revelry in Hell (coll 1974 chap); #5: The Moon Man (coll 1974 chap); #6: Dr Satan (coll 1974 chap) by Paul ERNST; #8: The Mysterious Wu Fang (1975 chap) by Robert J. Hogan ( The MYSTERIOUS WU FANG ); #9: Dr. Yen Sin (coll 1975 chap) by Donald E. Keyhoe ( DR. YEN SIN); #11: The Octopus (1939 The Octopus as "The City Condemned to Hell"; 1976 chap) (The OCTOPUS ) and #12: The Scorpion (1939 The Scorpion as "Satan's Incubator"; 1975 chap) (The SCORPION ), both by Randolph Craig (Norvell W. PAGE); #13: Death Orchids & Other Bizarre Tales (coll 1976 chap); #17: The Secret Six (coll 1977 chap) by Robert J. Hogan; #19: Dr Death (1935 Dr Death; 1979 chap) and #20: Phantom Detective (coll 1979 chap). Similarly, the Lost Fantasies series republished work by Otis Adelbert KLINE and Jack WILLIAMSON as well as several REW anthologies: Lost Fantasies #4: Lost Fantasies (anth 1976 chap); #5: Lost Fantasies (anth 1977 chap); #6: Lost Fantasies (anth 1977 chap); #8: The Lake of Life (anth 1978 chap) and #9: The Sin Eater (anth 1979 chap). The Weird Menace Classics series comprised several REW anthologies: Weird Menace Classics #1: The Corpse Factory (anth 1977 chap); #2: Satan's Roadhouse (anth 1977 chap); #3: The Chair where Terror Sat (anth 1978 chap); #4: Devils in the Dark (anth 1979 chap); #5: Slaves of the Blood Wolves (anth 1979 chap) and #6: The Dance of the Skeletons (anth 1980 chap). In homage to Lester DENT REW ed The Man behind Doc Savage (anth 1974). WT50 (anth 1974) was a homage to WEIRD TALES, the rights to which he owned, eventually forming Weird Tales Limited to protect and license the name. It was through REW that George H. SCITHERS arranged to continue Weird Tales. Some of the contents of WT50 reappeared as The Weird Tales Story (noted above).Other small presses in which REW has been involved include Science Fiction Graphics (1977) and Pulp Press (1979-82); but as the 1980s advanced he became less directly involved in publishing activities, concentrating for some time on a mail-order book business. He has ed 1 anthology with Martin H. GREENBERG, Lovecraft's Legacy (anth 1990), plus 7 with Greenberg and Stefan R. Dziemianowicz: Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors (anth 1988), Rivals of Weird Tales: 30 Great Fantasy & Horror Stories from the Weird Fiction Pulps (anth 1990) and Famous Fantastic Mysteries: 30 Great Tales of Fantasy and Horror from the Classic Pulp Magazines Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels (anth 1991); Weird Vampire Tales (anth 1992); The Mists from Beyond (anth 1993); 100 Creepy Little Creatures (anth 1994) and 100 Wild Little Weird Tales (anth 1994). Solo REW ed The Eighth Green Man & Other Strange Folk (anth 1989). More interestingly, with the Alex and Valerie Warner series of horror tales he began to publish fiction in his own right. The Devil's Auction series - The Devil's Auction (1988), The Armageddon Box (1991), The Black Lodge (1991) and The Dead Man's Kiss (1992) - shows a vast knowledge of generic tricks and baggage, and considerable wit. [JC]Other Works: the Today's Sorcery sequence of fantasies, beginning with A Logical Magician (1994; vt A Modern Magician 1995 UK) and A Calculated Magic (1995).See also: H.P. LOVECRAFT. WEINER, ANDREW (SIMON) (1949- ) Canadian writer who began publishing sf with "Empire of the Sun" in Again, Dangerous Visions (anth 1972) ed Harlan ELLISON, but who became active only in the early 1980s, with 30 stories released in that decade. About half of his work was assembled in Distant Signals, and Other Stories (coll 1989); "Distant Signals" (1984 Twilight Zone) was televised in the Tales from the Darkside series. Station Gehenna (fixup 1987 US) intriguingly confronts its protagonist - sent to Gehenna to investigate a mystery involving the station crew and the partially terraformed planet-with an ALIEN enigma, a possible murder, and much material for thought. Craftsmanlike and quietly substantial, AW has yet to gain an appropriate reputation. [JC]See also: CANADA; TERRAFORMING. WEINSTEIN, HOWARD (1954- ) US writer whose work has been restricted to ties. Those for STAR TREK include The Covenant of the Crown * (1981), Deep Domain * (1987) and The Better Man* (1994); those for STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION include Power Hungry * (1989), Exiles * (1990) and Perchance to Dream * (1991); those for "V" include Prisoners and Pawns * (1985), Path to Conquest * (1987) and, with A.C. CRISPIN, East Coast Crisis * (1984). [JC] WEIRD AND OCCULT LIBRARY UK pocketbook magazine. 3 numbered, undated issues 1960; published by G.G. Swan, London; no ed named, but possibly Walter Swan. WOL contained a mixture of weird, sf, mystery and adventure stories, most of which had been sitting in Swan's drawer since WWII. Like its companion, SCIENCE FICTION LIBRARY, it was difficult to read because of its small print. [FHP] WEIRD FANTASY EC COMICS. WEIRD SCIENCE 1. Comic. COMICS; EC COMICS.2. Film (1985). Universal. Written/dir John Hughes, starring Anthony Michael Hall, Kelly LeBrock, Ilan Mitchell-Smith, Bill Paxton. 94 mins. Colour.A pair of teenage nerds feed pin-up-girl pictures to their computer, and it conjures up a sex goddess (LeBrock) who is nice to them and gives them moral lessons (rather as one might expect a scoutmaster to do). Finally they develop the courage to evict some bikers from a party, and win the hearts of two more appropriate teenage girls; the nasty older brother is turned into a monster, but the status quo is restored in time for the parents' return after a weekend away. Starting as sf, WS quickly turns to supernatural fantasy in which anything goes and nothing means much; its attitude towards all the women (some undressed against their will) is infantile. This was one of a series of sf teen movies made at around the same time ( CINEMA), and perhaps the worst, though occasionally Hughes's real ability to observe teenage mores shows. [PN] WEIRD TALES 1. US magazine, small PULP-MAGAZINE-size (9in x 6in [23cm x 15cm]) Mar-Apr 1923, BEDSHEET-size May 1923-May/July 1924, pulp-size Nov 1924-July 1953, DIGEST-size Sep 1953-Sep 1954. 279 issues Mar 1923-Sep 1954. Published by Rural Publishing Corp. Mar 1923-May/July 1924, Popular Fiction Co. Nov 1924-Oct 1938, Short Stories Inc. Nov 1938-Sep 1954; ed Edwin Baird Mar 1923-Apr 1924, Otis Adelbert KLINE May/July 1924, Farnsworth WRIGHT Nov 1924-Dec 1939, Dorothy McIlwraith Jan 1940-Sep 1954. WT was founded in 1923 by J.C. Henneberger and J.M. Lansinger; the former retained an interest in the magazine throughout its existence. Its early issues were undistinguished (despite the presence of writers who later became regular contributors, such as H.P. LOVECRAFT, Seabury Quinn and Clark Ashton SMITH) and the bumper Anniversary issue, May/July 1924, was to have been the last. But it reappeared in Nov 1924 with a new publisher (actually still Henneberger, but now without Lansinger) and a new editor. It has been suggested that the controversy caused by a necrophiliac horror story ("The Loved Dead" by C.M. Eddy [1896-1967] with H.P. Lovecraft) in the May/July issue - attempts were made to have it removed from the news-stands - gave WT the publicity boost it needed to survive.Under the editorship of Wright WT developed into the "Unique Magazine" its subtitle promised. Its stories were a mixture of sf - including some by Ray CUMMINGS in the 1920s and a lot by Edmond HAMILTON throughout - HORROR stories, SWORD AND SORCERY, exotic adventure, and anything else which its title might embrace. The early issues were generally crude in appearance, but the look of the magazine improved greatly in 1932 with the introduction of the artists Margaret BRUNDAGE and J. Allen ST JOHN. Brundage's covers - pastel chalks depicting women in degrees of undress being menaced in various ways - alienated some readers, but promised a sensuous blend of the exotic and the erotic which typified the magazine's appeal. The 1930s were WT's heyday; in addition to Lovecraft and Smith, it regularly featured August DERLETH, Robert E. HOWARD (including his Conan series), David H. KELLER, Otis Adelbert KLINE, Frank Belknap LONG, C.L. MOORE (especially with her Northwest Smith series), Jack WILLIAMSON and others - although the most popular contributor was Seabury Quinn (1889-1969), with an interminable series featuring the psychic detective Jules de Grandin. Although WT printed its share of dreadful pulp fiction, in the early 1930s it was, at its best, much superior to the largely primitive sf pulps. However, Wright's WT never really recovered from the almost simultaneous loss of 3 of its key contributors with the deaths of Howard (1936) and Lovecraft (1937) and the virtual retirement of Smith. New contributors in the late 1930s included Henry KUTTNER and artists Hannes BOK and Virgil FINLAY.At the end of 1939 Wright, in poor health, was replaced by Dorothy McIlwraith. The magazine continued steadily through the 1940s - although after being monthly Nov 1924-Jan 1940, with very few exceptions, it was now bimonthly (and would remain so) - and featured such authors as Robert BLOCH, Ray BRADBURY, Fritz LEIBER and Manly Wade WELLMAN with his John Thunstone stories. However, the editorial policy was more restrictive and WT was no longer a unique magazine: other fantasy magazines had appeared and, in the case of UNKNOWN, overshadowed it. Nevertheless, it continued to be the only regular magazine outlet for supernatural fiction until its death in 1954, when its publisher went bankrupt. It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of WT in the genres of weird fiction and Sword and Sorcery; though the emphasis was always on fantasy and the supernatural, it published a surprising amount of influential sf, and many sf writers published their early work in its pages. WT is perhaps rivalled only by ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION in terms of the number of stories of lasting interest which it produced.2. Subsequent series. Various nostalgic attempts, mostly unsuccessful, have been made to revive WT-or at least its title. The first was in 1973, with 4 pulp-size issues, Summer 1973-Summer 1974, ed Sam MOSKOWITZ, published by Weird Tales, Los Angeles (Leo MARGULIES), and continuing the original WT numeration (Vol 47, #1-#4).The rights to WT were bought by Robert E. WEINBERG, who eventually formed Weird Tales Limited to protect and license the name. He published a nostalgic anthology in homage to WT, WT50 (anth 1974), ed Weinberg, some of whose contents re-appeared in The Weird Tales Story (anth 1977), which he ed and partly wrote.The 3rd WT series was published as a paperback quarterly ed Lin CARTER, published by Zebra Books, who leased the rights from Weinberg. There were 4 issues: Weird Tales 1 (anth 1980), #2 (anth 1980), #3 (anth 1981) and #4 (anth 1983). Then came the 4th, confusing, series from a small press, the Bellerophon Network, owned by Californian publisher Brian Forbes. Advance publicity suggested alternately that the editor would be Gil Lamont or Forrest J. ACKERMAN, but in the event there were only 2, not very remarkable issues, both ed Gordon M.D. Garb, these being marked Fall 1984 (appeared 1985) and Winter 1985 (appeared 1986); they were vol 49, #1 and #2. The superior #1 included fiction by Harlan ELLISON, Stephen KING and R.A. LAFFERTY.The 5th series, ed George H. SCITHERS, Darrell SCHWEITZER and John Gregory BETANCOURT, published by another small press, the Terminus Publishing Co., Philadelphia, has been by far the most successful relaunch. Its numeration began with #290 (which counted in the 10 abortive relaunch issues which had preceded it); the pulp format neatly duplicated the two-column appearance of the original WT. It contains weird fiction and sword-and-sorcery, but little if any sf. From #300 (1991) it has been ed Schweitzer alone. It changed to a more conventional small-bedsheet format and design with the Winter 1992/93 issue, #305. There were only two copies a year for each of 1992, 1993 and 1994, the second of 1994 being retitled to Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, vol 1, no 1, Summer 1994, when the license to the WT title expired. The latter - effectively a new magazine despite the very similar content - was announced as quarterly, and #2, Spring 1995, has appeared. It is still ed Schweitzer. The last WT proper was #308, Spring 1994. 3. Reprint editions and anthologies. 3 UK edns were published at various times. In the first half of 1942 Swan Publishers produced 3 unnumbered issues. 1 more came in Nov 1946 from Merritt. Finally, Thorpe & Porter published 28 issues, numbered #1-#23, and then vol 1 #1-#5 Nov 1949-July 1954. There were 2 Canadian reprint editions: 1935-6 (vol 25 #6-vol 28 #1), 14 issues, and 1942-51, 58 issues.WT has been exhaustively mined for anthologies, and many of its contributors from the 1930s have gone on to new heights of popularity with paperback reprints of their stories. The long-running Not at Night series of horror anthologies (1925-34) ed Christine Campbell Thomson (1897-1985) drew largely on WT stories, sometimes publishing them even before they appeared in the magazine. Weird Tales (anth 1976) ed Peter Haining (1940- ) reprints a selection in facsimile. Other reprint anthologies were Peter Haining's Weird Tales: A Facsimile of the World's Most Famous Fantasy Magazine (anth 1976), Mike ASHLEY's Weird Legacies (anth 1977 UK) , Marvin KAYE's Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies (anth 1988); and 4 anthologies ed Leo Margulies: The Unexpected (anth 1961), The Ghoul Keepers (anth 1961), Weird Tales (anth 1964) and Worlds of Weird (anth 1965), the latter 2 being ghost-edited by Sam Moskowitz. Many other anthologies drew a large part of their content from WT, notably The Other Worlds (anth 1941) ed Phil STONG, 11 of its 25 stories being from WT.Major index sources are Index to the Weird Fiction Magazines: Index by Title (1962 NZ) and Index to the Weird Fiction Magazines: Index by Author (1964 NZ) by T.G.L. Cockcroft, and Monthly Terrors: An Index to the Weird Fantasy Magazines Published in the United States and Great Britain (1985) by Frank H. Parnell with Mike ASHLEY. [MJE/PN]See also: GOTHIC SF; SF MAGAZINES. WEIRD WORLD UK magazine, PULP-MAGAZINE size. 2 undated issues, 1955-6, published by Gannet Press, Birkenhead; ed anon. WW printed a mixture of sf and fantasy, including some reprints. The fiction was of fairly low quality. The advertised companion magazine, Fantastic World, never appeared. [FHP] WEI SHILI [r] CHINESE SF. WEISINGER, MORT(IMER) (1915-1978) US editor, an active sf fan from the early 1930s, editing Fantasy Magazine, the leading FANZINE of its day; he also sold a few sf stories, starting with "The Price of Peace" for Wonder Stories in 1933. In 1936 he became editor of THRILLING WONDER STORIES; later he also ed its companion magazines STARTLING STORIES and CAPTAIN FUTURE, the latter being probably his own conception. Under his direction TWS was openly juvenile in appeal, its garish covers giving rise to the term "bug-eyed monsters" ( BEMS). In 1941 he became editor of the COMIC book SUPERMAN, and subsequently editorial director of the whole range of National Periodical Publications ( DC COMICS), to which he recruited many sf writers, including Alfred BESTER, Otto Binder ( Eando BINDER), H.L. GOLD, Edmond HAMILTON and Manly Wade WELLMAN. His career is outlined in "Superman" in Seekers of Tomorrow (1965) by Sam MOSKOWITZ. [MJE] WEISS, JAN [r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF. WELBY, PHILIP [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. WELCH, L(UDERNE) EDGAR (1855-? ) UK writer, in the USA for at least 10 years until 1905, after which nothing is known of LEW, who wrote under pseudonyms. Most of his work was published as by Grip, including his first 2 sf novels, The Monster Municipality, or Gog and Magog Reformed (1882), a DYSTOPIAN prediction that socialist reforms will torture London in 1885, and How John Bull Lost London, or The Capture of the Channel Tunnel (1882), one of the earlier future- WAR novels - if not the earliest - to warn against a tunnel connecting the UK to France ( TRANSPORTATION). LEW is also cited as the author of Politics and Life in Mars: A Story of a Neighbouring Planet (1883), anon, in which advanced MARS is contrasted with backward Earth - though Darko SUVIN, in Victorian Science Fiction in the UK (1983), doubts the ascription because the opinions expressed are UTOPIAN. As J. Drew Gay, LEW was definitely responsible for The Mystery of the Shroud: A Tale of Socialism (1887), in which a fog gives a socialist secret society the chance to conquer England, but the chance is muffed. [JC] WELCH, ROWLAND L.P. DAVIES. WELCOME TO BLOOD CITY Film (1977). An EMI/Len Herberman Production. Dir Peter Sasdy, starring Jack Palance, Keir Dullea, Samantha Eggar, Barry Morse. Screenplay Stephen Schneck, Michael Winder. 96 mins. Colour.This UK/Canadian coproduction is one of the earlier movies to take VIRTUAL REALITY as its theme (but see also WELT AM DRAHT [1973]). A group of amnesiacs find themselves in a savage township of the Old West, where social advancement is by murder. They do not realize that they are inhabiting a computer-generated reality, one of whose supervisors, a woman (Eggar), develops an emotional fixation on a new conscript (Dullea), and interferes illegitimately with the "game". This game is designed to find people with high survival quotients, who will then, in the real world, lead guerrilla units in an unspecified ongoing war. Flat direction and poor performances fail to make anything much of the intriguing premise, though the end is touching. [PN] WELCOME TO OBLIVION Roger CORMAN. WELDON, FAY (1931- ) UK writer. Almost all of her work has - with passion, anger and a highly charged creative ambiguity - dealt with issues and situations generally conceived of as FEMINIST. Much of her later fiction verges on the supernatural or edges into the future, or both. In Puffball (1980) a pregnant woman is influenced by Glastonbury Tor. In The Rules of Life (1987 chap), set in AD2004, a dead woman communicates her memoirs through a computer console. In The Cloning of Joanna May (1989) a man has his wife "cloned" ("not cloning in the modern sense, but parthenogenesis plus implantation", the book explains) so that he can enjoy various younger versions of her. The novel was dramatized as a tv miniseries, The CLONING OF JOANNA MAY (1991). [JC]Other works: Female Friends (1975); Watching Me, Watching You (coll 1979); Wolf the Mechanical Dog (1988 chap), an uneasy sf fable for children.See also: CLONES; WOMEN SF WRITERS. WELLEN, EDWARD (PAUL) (1919- ) US writer, almost exclusively of short stories, mostly in the mystery genre. His first sf was a "non-fact article", "Origins of Galactic Slang" for Gal in 1952, and was followed by a sequence of Galactic Origins spoofs. His actual fiction was concise, literate, cynical and frequently anthologized, and is overdue for collection. In his only novel, Hijack (1971), told with a delicate balance of spoof and splatter, the Mafia learns that the US Government is secretly preparing to escape the Solar System because the Sun is going nova, and muscles in on the action. In the end, a representative sample of humanity heads toward the stars. [JC]See also: MESSIAHS. WELLES, ORSON [r] The TRANSFORMERS - THE MOVIE ; WAR OF THE WORLDS. WELLMAN, MANLY WADE (1903-1986) US writer, born in Angola (though his family returned to the USA when he was 6), prolific in both FANTASY and sf, though far more significant for works in the former; he also wrote Westerns - though less frequently than his brother, Paul I. Wellman (1898-1966) - and crime fiction. MWW began publishing with a fantasy, "Back to the Beast" for Weird Tales in 1927; his first sf story proper, "When Planets Clashed", appeared (in Wonder Stories Quarterly) as late as 1931. Both were under his own name, though much of his early work appeared under pseudonyms, including Levi Crow, Gans T. Field and the house name Gabriel BARCLAY. Much of his early work appeared in THRILLING WONDER STORIES and STARTLING STORIES, and was suitably vigorous and high-coloured. His first book was a short SPACE OPERA, The Invading Asteroid (1932 chap). Giants from Eternity (1939 Startling Stories; 1959) featured the rebirth of medical geniuses from Earth's past to confront a future menace; Sojarr of Titan (1941 Startling Stories; 1949) was a Tarzan-derived tale set in space; and the Hok series, stories published 1939-41 in AMZ and 1942 in Fantastic Adventures, were sf adventures set in various early mythic civilizations.Of greatest sf interest were novels like Twice in Time (1940 Startling Stories; cut 1957; with text restored and 1 story added, rev as coll 1988), an effective TIME-TRAVEL tale featuring a vivid portrayal of Leonardo da Vinci's Florence, and Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds (fixup 1975), with his son Wade Wellman, which intricately involves the detective with the Martian INVASION featured in H.G. WELLS's novel. But in general MWW's sf almost completely lacks the folkloric tone and cunning quietude of his best work.MWW's fantasy ranged from early weird stories derivative of H.P. LOVECRAFT through tales of the occult, tales that evoked Native American legend, and on to the sequences noted below. Much of his miscellaneous work was assembled in Worse Things Waiting (coll 1973), a large volume which helped inspire the growth of interest in his work over the last years of his life. More centrally, the Judge Pursuivant series (in Weird Tales 1938-41), as by Gans T. Field, and the John Thunstone series - some of the original stories, published in Weird Tales from 1938, being originally published as by Gans T. Field - were assembled in Lonely Vigils (coll 1981). What Dreams May Come (1983) and The School of Darkness (1985) continued to feature Thunstone. Both Thunstone and Pursuivant are occult detectives, and the range of their investigations is compendious, encompassing most of MWW's general periods and venues of interest, from the US Civil War to the rural USA of the 20th century. From 1951 - with stories appearing frequently in The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION , which had taken over from Weird Tales as his main journal - much of MWW's energy was devoted to his most famous sequence, the stories and novels set in the Appalachian regions of North Carolina and following the career of witchcraft-fighter and minstrel Silver John or John the Balladeer: Who Fears the Devil? (coll of linked stories 1963; exp vt John the Balladeer 1988), The Old Gods Waken (1979), After Dark (1980), The Lost and the Lurking (1981), The Hanging Stones (1982) and The Voice of the Mountain (1985). Along with the stories assembled in The Valley so Low: Southern Mountain Tales (coll 1987), the series remains his most significant achievement. [JC]Other works: Romance in Black (1938 Weird Tales as "The Black Drama"; 1946 chap UK) as by Gans T. Field; The Beasts from Beyond (1944 Startling Stories as "Strangers on the Heights"; 1950 UK); The Devil's Planet (1942 Startling Stories; 1951 UK); The Dark Destroyers (1938 ASF as "Nuisance Value"; 1959; cut 1960 dos); Island in the Sky (1941 TWS; 1961); a CAPTAIN FUTURE novel, The Solar Invasion * (1946 Startling Stories; 1968); The Beyonders (1977); Cahena: A Dream of the Past (1986).About the author: Manly Wade Wellman, the Gentleman from Chapel Hill: A Memorial Working Bibliography (1986 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr.See also: ARTS; COMICS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MYTHOLOGY; PASTORAL; REINCARNATION; SUPERMAN [character]; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES. WELLS, ANGUS (1943- ) UK writer, previously a paperbacks editor. Most of his novels have been Westerns as by Charles L. Pike, James A. Muir and other names. As Ian Evans, he wrote Starmaidens * (1977), an sf tv tie. Under the house name Richard Kirk, which he shared with Robert P. HOLDSTOCK, he contributed to the Raven fantasy series Swordsmistress of Chaos (1978) with Holdstock and, solo, The Frozen Gods (1978) and A Time of Dying (1979). As AW he has written the Book of the Kingdoms fantasy sequence - Wrath of Ashar (1988), The Usurper (1989) and The Way Beneath (1989) - and begun a second sequence, the Godwars books, with Forbidden Magic (1991) and Dark Magic (1992). Lords of the Sky (1994) is also fantasy. In 1973-5 AW ed a series of collections assembling for UK readers the "best of" various sf authors, including The Best of Isaac Asimov (anth in 2 vols 1973), The Best of Arthur C. Clarke (anth in 2 vols 1973), The Best of Robert A. Heinlein (anth in 2 vols 1973), The Best of John Wyndham (anth 1973), THE BEST OF FRITZ LEIBER (anth 1974), The Best of A.E. van Vogt (anth 1974), The Best of Frank Herbert (anth 1975) and The Best of Clifford D. Simak (anth 1975). [JC] WELLS, BASIL (EUGENE) (1912- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Rebirth of Man" for Super Science Stories in 1940, and whose generally unremarkable work is assembled in Planets of Adventure (coll 1949) and Doorways to Space (coll 1951). He also wrote 4 tales as by Gene Ellerman. He became comparatively inactive after about 1957. [JC] WELLS, CATHERINE Working name of US writer Catherine Jean Wells Dimenstein (1952- ) whose sf, a tightly-woven sequence set aeons hence in an ecologically devastated Earth,comprises The Earth Is All (1991), Children of theEarth(1992) and Earth Saver(1993). In the first volume an embittered high-tech woman falls in love with a man fromone of the tribes - CW bases them on Native American models - whose lifestyle has placated thesentient being of Mother Earth,while simultaneously young Coconico must defend this world frominterference from the stars. The second and third volumes are fantasy-like in the telling, asCoconico, cast centuries forward, battles to return to his time and his love; back in time, however,he has become a legend. Stories are interwoven.In the end, a return in time and to proper living isconsummated. [JC] WELLS, H(ERBERT) G(EORGE) (1866-1946) UK writer. At the time of HGW's birth his father was a shopkeeper - having earlier been a gardener and cricketer - but the business failed and HGW's mother was forced to go back into domestic service as a housekeeper. Her desire to elevate the family to middle-class status resulted in "Bertie" being apprenticed to a draper, like his brothers before him, but in 1883 he become a teacher/pupil at Midhurst Grammar School. He obtained a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London and studied biology there under T.H. Huxley (1825-1895), a vociferous proponent of Darwin's theory of EVOLUTION and an outspoken scientific humanist, who made a deep impression on him. HGW resumed teaching, took his degree externally, and wrote 2 textbooks (published 1893) while working for the University Correspondence College. He dabbled in scientific journalism, publishing the essay "The Rediscovery of the Unique" in 1891 and beginning to sell articles and short stories regularly in 1893.The most ambitious and important of his early articles was "The Man of the Year Million" (1893), which boldly describes Man as HGW thought natural selection would ultimately reshape him: a creature with a huge head and eyes, delicate hands and a much reduced body, permanently immersed in nutrient fluids, having been forced to retreat beneath the Earth's surface after the cooling of the SUN. In other articles HGW wrote about "The Advent of the Flying Man", "An Excursion to the Sun" (a poetic cosmic vision of solar storms and electromagnetic tides), "The Living Things that May Be" (on the possibility of silicon-based life) and "The Extinction of Man". A good deal of this speculative nonfiction is reprinted in H.G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction (coll 1975) ed Robert M. PHILMUS and David Y. Hughes. His early short stories are less adventurous, mostly featuring encounters between men and strange lifeforms, as in "The Stolen Bacillus" (1894), "In the Avu Observatory" (1894), "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid" (1894) and "Aepyornis Island" (1894).The Chronic Argonauts, a series of essays written for his amateur publication The Science Schools Journal in 1888, became the basis for HGW's first major fiction, The Time Machine: An Invention (1895 US; rev 1895 UK), which maps the evolutionary future of life on Earth. The human species subdivides into the gentle Eloi and the bestial Morlocks; both ultimately become extinct, while life as we know it slowly decays as the Sun cools. His interest in social reform and socialist political ideas is reflected in the fantasy The Wonderful Visit (1895), in which an angel displaced from the Land of Dreams casts a critical eye upon late-Victorian mores and folkways. The central themes of these novels - the implications of Darwin's evolutionary theory and the desire to oppose and eradicate the injustices and hypocrisies of contemporary society - run through all HGW's work. In the quasi-allegorical The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) he developed ideas from an essay, "The Limits of Plasticity", into the story of a hubristic SCIENTIST populating a remote ISLAND with beasts which have been surgically reshaped as men and whose veneer of civilization exemplified by their chanted "laws"-proves thin. "A Story of the Stone Age" (1897) is a notable attempt to imagine the circumstances which allowed Man to evolve from bestial ancestors. His short stories grew bolder in conception, as exemplified by the visionary fantasy "Under the Knife" (1896), the cosmic- DISASTER story "The Star" (1897) and the cautionary parable "The Man who Could Work Miracles" (1898), later filmed (see below). The novella A Story of the Days to Come (1899 Pall Mall Magazine; 1976) is an elaborate study of future society, imagining a technologically developed world where poverty and misery are needlessly maintained by class divisions, while The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance (1897) is a second classic study of scientific hubris brought to destruction.In THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898; with epilogue cut 1898 US) HGW introduced ALIENS into the role which would become a CLICHA: monstrous invaders of Earth, competitors in a cosmic struggle for existence ( WAR OF THE WORLDS for radio, film and tv versions). When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; rev vt The Sleeper Awakes 1910) is a robust futuristic romance of socialist revolution, whose hero awakes from SUSPENDED ANIMATION ( SLEEPER AWAKES) to play a quasi-messianic ( MESSIAHS) role. (HGW was never able to believe in proletarian socialism, assuming that social justice would have to be imposed from above by a benevolent intelligentsia.) In THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901 US) he carried forward the great tradition of FANTASTIC VOYAGES to the MOON, and described the hyperorganized DYSTOPIAN society of the Selenites. HGW's sf works of this period were labelled "scientific romances" by reviewers, and HGW spoke of them as such in early interviews, although he later chose to lump them together with such fantasies as The Sea Lady (1902) as "fantastic and imaginative romances". Despite this apparent disowning of their distinctive qualities, Wells's early SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES became the archetypal examples of a distinctive UK tradition of futuristic and speculative fiction.Wells's early realistic novels drew heavily upon his own experiences to deal with the pretensions and predicaments of the aspiring lower-middle class. The Wheels of Chance (1896) is light comedy in a vein carried forward by the more successful Kipps (1905), The History of Mr Polly (1910) and Bealby: A Holiday (1915), but HGW wanted to make his name as a serious novelist, and attempted to do so with Love and Mr Lewisham (1900). He remained an ardent champion of the novel of ideas versus the novel of character, and he set out to tackle large themes and to attack issues of contemporary social concern. His most successful effort along these lines was Tono-Bungay (1909), followed by Ann Veronica (1909), a polemic on the situation of women in society, and the political novel The New Machiavelli (1910 US). The longest and most pretentious of these novels is The World of William Clissold (3 vols 1926). Some of the later novels of ideas apply fantastic twists for dramatic purposes although remaining basically realistic; the most effective is that deployed in The Dream (1924).In his essays HGW began to direct more effort to careful and rational PREDICTION, and became a founder of FUTUROLOGY with the series of essays collected as Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Human Progress upon Human Life and Thought (coll 1901). He tried to justify the method of this work in a lecture, published as The Discovery of the Future (1902 chap), which marked a turning-point in his thought and work; from then on he abandoned the wide-ranging, exploratory and unashamedly whimsical imagination which had produced his early scientific romances and focused on the probable development of future HISTORY and the reforms necessary to create a better world. His futurological essays brought him to the attention of Sidney (1859-1947) and Beatrice (1858-1943) Webb, and he joined the Fabian Society in 1903. His subsequent career as a social crusader went through many phases. He tried to assume command of the Fabian Society in 1906, but failed and withdrew in 1908. During WWI he was active in the League of Nations movement. Between the Wars he visited many countries, addressing the Petrograd Soviet, the Sorbonne and the Reichstag. In 1934 he had discussions with both Stalin and Roosevelt, trying to recruit them to his world-saving schemes. His real influence, however, remained negligible, and he despaired of the whole business when the world became embroiled in global war for a second time.In his UTOPIAN novels A Modern Utopia (1905) and Men Like Gods (1923) HGW described technologically sophisticated societies governed by socialist principles, and in his other work he tried to describe the new people who might help to bring such worlds into being. In The Food of the Gods, and How it Came to Earth (1904) the new race is produced by a super-nutrient which enlarges both body and mind. In In the Days of the Comet (1906) the wondrous change in human personality is brought about by the gases in a comet's tail, through which the Earth is fortunate enough to pass. The most interesting of HGW's later scientific romances, however, are those which attempt to apply a more rigorous logic to the imagining of future WAR. In "The Land Ironclads" (1903) he anticipated the use of tanks, and in The War in the Air, and Particularly How Mr Bert Smallways Fared while it Lasted (1908) he envisaged colossal destruction wrought by aerial bombing. In The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind (1914) similar destruction is wrought by atomic bombs whose "chain reactions" cause them to explode repeatedly, and the story embodies HGW'S growing conviction that a new and better world could be built only once the existing social order had been torn down. When WWI began in actuality HGW was for this reason initially enthusiastic - a point of view expressed in what remained for some time his most famous novel, Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916) - but events after 1918 failed to live up to his hopes. He clung nevertheless to the idea that some such pattern of events would come about, as displayed in the last and most comprehensive of his speculative histories of the future, The Shape of Things to Come (1933), based on his last major summary of his utopian philosophy, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (2 vols 1931 US). The Shape of Things to Come became the basis of HGW's script for the film THINGS TO COME (1935; book version 1935). He also scripted the 1936 film The Man who Could Work Miracles (script published 1936 chap; not to be confused with the book publication of the original story); both scripts were assembled as Two Film Stories: Things to Come; Man who Could Work Miracles (omni 1940). His other filmscripts, including one for The King who Was a King (1929), never reached the screen.HGW became increasingly impatient of the follies of his fellow men, and dubbed the post-1918 world the "Age of Frustration" - a notion eccentrically elaborated in The Anatomy of Frustration: A Modern Synthesis (1936). This attitude underlies an extensive series of "sarcastic fantasies" begun with The Undying Fire (1919), an allegory in which the Book of Job is re-enacted in contemporary England, with a dying Wellsian hero "comforted" by various social philosophers. That book reflected a brief reinvestment in religious faith which HGW explained in God the Invisible King (1917) and dramatized in The Soul of a Bishop (1917). In Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928) a shipwrecked man tries to convert superstitious savages to the ways of common sense but cannot prevail against their cruel and stupid tribal customs; in the end he discovers that he has been delirious, and that Rampole Island is New York. In The Autocracy of Mr Parham (1930) an inoffensive individual becomes possessed by a "master spirit" which drives him to seek charismatic political power as "Lord Paramount". In The Croquet Player: A Story (1936 chap) a village is haunted by the brutal spectres of Man's evolutionary heritage, but the allegory is lost on the socialite of the book's title. In The Camford Visitation (1937 chap) the routines of a university are upset by the interventions of a mocking disembodied voice. In All Aboard for Ararat (1940) God asks a new Noah to build a second Ark; Noah agrees, provided that this time God will be content to remain a passenger while Man takes charge of his own destiny. In the gentler Star Begotten: A Biological Fantasia (1937) cosmic rays emanating from Mars may or may not be causing a mutation in the human spirit comparable to that wrought by the miraculous comet of In the Days of the Comet. The Holy Terror (1939) is a painstaking study of the psychological development of a modern dictator based on the careers of Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler.Most of HGW's short stories were initially reprinted in 5 collections: The Stolen Bacillus, and Other Incidents (coll 1895), The Plattner Story, and Others (coll 1897), Tales of Space and Time (coll dated 1900 but 1899), Twelve Stories and a Dream (coll 1903) and The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories (coll 1911). The contents of these were reprinted in The Short Stories of H.G. Wells (coll 1927; vt The Famous Short Stories of H.G. Wells 1938 US; vt The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells 1965 UK) along with THE TIME MACHINE as well as 3 stories which had previously appeared in the US collection Thirty Strange Stories (coll 1897 US) and 4 others, including the prehistoric fantasy "The Grisly Folk" (1921) and an apocalyptic fantasy, "The Story of the Last Trump", from the non-sf book Boon (coll 1915 as Reginald Bliss; 1920 as by HGW). The short stories not included in this omnibus were reprinted in The Man with the Nose and Other Uncollected Short Stories (coll 1984) along with the script for an unmade film. HGW's most notable long scientific romances were collected in The Scientific Romances of H.G. Wells (omni 1933; cut vt Seven Famous Novels 1934 US), re-edited as Seven Science Fiction Novels (omni 1950 US).HGW possessed a prolific imagination which remained solidly based in biological and historical possibility, and his best works are generally regarded as exemplary of what sf should aspire to do and be. His other ambitions persuaded him to put his bold and vigorous imagination into a straitjacket for the bulk of his career, but he nevertheless remained the founding father and presiding genius of UK scientific romance, and he was a significant influence on the development of US sf. He never managed to resolve the imaginative conflict between his utopian dreams and his interpretation of Darwinian "natural law", as is evidenced by the despairing passages of his essay Mind at the End of its Tether (1945 chap), which opines that mankind may be doomed because people cannot and will not adapt themselves to a sustainable way of life. He seems to have imagined his own career as an analogue of the situation of the hero of The Undying Fire or that of the luckless sighted man in The Country of the Blind (1904 The Strand; 1915 chap US; rev plus original text 1939 chap UK) - although he also portrayed himself ironically as a deluded idealist in Christina Alberta's Father (1925) and seemed quite unable to decide how to portray himself in his quirky Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866) (2 vols 1934), though its continuation, H.G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography (1984) - not published during his lifetime because of its sexual content, and because it mentioned living persons-did something to round out the picture. HGW slightly revised many of his works for the 26-vol Atlantic edition of The Works of H.G. Wells (1924-7 US). New and definitive editions of the most famous scientific romances - current editions of which reveal many textual variations - were in active preparation from various houses before revision of international copyright conventions extended the period of protection beyond 50 years after the author's death; editions which have, all the same appeared, includeThe Time Machine/The War of the Worlds: A Critical Edition (omni 1977) ed Frank D. McConnell which presents some valuable information, though the texts themselves are corrupt; The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition (1987) ed Harry M. Geduld, which is more reliable; THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1993), a variorum text (eccentrically based on the US version rather than the UK) ed Robert M. PHILMUS; A Critical Edition of The War of the Worlds (1993) ed David Y. Hughes and Harry M. Geduld.Films based on HGW's work include ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932), The INVISIBLE MAN (1933), The WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), The TIME MACHINE (1960), The FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1964), The ISLAND OF DR MOREAU (1977) and, very loosely, FOOD OF THE GODS (1976). Notable RECURSIVE SF in which HGW is a character includes The Space Machine (1976) by Christopher PRIEST, Time After Time (1976) by Karl Alexander (filmed as TIME AFTER TIME [1979]), and "The Inheritors of Earth" (1990) by Eric BROWN. [BS]Other collections: Many further collections are merely re-sorts of material first or most reliably published in the collections listed above. Useful collections include 28 Science Fiction Stories (coll 1952), Selected Short Stories (coll 1958) and The Best Science Fiction Stories of H.G. Wells (coll 1966).Other novels: The Research Magnificent (1915); The Bulpington of Blup (1932); You Can't Be Too Careful: A Sample of Life 1901-1951 (1941).Nonfiction: Mankind in the Making (1903); New Worlds for Old (1908); The War that Will End War (1914); The Outline of History (1920); The Salvaging of Civilization (1921); A Short History of the World (1922); The Way the World is Going: Guesses and Forecasts of the World Ahead (1928); The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (1928); The Science of Life (1930) with Julian Huxley and G.P. Wells; World Brain (1938); The Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939); The New World Order (1939); Phoenix (1942); The Conquest of Time (1942); The Happy Turning: A Dream of Life (1945 chap); Journalism and Prophecy 1893-1946 (coll 1964; cut 1965) ed W. Warren WAGAR.About the author: Of the numerous critical works on HGW, those of interest include: The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances (1961) by Bernard Bergonzi; H.G. Wells and the World State (1961) by W.W. WAGAR; H.G. Wells: A Collection of Critical Essays (anth 1976) ed Bergonzi; The Logic of Fantasy: H.G. Wells and Science Fiction (1982) by John Huntington; The Life and Thought of H.G. Wells (1963 Russia; trans 1966) by Julius KAGARLITSKI; H.G. Wells and the Culminating Ape: Biological Themes and Imaginative Obsessions (1982) by Peter Kemp; The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells (1981) by Frank McConnell; The Time Traveller: The Life of H.G. Wells (1973) by Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie; H.G. Wells (1970) by Patrick PARRINDER; H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage (anth 1972) ed Parrinder; H.G. Wells: Critic of Progress (1973) by Jack WILLIAMSON; H.G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction (anth 1977) ed Darko SUVIN and Robert M. PHILMUS; Aspects of a Life (1984) by Anthony WEST, HGW's son by Rebecca West (1892-1983); H.G. Wells: A Comprehensive Bibliography (latest edn 1986) published by the H.G. Wells Society; H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (1986) by David C. Smith; H.G. Wells under Revision: Proceedings of the H.G. Wells International Symposium, London, July, 1986 (anth 1990) ed Parrinder and Christopher Rolfe.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; ANTIGRAVITY; ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); AUTOMATION; BIOLOGY; CITIES; CLUB STORY; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; COMICS; COSMOLOGY; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DEATH RAYS; DEVOLUTION; DIME-NOVEL SF; DIMENSIONS; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; ECONOMICS; EDISONADE; END OF THE WORLD; ENTROPY; ESP; FAR FUTURE; FRANCE; GAMES AND TOYS; GENETIC ENGINEERING; GREAT AND SMALL; HEROES; HISTORY OF SF; HIVE-MINDS; HUMOUR; IMAGINARY SCIENCE; INVASION; INVISIBILITY; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; MACHINES; MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; MARS; MATHEMATICS; MEDICINE; MONEY; MONSTERS; MUSIC; MUTANTS; NEAR FUTURE; NUCLEAR POWER; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; ORIGIN OF MAN; PARALLEL WORLDS; PERCEPTION; PHYSICS; POLITICS; POLLUTION; POWER SOURCES; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; PULP MAGAZINES; RADIO; RELIGION; ROCKETS; RUSSIA; SATIRE; SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; SEX; SOCIAL DARWINISM; SOCIOLOGY; SPACESHIPS; SUPERMAN; TECHNOLOGY; THEATRE; TIME TRAVEL; TRANSPORTATION; WAR OF THE WORLDS; WEAPONS. WELLS, HUBERT GEORGE Forrest J. ACKERMAN. WELLS, JOHN JAY Juanita COULSON. WELLS, (FRANK CHARLES) ROBERT (1929- ) UK writer who began publishing sf with "The Machine that was Lovely" for the Observer in 1954, and who later concentrated on novels, beginning with The Parasaurians (1969 US), in which play-safaris against ROBOT dinosaurs turn into a more serious threat to the hero. The Spacejacks (1975 US) is a traditional SPACE OPERA. [JC]Other works: Candle in the Sun (1971); Right-Handed Wilderness (1973 US). WELLS, RONNIE [r] LATIN AMERICA. WELT AM DRAHT (vt World on a Wire) Made-for-tv film (1973). ARD. Dir Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1946-1982), starring Klaus Lowitsch, Barbara Valentin, Mascha Rabben, Karl Heinz Vosgerau, Wolfgang Schenk, Gunter Lamprecht. Screenplay Fritz Muller-Scherz, Fassbinder, based on Counterfeit World (1964 UK; vt Simulacron-3 US) by Daniel F. GALOUYE. Originally broadcast in 2 parts, each 105 mins. Colour.Fassbinder was perhaps the most brilliant German film director of the 1970s; this was his only sf film. For the purpose of exploring new technologies, the Institute for Cybernetics and Futures Investigation has its giant COMPUTER, Simulacron, create a possible future within its own circuits: a VIRTUAL REALITY whose "human" occupants - in reality, programs-are unaware of their status and can be deleted if they behave wrongly. In the real world, in the Institute itself, mysterious incidents occur, and the protagonist, Stiller, realizes that his world too is a simulation controlled from a higher level, and that to learn this truth is fatal. His lover turns out to be a projection from the higher level, a level in which a Stiller-equivalent is the ultimate manipulator pulling wires. Stiller succeeds in taking the place of his higher-level counterpart.In Galouye's novel our reality is the middle level, whereas in the film our world is the top level, but that does not diminish the film's threatening effect, for an atmosphere is built up of exchangeability on all levels, so that reality is dissolved and no place is left for security. Fassbinder made the most of his low tv budget by exploiting real locations in modern offices, using glass, concrete and neon lights alarmingly to create a sense of the artificiality of the real. [HJA] WENDELESSEN [s] Charles DE LINT. WENTWORTH, ROBERT [s] Edmond HAMILTON. WEREWOLVES SUPERNATURAL CREATURES. WERFEL, FRANZ (1890-1945) Austrian poet, playwright and novelist, born in Prague, known mainly for his sentimental novels, though he achieved his early fame as an Expressionist poet and dramatist. After escaping the Nazis via Spain as WWII loomed, he went to California, where he wrote Stern der Ungeborenen (1946 Austria; trans Gustave O. Arlt as Star of the Unborn 1946 US) before dying in US exile. This long, contemplative UTOPIA depicts a philosophically complex FAR-FUTURE Earth through the eyes of a narrator (named Franz Werfel) who is guided through the 3 parts of the novel by a mentor explicitly associated with DANTE ALIGHIERI's Vergil. This narrator's response to the depopulated, deeply alienating, surreal world about him seems cunningly to mirror the exiled author's real-world experiences of California. The melancholy underlying the story, and its long effortless perspectives of time and thought, give the book a clarity and reserve reminiscent of the work of Olaf STAPLEDON. [JC]See also: ARTS; AUSTRIA; GERMANY; RELIGION. WERPER, BARTON House name used by US writers Peter T. Scott (? - ) and Peg O'Neill Scott (? - ) for their unauthorized NewTarzan sequence, each working solo, with Peter Scott writing all but the 3rd vol: Tarzan and the Silver Globe (1964), Tarzan and the Cave City (1964), Tarzan and the Snake People (1964), Tarzan and the Abominable Snowman (1965) and Tarzan and the Winged Invaders (1965). It enjoyed a short shelf-life; the Edgar Rice BURROUGHS estate successfully sued the publisher, and the books were withdrawn in 1966. Peg O'Neill Scott, as Scott O'Neill, has written Martian Sexpot (1963). [JC] WESSEL, JOHAN (or JOHN) HERMANN [r] DENMARK; SCANDINAVIA. WESSEX, MARTYN [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. WESSO, H.W. Working name of German-born US illustrator Hans Waldemar Wessolowski (1894-? ). HWW was educated at the Berlin Royal Academy. He emigrated to the USA in 1914, and soon found work as an illustrator (both covers and interiors) for a variety of magazines. When the Clayton magazine chain created ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION (then called Astounding Stories of Super-Science) in Jan 1930 they hired HWW, who painted all 34 covers of the Clayton ASF. His black-and-white ILLUSTRATION was similar to that of his contemporary Frank R. PAUL, but his colour paintings were very different; where Paul's were crowded and often artificially busy, HWW's-often watercolours - were more open, and he seemed more concerned with the overall design of each piece. His best covers create an almost abstract beauty out of the conventional icons of SPACE OPERA. HWW did work for many sf magazines in the 1930s and early 1940s, including more for ASF in the late 1930s (more accomplished than before) and AMZ, Amazing Stories Quarterly, Captain Future, Marvel Science Stories, Startling Stories and TWS. [JG/PN] WESSOLOWSKI, HANS WALDEMAR H.W. WESSO. WEST, ANTHONY (1914-1987) UK writer, in the USA for much of his life, son of H.G. WELLS and Rebecca West (1892-1983). His H.G. Wells: Aspects of a Life (1984), published just after his mother's death, was widely understood as an act of retribution aimed mainly at her - he was an illegitimate child and was raised eccentrically - and only secondarily at Wells. His first novel, On a Dark Night (1949 UK; vt The Vintage 1950 US), is an afterlife fantasy describing a suicide's questings through space and time for the meaning of life. Another Kind (1951 UK) is a NEAR-FUTURE story with love in the foreground and a UK civil war filling the scene. [JC] WEST, (MARY) JESSAMYN (1902-1984) US writer most famous for tales of rural Quakerism like The Friendly Persuasion (1945). Her sf novella, The Chilekings (1954 Star Short Novels as "Little Men"; 1967), is a moral fable in which children switch statures with adults and take control. [JC]See also: GREAT AND SMALL. WEST, MORRIS (LANGLO) (1916- ) Australian novelist, in his early years a lay monk, and best known for novels like The Devil's Advocate (1959). In The Navigator (1976) a lost ISLAND is found in the South Pacific, and a UTOPIAN community is founded there. The Clowns of God (1981), set at the end of the century, deals in apocalyptic terms with a Pope convinced that the Second Coming is nigh. [JC] WEST, OWEN Dean R. KOONTZ. WEST, PAMELA (1945- ) US writer whose sf novel, 20/20 Vision (1990), is an intricate TIME-TRAVEL tale in which a murder in 1995 is brooded over by a detective in 2020 and solved through the agency of time-travelling archivists from 2040, who send the detective back to explore the causes of the crime. [JC] WEST, WALLACE (GEORGE) (1900-1980) US lawyer, writer, public-relations man and pollution-control expert who began publishing short stories with "Loup-Garou" for Weird Tales in 1927 and sf with "The Last Man" for AMZ in 1929, thereafter appearing fairly regularly in the magazines until the late 1960s. His stories, though unpretentiously told, exhibit a level-headed cognitive vigour that keeps even his early work from dating. Some of his tales-like "Dust" (1935) - made significant early attempts to put POLLUTION and other side-effects of progress on the sf agenda. 2 magazine series collected in book form were The Bird of Time (fixup 1959), a PLANETARY ROMANCE set on MARS, and Lords of Atlantis (coll of linked stories 1960), which features the rulers and scientists of ATLANTIS who, after the island sinks, live on as the gods of the Greek pantheon. Most of WW's novels were revisions of pre-WWII material, though The Memory Bank (1951 Startling Stories as "The Dark Tower"; 1961) demonstrates his marginally more awkward later form. He was never a remarkable writer, nor did he ever devote himself full-time to fiction; but he was never dull. [JC]Other works: Betty Boop in Snow-White * (1934) and Alice in Wonderland * (1934), both film ties; Outposts in Space (1931 Weird Tales; exp 1962); River of Time (1963); The Time-Lockers (fixup 1964); The Everlasting Exiles (fixup 1967).See also: OUTER PLANETS; POLITICS. WESTALL, ROBERT (ATKINSON) (1929-1993) UK author, art teacher (1960-85) and antique shop proprietor. Until near the end of his life his work was mostly for older children. His debut novel, The Machine-Gunners (1976), which formed the basis of the play The Machine-Gunners (1986) and won the Carnegie Medal, is a realist tale set during the war he described in his nonfiction Children of the Blitz: Memories of Wartime Childhood (1985); the novel's sequel was Fathom Five (1979).His second novel The Wind Eye introduced supernatural forces (in the form of St Cuthbert), and these recur often in novels such as The Watch House (1977), Ghost Abbey (1988), Old Man on a Horse (1989 chap) and The Promise (1990), and in many stories in his collections Break of Dark (coll 1982), The Haunting of Chas McGill and Other Stories (coll 1983 US), Rachel and the Angel and Other Stories (coll 1986), Ghost and Journeys (coll 1988), The Call and Other Stories (coll 1989), Echoes of War (coll 1989), A Walk on the Wild Side: Cat Stories (coll 1989), The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral (coll 1991), The Fearful Lovers (coll 1992; vt Fearful Lovers 1993), plus two retrospective assemblies, Demons and Shadows; The Ghostly Best Stories of Robert Westall (coll 1993 US) and Shades of Darkness: More of the Ghostly Best of Robert Westall (coll 1994 US). RW also published a fine collection of ghost stories for adults, Antique Dust: Ghost Stories (coll 1989), in which a certain primness only adds a horrific reticence to the resonances of M.R. James (1862-1936). He ed Ghost Stories (anth 1988).RW, who by the 1980s had established a considerable reputation and went on garnering awards, wrote only one pure sf novel, Futuretrack 5 (1983), set in a conformist future that lobotomizes individualists. This was good, but better was the earlier TIME-TRAVEL fantasy The Devil on the Road (1978), where a young biker finds himself confronting Witchfinder Hopkins in the 17th century. The Cats of Seroster (1984) is, unusually for RW, SWORD AND SORCERY, set in an imaginary medieval world. Urn Burial (1987) hovers between sf and horror in its tale of the awakening of long-dormant aliens. [PN]Other works: The Scarecrows (1981); The Creatures in the House (1983); Blitzcat (1989); The Kingdom by the Sea (1990); Stormsearch (1990), not fantasy; Yaxley's Cat (1991); The Christmas Ghost (1992 chap); some books for younger children.See also: CHILDREN'S SF; FANTASY. WESTALL, WILLIAM (BURY) (1835-1903) UK author and journalist, foreign correspondent for The Times of London, who travelled in South America. The Phantom City: A Volcanic Romance (1886) describes a LOST-WORLD race of Maya-type people at pre-Conquest level. A Queer Race: The Story of a Strange People (1887) is concerned with a lost race of Elizabethan Englishmen who have undergone strange mutations in pigmentation. Don or Devil? (1901) is a rare lost-world text. [JE/EFB]Other works: Tales and Legends of Saxony and Lusatia (coll 1877); Tales and Traditions of Switzerland (coll 1882).See also: ANTHROPOLOGY. WESTERMAN, PERCY F. [r] WEAPONS. WESTERN FICTION PUBLISHING CO. DYNAMIC SCIENCE STORIES; MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES; MARVEL STORIES. WESTLAKE, DONALD E(DWIN EDMUND) (1933- ) US writer, mostly of detective novels and thrillers, often slapstick, under his own name and under pseudonyms, notably Richard Stark; he won an Edgar award with God Save the Mark (1968). He began publishing sf - always of secondary interest in his career, though never carelessly done - in 1954 with "Or Give Me Death" for Universe, and assembled much of his short work in The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution and Other Fictions (coll 1968). His first novel of sf interest, Anarchaos (1967) as by Curt Clark, is an adventure tale set on a planet where one's own death is the only crime recognized; along with 9 stories - mostly early - this novel was assembled as Tomorrow's Crimes (coll 1989) as DEW. High Jinx (1987) and Transylvania Station (1988), both with Abby Westlake, are mysteries incorporating elements of spoofed horror. A polished, intelligent, witty writer, DEW has left sf the poorer by his decision not to concentrate seriously on the genre. [JC]Other works: Ex Officio (1970) as by Timothy J. Culver, marginal; Humans (1992), a fantasy.See also: PULP MAGAZINES. WESTLAKE, MICHAEL (1942- ) UK writer and editor whose One Zero and the Night Controller (1980) is a FABULATION in which a taxi driver tracks down an occult nocturnal mystery, whose Imaginary Women (1987) plays with questions of reality, and in whose 51 Soko: To the Islands on the Other Side of the World (1990) four Japanese men send letters to various English figures, weaving a pattern whose links are supernatural, and describing en passant several ALTERNATE WORLD versions of UK history. Of specific sf interest is The Utopian (1989), a double narrative contrasting the life of an insane contemporary man with that of his namesake - or metaphorical double, or literal REINCARNATION - in the communal matriarchy which obtains in AD2411. Though the tale might seem to read as delusional, both lives are equally weighted: the delusion, if any, might be the world of 1989. [JC] WESTON, GEORGE (1880-1965) US writer best known for His First Million Women (1934; vt Comet "Z" 1934 UK), an early version of the theme in which sterility affects all but one man - a theme more widely used after the first nuclear explosion. GW's protagonist uses his new-Adam status to promulgate disarmament, until the dissipation of Comet "Z"'s effects makes it possible for him to be ignored. [JC]Other works: The Apple Tree (1918); Queen of the World (1923). WESTON, PETER (1944- ) UK sf fan and editor, active mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. He published a FANZINE, SPECULATION, organized the Speculation sf conferences in Birmingham (1970-72), was TAFF winner in 1974 ( AWARDS), and was Chairman of the 1979 UK World SF CONVENTION. He also edited the Andromeda sequence of original sf anthologies-Andromeda 1 (anth 1976), #2 (anth 1977) and #3 (anth 1978) - which published work by a number of authors including Brian W. ALDISS, Harlan ELLISON, Fritz LEIBER, Christopher PRIEST and Bob SHAW. [PR]See also: HUGO. WESTON, SUSAN (BROWN) (1943- ) US writer whose Children of Light (1985), set in a USA direly but not terminally threatened by HOLOCAUST, treats the possibilities of human survival with warmth and some plausibility. [JC] WESTWORLD Film (1973). MGM. Dir Michael CRICHTON, starring Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin. Screenplay Crichton. 88 mins. Colour.Westworld is in a future theme park, Delos, that contains also Roman and Medieval "worlds"; its permanent occupants - even the horses - are ROBOT simulacra, controlled by human technicians in an underground laboratory. Two male visitors on holiday enjoy out-drawing the local robot gunman (Brynner) and sleeping with the acquiescent robot saloon girls, and it seems that the film will be a comedy about the tawdriness of men's machismo fantasies, safely acted out in a purely Hollywood "Wild West". Next day, however, the Brynner robot shoots one of the men dead, the beginning of a revolt by the machines with the implacable gunman as its focus. The puncturing of the fantasy forces us to question our reliance on machinery rather than on ourselves (Crichton's theme for several films to come). With a subtext about our exploitation of slaves and coolies, Crichton's first theatrical feature - he had directed the made-for-tv PURSUIT (1972) - is wittily macabre, and makes its debating points with clarity if not with subtlety. The novelization, by Crichton, is Westworld * (1974). W's inferior sequel was FUTUREWORLD (1976), not by Crichton. A tv series, Beyond Westworld (1980), ran for only 3 episodes, with 2 further episodes made but unaired. Prod and mainly written by Lou Shaw for MGM TV, this told of a Westworld scientist who steals androids for sinister purposes. [PN/JB]See also: CINEMA; VIRTUAL REALITY. WETANSON, BURT (? - ) US writer who collaborated with Thomas HOOBLER (whom see for details) on The Hunters (1978) and its sequel, The Treasure Hunters (1983). [JC] WETMORE, CLAUDE H(AZELTINE) (1862-1944) US writer of several novels. Of sf interest is Sweepers of the Sea: The Story of a Strange Navy (1900), written with the assistance of Robert M. Yost, in which 2 young Incans resolve to create the United States of Incaland and to dominate the Southern Hemisphere as the USA does the Northern. With the aid of Incan treasure they create a navy of impregnable ships, defeat the British, make peace with North America, and prepare to rule. [JC] WHARTON, WILLIAM Pseudonym of a US painter and writer (1925- ), living in Paris, who wishes not to reveal his name. Best known for FABULATIONS with a MAGIC-REALIST colouring, like Birdy (1979 US) and Dad (1981 US), he moved gradually into tales whose resolution depends upon their being read as FANTASY, like Tidings (1987 US). Franky Furbo (1989 US), like almost all his work, can be read as an intense evocation of WW's own family, this time in sf terms. The eponymous talking fox - at first presented as a delusional fantasy on the part of the protagonist, author of short stories featuring the animal - turns out to be a genuine visitant from the future who has taken on the protagonist's human form in order to become the mutant progenitor of the new race to which - in the future - he belongs, and which has inherited the battered Earth. [JC] WHEATLEY, DENNIS (YEATS) (1897-1977) UK writer who served in both WWI and WWII, in the latter with the Joint Planning Staff 1941-4. He was a prolific and extremely popular author of many espionage thrillers and historical romances, although the best of his work - and since his death the only category of his large oeuvre to be read at all widely - consists of a number of black-magic tales in which contemporary political knots are unravelled through occult means. Characters tend to appear and reappear from book to book, genre to genre, throughout his work, so that the black-magic books form a quasiseries; they include The Devil Rides Out (1935) - the best of them - and its sequel Strange Conflict (1941), Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts (coll 1943), The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948), To the Devil - A Daughter (1953), The Ka of Gifford Hillary (1956), The Satanist (1960), They Used Dark Forces (1964), The White Witch of the South Seas (1968), Gateway to Hell (1970) and The Irish Witch (1973); a late omnibus is The Devil Rides Out and Gateway to Hell (omni 1992). Closely associated with these are several LOST-WORLD novels, including The Fabulous Valley (1934), They Found Atlantis (1936), Uncharted Seas (1938) - set in a monster-choked Sargasso Sea and filmed as The LOST CONTINENT (1968) - and The Man who Missed the War (1945), set in the Antarctic; the last 3 were assembled as Worlds Far from Here (omni 1952). DW's black-magic and lost-world novels are neither short nor amusing, though an intermittent story-telling gift sustains readers through passages of political and racial abuse; his remaining sf, unfortunately, was less gifted by his story-telling instinct, nor did his scientific speculations show much acumen. Titles include Such Power is Dangerous (1933), Black August (1934) - the Prince Regent of England defeats the forces of totalitarianism - The Secret War (1937), Sixty Days to Live (1939)-a comet destroys human civilization - and Star of Ill-Omen (1952), about flying saucers ( UFOS), the last 2 being assembled with a non-sf novel as Into the Unknown (omni 1960). [JC]Other works: A Century of Horror Stories (anth 1935).See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; ATLANTIS; UNDER THE SEA. WHEELER, DEBORAH (? - ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with WHEELER, (JOHN) HARVEY (1918-?1988) US writer, co-author with Eugene L. BURDICK (whom see for details) of Fail-Safe (1962). [JC] WHEELER, SCOTT (? - ) US writer whose Matters of Form (1987) depicts the long campaign of a group of ALIENS, stranded on Earth in the 20th century, to upgrade human civilization to a level at which star travel is possible. Later sections of the book, introducing a second (and evil) alien race, are less effective. [JC] WHEELER, THOMAS GERALD (? - ) US physician and author whose juvenile sf novel Lost Threshold (1968) is a very late LOST-WORLD story, set underground. Loose Chippings (1968), also a juvenile, is a borderline-sf tale set in an anachronistic village in England. [JC] WHEELER-NICHOLSON, MALCOLM (1890-1968) US writer, a prolific producer of pulp fiction who was also important in the history of COMICS as the founder of the firm which became DC COMICS. Death Over London (1940) is uninteresting sf featuring Nazi spies destroying US installations with sympathetic vibrations. [RB] WHEELWRIGHT, JOHN T. [r] Robert GRANT; John Boyle O'REILLY. WHELAN, MICHAEL (1950- ) US illustrator, in his popularity the heir to Frank Kelly FREAS. He has won 11 HUGOS (Freas won 10), of which 10 have been for Best Professional Artist - every year 1980-86, and again in 1988, 1989 and 1991; the other was for Best Nonfiction in 1988 for Michael Whelan's Works of Wonder (1987), a book collecting some of his work. A Californian, MW studied art and biology at San Jose State University and then worked at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. In 1975 he began painting covers for DAW BOOKS, then for ACE BOOKS and MARVEL COMICS, and soon for other paperback houses including DEL REY BOOKS, earning high praise for his work on several series, such as reissues of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's Barsoom books and Michael MOORCOCK's Elric books. His popularity increased on publication of Wonderworks (1979), collecting his work, which was a bestseller (in art-book terms); it was for his 1979 publications that he won his first Hugo. MW continually tops the LOCUS poll ( AWARDS) for Best Artist by a very substantial margin. He has dominated sf book-cover ILLUSTRATION right through the 1980s. He is given many of the most prestigious commissions, and his original work fetches astonishingly high prices at sf art auctions. MW has spoken of his consciousness that it was during the 1980s that sf art became - at least at the top - a well paid profession for almost the first time. His huge popularity is difficult to explain or analyse, though his work is clearly very proficient: vivid, colourful, meticulous, giving an appearance of naturalism no matter how "alien" his subject, and highly finished - if occasionally a little languid. Often he adopts a fully realistic approach; sometimes surreal objects hover enigmatically. He has acknowledged a debt to his UK colleagues, and certainly MW's style can be compared with that of, say, Jim BURNS; it is probably not coincidental that Burns was the first artist to break MW's run of Hugos (and that was in a year when MW withdrew from the Hugo contest). [PN/JG] WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH Film (1969). Hammer/Warner. Dir Val Guest, starring Victoria Vetri, Robin Hawdon, Patrick Allen. Screenplay Guest, from story by J.G. BALLARD. 100 mins. Colour.This was originally written by J.G. Ballard, but director Guest got to the script and eliminated anything expensive, original or intellectual. Still a bit livelier than most prehistoric romances, this is one of a series of them made by Hammer, the first being ONE MILLION YEARS BC (1966). The usual story: woman of one tribe (Vetri) falls for man of another (Hawdon) and also makes friends with a dinosaur. Those who stand between the star-crossed lovers are conveniently wiped out by vast tides whipped up by a still gaseous Moon (a survival from Ballard's original story, which made much of astronomical cataclysms). The dinosaurs and giant crabs were designed by a team led by Jim Danforth. [PN] WHEN THE WIND BLOWS Animated film (1986). Meltdown Productions. Dir Jimmy T. Murakami, starring the voices of John Mills, Peggy Ashcroft. Screenplay Raymond BRIGGS, based on his own When the Wind Blows (graph 1982). 84 mins. Colour. Before turning his bestselling GRAPHIC NOVEL into a screenplay, Briggs made a RADIO adaption, with the unfortunate effect that WTWB is shackled to the non-stop chatter of its two (working-class) characters. Jim (Mills) and Hilda (Ashcroft) live in Sussex, and are concerned about the approach of WWIII. They follow advice given in official pamphlets, but the aftermath of the Bomb proves much worse than the pamphlets contemplate, and they are left on their own. Moaning about international crises they have not bothered to be interested in, misled by memories of the cameraderie of WWII and somewhat unfairly patronized by the film, they are shattered to learn that nuclear HOLOCAUST means no more milk deliveries, a toilet that will not flush and destroyed curtains, as well as presumably terminal radiation sickness. While Murakami, who had dir the live-action BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (1980), uses state-of-the-art animation technology to make the best use in the medium of three-dimensional sets since Hoppity Goes to Town (1941), the film suffers from a certain middle-class Campaign-for-Nuclear-Disarmament smugness, with Sir John Mills and Dame Peggy Ashcroft trying to sound as obtuse as "ordinary" people. There is an irksomely dirge-like David Bowie theme song. [KN] WHEN TIME RAN OUT . . . Irwin ALLEN. WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE Film (1951). Paramount. Dir Rudolph Mate, starring Richard Derr, Barbara Rush, John Hoyt, Larry Keating. Screenplay Sydney Boehm, based on When Worlds Collide (1933) by Philip WYLIE and Edwin BALMER. 83 mins. Colour.WWC, which helped spark the 1950s sf-movie boom, was George PAL's 2nd sf production, made after his DESTINATION MOON. 2 wandering planets are approaching Earth; US scientists calculate (though a disbelieving world, led by philistine UK scientists, rejects their conclusions) that the first will pass close by, creating tidal waves and earthquakes, and the second will annihilate Earth by direct impact; only the construction of a space ark (like Noah's) will save a handful of survivors. The spacecraft (launched on an upwards slanting railway line) carries 40 people to one of the two planets, Zyra, which is habitable. A routine love interest, and melodrama about who gets on the ark and who does not, leaves the single-minded thrust of the film surprisingly undamaged; it continues to grip. A low budget meant that the first near-miss sequence was montaged largely (and effectively) from stock shots - though the liners famously afloat in city streets in 2 brief shots are new; Earth's final death is over in an eye-blink, and the new planet is obviously a bright green painting (by Chesley BONESTELL). The religious subtext - Earth wiped out for its sins, and new Adams and Eves in a new Eden - is presented with no great moral conviction. [PN]See also: HOLOCAUST AND AFTER. WHERE HAVE ALL THE PEOPLE GONE? Made-for-tv film (1974). Metromedia/NBC. Dir John L. Moxey, starring Peter Graves, Verna Bloom, Ken Sanson, George O'Hanlon Jr. Teleplay Lewis John Carlino, Sandor Stern, from a story by Carlino. 72 mins. Colour.A man and his teenage children are in a cave when a solar flare creates a virus (!) which kills, then reduces to something like sand, almost everybody on Earth. The family journeys across California to their seaside home, where they hope to find the mother alive. They encounter other survivors, some unfriendly, and packs of dogs running wild. Routine stuff, competently directed; an interesting twist has the teenagers showing initiative while the father is passive. [JB] WHIRLING THE WORLDS VOYAGE A TRAVERS L'IMPOSSIBLE. WHITE, (GEORGE) ARED (1881-1941) US military officer and writer, one of the organizers of the American Legion in 1919; Camp White in Oregon was named for him. Of his numerous stories and 4 novels, 2 books are sf. Attack on America (1939) describes a weakened, unprepared USA attacked through Mexico by an international coalition dominated by Germany; as with its model, George CHESNEY's The Battle of Dorking (1871), most of the book consists of vivid descriptions of army movements and battles (which the USA loses, though she emerges victorious at the end). In Seven Tickets to Singapore (1939), US agents pursue spies who have stolen a "detonation ray"; the book is interesting only for its depiction of a Chinese detective substantially more intelligent and resourceful than his US employers. The Spy Net (1931) and Agent B-7 (1934), not sf, combine the worst elements of E. Phillips OPPENHEIM and William LE QUEUX. [RB] WHITE, FRED(ERICK) M(ERRICK) (1859-19? ) UK writer who contributed sf to Pearson's Magazine, The Strand Magazine and other general fiction magazines in the early 1900s. He continued writing well into the 1920s, being best known for his Doom of London DISASTER series for Pearson's Magazine - "The Four White Days" (1903), "The Four Days' Night" (1903), "The Dust of Death" (1903), "A Bubble Burst" (1903), "The Invisible Force" (1903) and "The River of Death" (1904) - in which London and the UK are subjected to a variety of calamities. Catastrophe is turned to the UK's advantage in his only sf novel, The White Battalions (1900): a shift in the flow of the Gulf Stream leads to arctic conditions in mainland Europe, so that the UK is able to win a WAR. [JE] WHITE, GEORGE H. [r] SPAIN. WHITE, JAMES (1928- ) UK writer from Ulster who worked as publicity officer with an aircraft company 1968-84. He began to publish sf with "Assisted Passage" for NW in 1953. To many readers (though his singleton novels are equally engaging) he is known almost exclusively for the tales about galactic MEDICINE comprising the Sector General sequence, set in a 384-level space-station/hospital "far out on the galactic Rim" and designed to accommodate all known kinds of XENOBIOLOGICAL problems. Dr Conway (he seems to have no first name), a human member of the 10,000-strong multi-species staff, solves alone or with colleagues a series of medical crises with humour, ingenuity and an underlying Hippocratic sense of decency. The sequence includes Hospital Station (coll of linked stories 1962 US), Star Surgeon (1963 US), Major Operation (fixup 1971), Ambulance Ship (fixup 1979 US), Sector General (coll of linked stories 1983 US), Star Healer (1985 US), Code Blue - Emergency (1987 US) and The Genocidal Healer (1992). Some further Sector General tales appear, along with stories set in similar sf venues, in The Aliens Among Us (coll 1969 US; cut 1979 UK) and Futures Past (coll 1982 US; with 1 story dropped and 1 added rev 1988 UK). White's capacity to conceive and make plausible a wide range of alien anatomies seems unflagging.Other collections include Deadly Litter (coll 1964 US) and Monsters and Medics (coll 1977), but their contents are generally less appealing than his series tales, though they share an ease with sf hardware and a quickness of plot. His singleton novels are more impressive. Second Ending (1962 chap US) encompasses in a few pages the end of humanity, an eons-long perspective, and new hope for a sole survivor. Open Prison (1965; vt The Escape Orbit 1965 dos US) is exhilarating adventure sf. Perhaps the most successful is the ingenious The Watch Below (1966 US), a tale whose two narrative lines dovetail cleverly. In one a WWII merchant vessel sinks, leaving 3 men and 2 women to survive in a large air pocket, work out life-maintenance systems and eventually breed there UNDER THE SEA while 100 years pass. In the other, water-dwelling ALIENS, who have long been seeking a wet world like Earth to inhabit peacefully, land their starship in the sea in time to save the descendants of the 5 20th-century survivors. The various correspondences between the two sets of "prisoners" are neatly and humanely stressed. In The Dream Millennium (1974) a physician dreams a Jungian version of the human story in SUSPENDED ANIMATION as his slower-than-light ship takes him and other passengers to a paradisal planet. Underkill (1979) marks a grim contrast, suggesting that an alien race's response to the internecine savageries of humanity might be the just extirpation of almost the entire species. It might be noted that JW tends to grow more genial the further from the present he sets his stories; if some of the Sector General tales seem at times almost wilfully upbeat, their ebullience may have been palliative in nature. Underkill clearly represents a vision any writer might be glad to step around. [JC]Other works: The Secret Visitors (1957 dos); All Judgement Fled (1968); Tomorrow is Too Far (1971 US); Dark Inferno (1972; vt Lifeboat 1972 US); The Interpreters (1985 chap dos); The Silent Stars Go By (1991 US), an ALTERNATE-WORLD tale.About the author: James White, Doctor to Aliens: A Working Bibliography (1986 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr.See also: CRYONICS; GENERATION STARSHIPS; MYTHOLOGY; NEW WORLDS; NEW WRITINGS IN SF; POLLUTION. WHITE, JANE (1934-1985) UK writer, mostly of tales for older children, whose only sf novel, Comet (1975), treats the title's threat from the humanizing perspective of its young protagonists. All proves well in the end. [JC] WHITE, JOHN [r] W. Graham MOFFAT. WHITE, STEVE [r] David WEBER. WHITE, STEWART EDWARD (1873-1946) US writer of travel books and novels, many of the latter being historical tales set in California. In his later years he became interested in Spiritualism, believed he was in contact with his dead wife, and wrote some books about the other world, including The Unobstructed Universe (1940) and 2 sequels. His sf novels are The Mystery (1907) with Samuel Hopkins ADAMS, a complicated tale involving an abandoned ship on the high seas, and the mysterious "celestium" which the mutineers who have stolen it do not know has the effect of making anyone nearby jump into the sea; and its sequel, The Sign at Six (1910 Popular Magazine as "The City of Dread"; 1912), by SEW alone, in which the investigative protagonist of the previous book uncovers a mad SCIENTIST who threatens to freeze New York City with his "nullifier". [JC/PN] WHITE, TED Working name of US writer and editor Theodore Edwin White (1938- ) who became-after working as assistant editor for FSF 1963-8 - the sometimes controversial editor of AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC 1969-78; he noticeably improved the magazines, buying original stories and emphasizing matters relating to sf FANDOM. He later ed HEAVY METAL 1979-80 and Stardate 1985-6. TW is known, too, for the many chatty, aggressive, self-defensive and polemical letters he published in such fanzines as The ALIEN CRITIC , and for his continuing column in ALGOL, which had the same qualities, as did his editorials in AMZ and Fantastic. He won a HUGO as Best Fan Writer in 1968.His writing career began with "Phoenix" for AMZ in 1963 with Marion Zimmer BRADLEY; this became part of Phoenix Prime (fixup 1966), #1 in his Qanar series of quest tales, which continued with The Sorceress of Qar (1966), where a good SUPERMAN fights bad supermen, and Star Wolf! (1971). His first novel was a TIME-TRAVEL tale, Invasion from 2500 (1964) with Terry CARR, together writing as Norman Edwards. Most of TW's subsequent titles are unremarkable examples of adventure sf like Android Avenger (1965 dos) and its sequel The Spawn of the Death Machine (1968), about the ANDROID Tanner and his adventures, and The Secret of the Marauder Satellite (1967), an sf juvenile. He also wrote the ending of the Philip K. DICK serial "A. Lincoln - Simulacrum" (AMZ 1969-70), though Dick's own ending was restored when it was published as We Can Build You (1972). TW's 2 novels of some distinction are The Jewels of Elsewhen (1967), a vividly imagined tale of strife among the DIMENSIONS, and By Furies Possessed (1970), a tale of PARASITISM in which the invading ALIENS turn out to be symbionts. [JC/PN]Other works: Lost in Space * (1967), a tv tie ( LOST IN SPACE) as by Ron Archer, with Dave VAN ARNAM, and Sideslip (1968), also with Van Arnam; a Captain America tie, The Great Gold Steal * (1968); No Time Like Tomorrow (1969); Trouble on Project Ceres (1971), a juvenile; The Oz Encounter (1977) with Marv Wolfman (1946- ), written by Wolfman from characters and a scenario devised by TW; Phoenix (1977) with Wolfman; Forbidden World (1978) with David F. BISCHOFF.As Editor: The Best from Amazing Stories (anth 1973); The Best from Fantastic (anth 1973).See also: CITIES; INVASION; SF MAGAZINES. WHITE, T(ERENCE) H(ANBURY) (1906-1964) UK writer whose overwhelming nostalgia for a lost England expressed itself most vividly in his 2 best-known works, Farewell Victoria (1933) and a superlative tragicomic fantasia on Le Morte D'Arthur (1485) by Sir Thomas Malory (c1408-1471), The Once and Future King (1958), a book comprising 3 earlier novels, substantially recast, plus a previously unpublished 4th section; it was adapted by Alan Jay Lerner (1918-1986) into the stage musical Camelot in 1960 (published as Camelot: A New Musical 1961; filmed 1967). Those 3 earlier novels - The Sword in the Stone (1938; rev 1939 US), made into a philistine feature cartoon by Walt Disney in 1963, The Witch in the Wood (1939 US), retitled "The Queen of Air and Darkness" in the recasting, and The Ill-Made Knight (1940 US) - are themselves of very considerable interest as fantasias, as is THW's original concluding section (the 1958 conclusion was written later), The Book of Merlyn (1977 US), whose rejection by THW's UK publishers during WWII, because of its pacifist content, delayed for 15 years the publication of any version of the whole. The 1958 novel, despite The Sword in the Stone being a juvenile, constitutes a remarkable and pessimistic exploration of the complexity of Evil, of the decay of the Matter of Britain - modern England is envisioned with particular venom in the ant DYSTOPIA to which Merlyn subjects the young Arthur as part of his education - and generally of the loss of innocence.Other books by THW are of some sf interest. Early on, Earth Stopped (1934) and Gone to Ground (coll of linked stories 1935), introduced an sf HOLOCAUST to underline the points THW wished to make about contemporary civilization through the conversations and fox-hunting manias of a large cast; in the 2nd vol, survivors of the final WAR tell each other exemplary tales ( CLUB STORY) while hiding in a cave. Without any source being cited, all the supernatural tales in Gone to Ground were reprinted in The Maharajah, and Other Stories (coll 1981), losing most of their effectiveness through the unacknowledged uprooting. Mistress Masham's Repose (1946 US) tells how a group of Lilliputians, transported to England by Gulliver, have survived in the capacious grounds of the vast estate of Malplaquet for 200 years, until a young girl almost destroys them by treating them as pets. The protagonist of The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947 US) is a mocking self-portrait of the author; he becomes a new Noah in a hilariously pixilated Eire. In The Master (1957), an sf juvenile, a boy and a girl come across a plot to rule the world from the deserted island of Rockall, where the Merlyn-like Master, 157 years old, has perfected both hypnotic control and a vibration device that will destroy all machines; fortunately he trips over the children's dog, injures himself, and drowns himself in the sea. THW's sf was of a piece with all his work, sharing the sentimentality, satirical power, sadness, longing for retrospectic havens, manic humour and compassion of his best fantasy. [JC]About the author: T.H. White: A Biography (1968) by Sylvia Townsend Warner.See also: CHILDREN'S SF; GREAT AND SMALL; SWORD AND SORCERY. WHITE, TIM Working name of UK illustrator Timothy Thomas Anthony White (1952- ), one of the new school of super-realists that has shaped UK sf ILLUSTRATION since the mid-1970s. After 2 years in advertising he received his first sf commission in 1974. Immediately successful, he soon became one of the UK's premier book-cover illustrators; he has painted several hundred of them. There is a case for calling him the finest technician in UK sf illustration, and along with Chris FOSS and Jim BURNS he has produced the UK's most influential sf artwork of the past two decades. Using very fine detail, his paintings have a luminous clarity sometimes reminiscent of Rene Magritte (1898-1967) or (rather differently) of Andrew Wyeth (1917- ). His work is figurative, often uses unusual perspectives, and regularly makes much of grass and sky in the landscapes in which the sf images are set. The Science Fiction and Fantasy World of Tim White (1981), a very strong collection, contains 111 paintings, nearly all book covers. [PN/JG]See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD. WHITE DWARF GAMES AND TOYS; GAMES WORKSHOP. WHITEFORD, WYNNE N(OEL) (1915- ) Australian sf writer and (retired) motoring journalist, whose first sf may have been "Beyond the Infinite" for Adam and Eve in 1934. He wrote more sf in the 1950s, beginning to sell to overseas markets with "The Non-Existent Man" (1958 AMZ) and remaining quite prolific in US magazines until 1960. His third period of writing began with short stories in the Kesrii series in 1978. His first novel, Breathing Space Only (1980), a rather downbeat post- HOLOCAUST tale, ends with its protagonist isolated among superior humans, returned from the stars, with whom he has nothing in common. It was followed by Sapphire Road (1982), Thor's Hammer (1983), The Hyades Contact (fixup 1987 US), which is part of the Kesrii series, Lake of The Sun (1989 US) and The Specialist (1990 US). Several of these books imagine forms of evolved humanity; all are thoughtful, competent sf adventure stories. [PN]See also: AUSTRALIA. WHITE HOLES BLACK HOLES. WHITLEY, GEORGE [s] A. Bertram CHANDLER. WHO? (vt The Man in the Steel Mask) Film (1974). Hemisphere/Maclean & Co. Dir Jack Gold, starring Elliott Gould, Trevor Howard, Joseph Bova. Screenplay John Gould (Jack Gold), based on WHO? (1958) by Algis BUDRYS. 91 mins. Colour.Released long after being made, and publicized not at all, this taut, efficient little metaphysical thriller, hinging on questions of what constitutes identity, deserved rather better. A key US scientist (Bova) is terribly injured on the East German border and later returned, fixed up by the Russians, in CYBORG form with a metal face and hand. Or is he a planted double agent? Gould plays the US security man who sees to it that the cyborg is constantly watched. With a series of Cold-War riffs, a rather good subtext is set up about the human-seeming machine of the state apparatus (on both sides) versus the machine-seeming human (with more human feeling than he putatively had before, as shown in a touching scene with the ex-wife). The prosthetic "monster" finally rejects secret scientific work; instead he retires, quite alone, to a farm. The mask is never removed, not even metaphorically, and the mystery is only solved (for alert viewers) through ironic indirection. Gold is known mainly as one of the UK's better tv-drama directors. [PN] WHO WOULD KILL JESSIE? KDO CHCE ZABIT JESSII? WHYTE, ANDREW A(DAMS) (? - ) US bibliographer whose main work has been to compile with Anthony R. LEWIS (whom see for titles) several vols of The N.E.S.F.A. Index to Science Fiction Magazines and Original Anthologies during 1973-84. Solo he produced The New SF Bulletin Index to SF Books, 1974 (1974 chap). [JC] WIBBERLEY, LEONARD (PATRICK O'CONNOR) (1915-1983) Irish writer who lived in the USA from 1943, and who published at least 103 books, beginning in 1947; much of this work was for children, and a modest proportion of it was sf or fantasy. His first and most famous sf novel, the ostensibly adult tale which begins the Grand Fenwick sequence, is The Mouse that Roared (1955; vt The Wrath of Grapes 1955 UK), a RURITANIAN spoof involving a super- WEAPON; it was filmed in 1959. The subsequent vols - Beware of the Mouse (1958), which is a prequel, The Mouse on Wall Street (1969) and The Mouse that Saved the West (1981) - make little use of sf devices except in the most cursory fashion, except for The Mouse on the Moon (1962), which involves spaceflight, and which was filmed in 1963. A singleton, One in Four (1976), depicts a USA threatened by immaterial entities from the FAR FUTURE. Encounter Near Venus (1967) and its sequel, Journey to Untor (1970), are CHILDREN'S SF. Of fantasy interest were several further juveniles, including Mrs Searwood's Secret Weapon (1954), McGillicuddy McGotham (1956), Take Me to Your President (1957), The Quest of Excalibur (1959), Stranger of Killknock (1961) and The Crime of Martin Coverly (1981). LW was an intermittently clever writer whose books were eaten by sweetness. [JC] WICKS, MARK (? -? ) UK writer whose To Mars Via the Moon: An Astronomical Story (1911) describes a UTOPIA whose Martian venue owes an acknowledged debt to the theories of Percival Lowell ( MARS). The book was probably intended as a fictionalization of popular science for younger readers. [JC/PN] WIENER, NORBERT (1894-1964) US mathematician and writer who established the contemporary sense of the word CYBERNETICS in his book Cybernetics (1948; rev 1961). Some of his speculations in this field appear in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) and in God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964), which directly influenced Frank HERBERT's Destination: Void (1966). As W. Norbert he published 2 sf stories, "The Miracle of the Broom Closet" in FSF (1952) and "The Brain" in Crossroad in Time (anth 1953) ed Groff CONKLIN. A novel, The Tempter (1959), is not sf. Ex-Prodigy (1953), nonfiction, is an interesting speculative study of the intellectual SUPERMAN. [JC]About the author: I Am a Mathematician (1956), autobiography. WIGNALL, T(REVOR) C. (1883-1958) UK author, usually for children as Trevor Wignall, whose sf novel Atoms (1923) with G(ordon) D(aniel) Knox posits a world with abundant atomic energy and broadcast power. These developments are described with wooden glee. [JC] WILBRAHAM, JOHN Robert POTTER. WILCOX, DON Working name of US writer Cleo Eldon Knox (1905- ), who taught creative writing at Northwestern University; most of his work, sometimes as Cleo Eldon, Miles Shelton or Max Overton, was for Ray PALMER's AMAZING STORIES and Fantastic Adventures, where he published his first story, "The Pit of Death", in 1939. A good GENERATION-STARSHIP tale, "The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years" (1940), soon followed. DW used the house name Alexander BLADE at least once, and also published a novelette, "Confessions of a Mechanical Man" (1947), as Buzz-Bolt Atomcracker. The Ebbtide Jones stories (1939-42; the 1st in AMZ, the rest in Fantastic Adventures) were published as by Miles Shelton. DW's "The Whispering Gorilla" (1940) was cobbled together with "The Return of the Whispering Gorilla" (1943) by his ZIFF-DAVIS stablemate David Vern, writing as David V. REED, to form The Whispering Gorilla (fixup 1950 UK), published as by David V. Reed. [JC/PN] WILCOX, RONALD [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. WILD CARDS ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series, ed George R.R. MARTIN, set in a SHARED WORLD, each volume comprising stories woven ( BRAID) into a more-or-less integrated narrative. Martin prefers to think of these books, because their contents are planned and linked, often as "mosaic novels", though we treat them as, only technically, anthologies. The 1st vol, Wild Cards: A Mosaic Novel * (anth 1987; vt Wildcards 1989 UK), shows its alternate Earth's history ( ALTERNATE WORLDS) deviating from our own in 1946 with the release over New York of a virus developed by ALIENS. The effect of the "Wild Card" virus is to kill immediately and horribly one out of ten people it infects. Survivors are mutated, mostly in useless, often monstrously damaging ways, in which case they are called "Jokers". One in ten is mutated beneficially: these become superpowered "Aces". The dividing line can be blurred; for example, physical deformity can be offset by an immense gain in strength.Ten vols have been issued to mid-1992, the remainder being #2: Aces High * (anth 1987), #3: Jokers Wild * (anth 1987), #4: Aces Abroad * (anth 1988), #5: Down and Dirty * (anth 1988), #6: Ace in the Hole * (anth 1990), #7: Dead Man's Hand * (1990), #8: One-Eyed Jacks * (anth 1991), #9: Jokertown Shuffle * (anth 1991) and #10: Double Solitaire (1992). Double Solitaire is a novel by Melinda SNODGRASS, the first single-author novel in what has otherwise been an oritinal-anthology series, but is copyrighted in Martin's name; Snodgrass acted as assistant editor on the series since #6. . The books focus on a cast of Aces and Jokers through the decades. The strongest stories are in the 1st vol, which deals impressively with the McCarthy era. Later volumes are more comic-bookish, and history's incredible resilience becomes irritating: when a secret Ace of enormous power runs for the presidency, events contrive to bring about a victory for George Bush. Despite this, WC is one of the better shared-worlds series, showcasing hard-edged writing by Edward BRYANT, Lewis SHINER, Walton Simons, Walter Jon WILLIAMS and others.A companion comic-book series comprises Wild Cards #1: Heart of the Matter (graph 1990), #2: Diamond in the Rough (graph 1990), #3: Welcome to the Club (graph 1990) and #4: Spadework (graph 1990), collected as Wild Cards (graph omni 1991). [RuB/RT]See also: GAMES AND TOYS; SUPERHEROES. WILDER, CHERRY Pseudonym of New Zealand-born writer Cherry Barbara Grimm, nee Lockett (1930- ), resident in Australia 1954-76 and then in Germany. After publishing short fiction and poetry she turned to sf, and chose the name Wilder. The themes of her first published sf story, "The Ark of James Carlyle" in New Writings in SF 24 (anth 1974) ed Kenneth BULMER, are the gradual rapprochement of, and changes in, human and ALIEN after First Contact. These themes recur in the well realized Torin series - THE LUCK OF BRIN'S FIVE (1977 US), The Nearest Fire (1980 US) and The Tapestry Warriors (1983 US), all first published as juveniles - and in the adult novel Second Nature (1982 US), which tells of a castaway society on the planet Rhomary. The Torin books focus on the relationship between the marsupial natives of the planet Torin and the succession of humans who become fruitfully involved with them, though the young protagonists do tend - perhaps rather conventionally - to open not only their own eyes to the wonders of the world but also those of their native hosts. CW's most significant achievements may lie in her complexly achieved short stories like "Something Coming Through" (1983) and "The Decline of Sunshine" (1987), in which a wry mythopoeic vein shines through. Some of her short fiction returns to Torin and Rhomary. CW's work, notable for its narrative skill, evocative style and rounded characterization, should by now have given her a higher reputation. [JC/MM/PN]Other works: The Rulers of Hylor fantasy trilogy, comprising A Princess of the Chameln (1984 US), Yorath the Wolf (1984 US) and The Summer's King (1986 US); Cruel Designs (1988 UK), occult/horror set in contemporary Germany.About the author: The CW issue of FOUNDATION, #54, Spring 1992, contains an autobiographical essay and "The Wilder Alien Shores, or The Colonials are Revolting", a critical assessment by Yvonne Rousseau.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; AUSTRALIA; CHILDREN'S SF; NEW WRITINGS IN SF; NEW ZEALAND; PASTORAL. WILDING, PHILIP (? - ) UK author of 2 routine sf adventures, Spaceflight - Venus (1955) and Shadow Over the Earth (1956). As John Robert Haynes he wrote The Scream from Outer Space (1955), also unremarkable. [JC/PN] WILD IN THE STREETS Film (1968). AIP. Dir Barry Shear, starring Christopher Jones, Shelley Winters, Diane Varsi, Millie Perkins, Hal Holbrook, Richard Pryor. Screenplay Robert Thom. 97 mins. Colour.Holbrook is the Kennedy-style Californian senator who, when he realizes that, through demographic shift, half the population are under 25, enlists a rock star (Jones, looking like James Dean) to help sway the youth vote. The strategy backfires when the senator's quid pro quo of lowering the voting age (it is eventually 14) allows the rock star himself to become president; in an act of revenge against his awful mother (Winters) he then consigns all the over-35s to concentration-camp retirement homes where they are force-fed LSD. The film's LSD-in-the-water-supply sequence created a stir at the time, and inspired some real-life imitations. The tongue-in-cheek script - the hippy sections badly dated - is still good, especially the finale where the subteens are fomenting further revolution. [PN/JB]See also: CINEMA. WILD PALMS US tv miniseries (1993). ABC-TV. Created and written by Bruce Wagner. Exec prods Wagner and Oliver Stone. Six hours. The first two-hour episode "Everything Must Go" dir Peter Hewitt; the next one-hour episode "The Floating World" dir Keith Gordon; the next one-hour episode "RisingSons" dir Kathryn Bigelow; the next one-hour episode "Hungry Ghosts" dir Keith Gordon; the last one-hour episode "Hello, I Must Be Going" dir Phil Joanou. StarringJames Belushi, Dana Delany, Robert Loggia, Kim Cattrall,Angie Dickinson, Ernie Hudson and Brad Dourif.This is the closest US television has got to CYBERPUNK, and to hammer the point homeWilliam GIBSON has a walk-on part as himself. The series is loosely based on a series of comicsby Wagner published in Details magazine. The year is around 2007. HarryWyckoff (Belushi) is a California attorney whose life is turning weird; he keeps seeing a possibly hallucinatory rhinoceros; his son is cold and withdrawn. He joins a group of religious cultists (the"new Realists" who believe in "synthiotics") run by a sinistersenator,who has a new media tv network that projects holograms ostensibly for entertainment purposes, actually for mind control, with the help of drugs. Nanochips, the Japanese and conspiracy theories are involved. It is often difficult to separate VIRTUAL REALITY from mundane reality. People suffer from image sickness. The whole thing is a paranoid tapestry,saturated in pop culture both contemporary and as projected into the near future, unusually virulent for tv (especially the blinding scene), and is somewhere between completely over-the-top comic-strip melodrama and genuinely impressive intensity. It is certainly stranger than any tv predecessor, with the possible exception of the cult tv series Twin Peaks, which many critics thought it somewhat resembled. Perhaps the outstanding sf television of the 1990s,though there are certainly plot oddities not really cleared up. The series, apparently unedited,is available on videotape. The relevant book is Wild Palms: The Teleplay (1994) byBruce Wagner. [PN] WILD, WILD WEST, THE US tv series (1965-9). A Michael Garrison Production/CBS TV. Created Michael Garrison. Prods Garrison, Fred Freiberger, Gene L. Coon, Collier Young, John MANTLEY, Bruce Lansbury. Writers included Henry Sharp, John Kneubuhl, Ken Kolb, Ken Pettus. Dirs included Paul Wendkos, Richard Donner, Irving Moore, Robert Sparr, Alan Crosland Jr, Marvin Chomsky. 4 seasons; 104 50min episodes. Season 1 b/w; colour thereafter.An amusing, sophisticated and successful mixture of Western and secret-agent fantasy, TWWW series had Robert Conrad playing Jim West, an 1870s James Bond. The plots usually involved anachronistic, futuristic devices and often featured mad scientists attempting to overthrow the government, using everything from manmade earthquakes to time machines. At its best TWWW had something of the bizarre quality of The AVENGERS (1961-8), to which it was the nearest US equivalent, but its stylization was not always light or witty enough. Low-angle shooting and clever use of sets ensured a genuine sense of decadent menace in the more baroque episodes. Michael Dunn played an often reappearing villain, the dwarf scientist Dr Loveless who invents ANDROIDS, miniaturization, hallucinogens and a lot more. The bland persona of the hero was offset by Ross Martin's jovial performance as his partner, Artemus Gordon. The series can be seen as anticipating STEAMPUNK. 2 sequels appeared a decade later as made-for-tv movies: The Wild Wild West Revisited (1979) and More Wild Wild West (1980), both dir Burt Kennedy. [JB/PN] WILD, WILD WEST REVISITED, THE The WILD, WILD WEST . WILEY, JOHN [s] Rog PHILLIPS. WILHELM, KATE Working name of US writer Katie Gertrude Meridith Wilhelm Knight (1928- ), married to Damon KNIGHT; beyond her writing, she has long been influential, along with her husband, through his founding of the MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' CONFERENCE in 1958 and its offshoot, in which she was directly involved, the CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP; she edited one of the anthologies of stories from the latter, Clarion SF (anth 1977).But KW early became best known for her writing, and by the 1980s was a ranking figure in the field, though her first work would eventually be seen as atypical. She started publishing sf in 1956 with "The Pint-Size Genie" for Fantastic, and continued for some time with the relatively straightforward genre stories of the sort to be found in her first book, The Mile-Long Spaceship (coll 1963; vt Andover and the Android 1966 UK); it was not until the late 1960s that she began to release the mature stories which have made her career an object lesson in the costs and benefits of the market, for it seemed clear from about 1970 that she was most happy as a writer at the commercially unpopular novella length, and least happy as a novelist. Her response was to publish short stories and novellas, frequently brought together in book form as "speculative fiction", while at the same time producing intermittently capable and variously ambitious full-length tales. The shorter fictions were assembled in: The Downstairs Room, and Other Speculative Fiction (coll 1968), which includes the NEBULA-winning "The Planners" (1968); Abyss: Two Novellas (coll 1971); The Infinity Box: A Collection of Speculative Fiction (coll 1975), the title story of which - also republished as THE INFINITY BOX (1971 Orbit 9 ed Damon Knight; 1989 chap dos) - is a darkly complex depiction of a NEAR-FUTURE USA as refracted through the slow destruction of the conscience of a man gifted with a PSI POWER; Somerset Dreams (coll 1978); Listen, Listen (coll 1981); Children of the Wind: Five Novellas (coll 1989), which includes the NEBULA-winning The Girl who Fell into the Sky (1986 IASFM; 1991 chap); State of Grace (coll 1991 chap) and And the Angels Sing (coll 1992), which includes "Forever Yours, Anna" (1987), also a Nebula-winner. The strongest of these stories are exercises in capturing the significant texture of the new in the context of individual lives; time and again, a tale begins within the shaky domesticity of the family and moves suddenly to an sf or fantasy perspective from which, chillingly, the fragility of our social worlds can be discerned. At this point, at the point of maximum realization, her best stories generally stop.With novels it has tended to be otherwise. After More Bitter than Death (1963), a mystery, her first sf novel was The Clone (1965) with Theodore L. THOMAS, one of the rare sf books to use CLONE in the strict biological sense, in describing a formidable, voracious and ever-growing blob, and a competent demonstration of her workmanlike capacity to cope with genre content. The Killer Thing (1967; rev vt The Killing Thing 1967 UK), set almost uniquely for KW on another planet, also shows some facility in telling conventional sf tales. But The Nevermore Affair (1966) and Let the Fire Fall (1969; cut and rev 1972 UK), which attempt to investigate character within novel-length plots, fail in the first through overexplication and in the second through an uneasiness of diction, so that the near-future religious revival at its heart is depicted with a diffuse sarcastic loquacity. This sense of drift - this sense that her novels wilfully continue past the point at which her interest in maximum realization has begun to flag - is avoided in some instances. For example, WHERE LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG (fixup 1976) - which won HUGO and Jupiter AWARDS for Best Novel - successfully translates her interest in clones (this time in the sf sense of "people-copies") to a post- HOLOCAUST venue in the Appalachians where an isolated community of clones has been formed to weather the interregnum until civilization can spread again, but develops in its own, perilously narrow fashion; significantly, the book is made up of 3 novella-length sequences, each superb. The Clewiston Test (1976) balances the effects on the eponymous developer of a dubious drugs project against those on her of an unhappy marriage; for the world of experimental BIOLOGY - in which KW has always been interested - cannot be divorced from the lives it affects, a truism rarely brought to bear with such sharpness. Fault Lines (1977), not sf, uses a displaced and edgy diction to present a woman's broken remembrances, the fault lines of the title representing her own life, her future, her unhappy marriages, the earthquake that traps her, and a powerful sense that civilization itself is cracking at the seams. But these novels stand out.More normally KW's novels - like A Sense of Shadow (1981), Welcome, Chaos (1981 Redbook as "The Winter Beach"; exp 1983) and Huysman's Pets (1986) - tend to dissipate powerful beginnings in generic toings and froings. Her Leidl and Meiklejohn sequence of sf/horror/fantasy detective tales - The Hamlet Trap (1987), The Dark Door (1988), Smart House (1989), Sweet, Sweet Poison (1990) and Seven Kinds of Death (1992) - seem in their compulsive genre-switching almost to parody this proclivity; but Crazy Time (1988), a late singleton, more successfully embraces the insecurity of the novel form as KW conceives it, and the ricochets of the plot aptly mirror the discourse it embodies upon the nature of institutionalized definitions of sanity and insanity. Most successfully of all, DEATH QUALIFIED: A MYSTERY OF CHAOS (1991) - whose sequel, The Best Defense (1994) is associational - combines detection and sf in a long, sustained, morally complex tale whose central story-telling hook - solving a murder in order to free the innocent protagonist of suspicion - leads smoothly into an sf denouement involving Chaos theory, new perceptions and a hint of SUPERMAN. It is the longest of her novels, yet the one which most resembles her successful short fiction. [JC]Other works: The Year of the Cloud (1970) with Theodore L. Thomas; Margaret and I (1971); City of Cain (1974), a near-future psi thriller with many sf trappings; Juniper Time (1979); Better than One (coll 1980) with Damon Knight, each contributing separate items; Oh, Susannah! (1982); Cambio Bay (1990); Naming the Flowers (1992 chap); Justice for Some (1993), associational.As Editor: Nebula Award Stories Nine (anth 1974).See also: ECOLOGY; IMMORTALITY; INTELLIGENCE; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; MEDICINE; MONSTERS; POLLUTION; ROBERT HALE LIMITED; SCIENTISTS; WOMEN SF WRITERS. WILKINS, JOHN (1614-1672) UK philosopher who served as the Bishop of Chester. He wrote no fiction, but was one of the first popularizers of science and a propagandist for scientific progress whose speculative nonfiction is remarkable. The 3rd edn of The Discovery of a New World (1638; 3rd rev ed 1640) includes a brief discourse on the possibility of travel to the MOON. Mathematicall Magick (1648) is a treatise on TECHNOLOGY, including essays on submarines, flying machines and perpetual-motion MACHINES (of whose feasibility he was sceptical). While he was Master of Wadham College, Oxford, he founded the Philosophical Society, which in 1662 became the Royal Society. [BS]See also: RELIGION; SPACESHIPS; TRANSPORTATION; UNDER THE SEA. WILKINS, (WILLIAM) VAUGHAN (1890-1959) UK writer best known for his historical romances, but who wrote some tales of sf interest. Being Met Together (1944), though marginal, interestingly describes an attempt to rescue Napoleon using a submarine ( UNDER THE SEA) designed by the US engineer and inventor Robert Fulton (1765-1815). After Bath (1945) is an ornately fantastic juvenile. The City of Frozen Fire (1950) is an energetic LOST-WORLD tale set in South Africa. Fanfare for a Witch (1954) is historical fantasy. Valley Beyond Time (1955) describes trips through the DIMENSIONS to the haven of the title and back again to a time-ridden, grief-enfolded Earth. [JC] WILLARD, TOM (? - ) US writer of military-sf adventures: the Strike Fighters sequence - Strike Fighters (1990), #2: Strike Fighters #2 (1990), #3: War Chariot (1991), #4: Sudden Fury (1991) and #5: Red Dancer (1991) - and the Afrikorps sequence as by Bill Dolan - Afrikorps (1991) and #2: Iron Horse (1991). [JC] WILLEFORD, CHARLES (RAY) (1919-1988) US writer, best known for his police thrillers in the Miami-based Hoke Moseley series. His The Machine in Ward Eleven (coll 1963) has more than once been listed as sf, but is not, although one of its stories is a surreal fantasy. [PN] WILLER, JIM (? - ) Canadian writer whose sf novel, Paramind (1973), takes a DYSTOPIAN view of the commanding role of the COMPUTER in a 21st-century world. [JC] WILLEY, ROBERT [s] Willy LEY. WILLIAM ATHELING Jr AWARD AWARDS. WILLIAMS, CHARLES (1886-1945) UK writer whose novels are essentially theological fantasy thrillers; he was closely associated with C.S. LEWIS and J.R.R. TOLKIEN. His romantic and obscurely devout use of Tarot and Grail imagery helped bring these themes into the generic mainstream. Of his novels, Many Dimensions (1931) bears some remote resemblance to sf, in that it depicts the world as being threatened by the dangerous powers (in particular TELEPORTATION) of a magical stone that can be split into endless identical copies; but in this, as in the remainder of his fiction, the bent of the fantasy is towards RELIGION. The TIME TRAVEL in All Hallows' Eve (1945) is devoted to similar ends. [JC/DRL]Other works: War in Heaven (1930); The Place of the Lion (1931); The Greater Trumps (1932); Shadows of Ecstasy (1933); Descent into Hell (1937).About the author: Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams (anth 1969) ed Mark R. HILLEGAS.See also: FANTASY; MYTHOLOGY. WILLIAMS, ERIC C(YRIL) (1918- ) UK writer, previously a bookseller, who began publishing sf with "The Desolator" for Science Fantasy in 1965 and was the author of some routine sf novels for ROBERT HALE LIMITED, starting with The Time Injection (1968). The Drop In (1977), not for Hale, is an alien- INVASION novel of some interest. [JC]Other works: Monkman Comes Down (1969); The Call of Utopia (1971); To End All Telescopes (1969); Flash (1972); Project: Renaissance (1973); Largesse from Triangulum (1979); Time for Mercy (1979); Homo Telekins (1981). WILLIAMS, FRANK Working name of UK writer Edward Francis Williams, Baron Francis-Williams (1903-1970), whose sf novel is The Richardson Story (1951; vt It Happened Tomorrow 1952 US). [JC] WILLIAMS, GORDON (MacLEAN) (1934- ) Scottish writer best known for the Hazell detective novels with Terry Venables (1943- ), writing together as P.B. Yuill. Of sf interest is his solo Micronauts sequence - The Micronauts (1977 US), Microcolony (1979 US; vt Microanaut World 1981 UK) and Revolt of the Micronauts (1981) - about government agents miniaturized to perform intricate assignments. [JC] WILLIAMS, JOHN A(LFRED) (1925- ) US writer, almost all of whose work has reflected his experiences (including service in WWII) as a US Black. The Man who Cried I Am (1967) posits a Black genocide plot on the part of the US Government, to be put into action in case of civil uprising. Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969) presents a Black revolt centred on Manhattan, comparable to Warren MILLER's The Siege of Harlem (1964) as a MAINSTREAM use of sf material. Captain Blackman (1972) features a time-travelling hero who takes part, as a Black soldier, in all the wars of US history. [JC/PN]See also: POLITICS. WILLIAMS, JON Walter Jon WILLIAMS. WILLIAMS, J.X. House name used on pornographic novels, several with sf content, published by Greenleaf Classics, a company owned by one-time sf editor William HAMLING. The Sex Pill (1968) as by JXW is by Andrew J. OFFUTT. 2 further fantastic titles, Her (1967) and Witch in Heat (1967), are by unidentified authors. [PN] WILLIAMS, MICHAEL LINDSAY (1940- ) US writer who published 2 sf novels - Martian Spring (1986) and its sequel, FTL: Further Than Life (1987) - which tackle conflicts between Earth and MARS, and consequent attempts to transcend these ills by gaining rapport with a transplanetary group mind; verve and clarity are lacking.MLW should not be confused with the Michael Williams involved in various DragonLance ties like DragonLance Heroes: Weasel's Luck * (1989) and DragonLance Heroes II: Galen Beknighted * (1990), as well as an untied fantasy series, From Thief to King: A Sorcerer's Apprentice (1990) and A Forest Lord (1991). [JC] WILLIAMS, NICK (VAN) BODDIE (1906-1992) US newspaperman - he was with the Los Angeles Times 1931-71, serving as its chief editor from 1958 - and writer who contributed short material to various "slicks"; he reported having published his first sf story pseudonymously in Weird Tales in the late 1920s, but could recall neither title nor pseudonym. The Atom Curtain (1956 dos) is set in a thoroughly unusual post- HOLOCAUST USA 170 years after an atomic barrier has isolated it from the rest of the world. Inside, a crazed immortal rules a population rapidly reverting to Neanderthal status, and a cave woman, after being clubbed, falls in love with the barrier-penetrating protagonist. [JC] WILLIAMS, PAUL (STEVEN) (1948- ) US editor and writer, founder of Crawdaddy, the first US rock magazine, in 1966, and author of several books on the subject, including the best books yet written on Bob Dylan. As literary executor of the Philip K. DICK estate he was from the first involved in the Philip K. Dick Society and was instrumental in the wisely phased and commercially successful publication of Dick's posthumous works. In Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick (1986) he set some early guidelines for the comprehension of Dick's difficult final decade; and with The Ultimate Egoist (coll 1994) by Theodore STURGEON, he inaugurated a carefully edited collected edition of Sturgeon's short work, planned to extend to as many as 10 volumes. [JC] WILLIAMS, PAUL O(SBORNE) (1935- ) US writer and professor of literature who won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL JR. AWARD for Best New Writer in 1983, and who is known in the sf field almost exclusively for his Pelbar sequence - The Breaking of Northwall (1981), The Ends of the Circle (1981), The Dome in the Forest (1981), The Fall of the Shell (1982), An Ambush of Shadows (1983), The Song of the Axe (1984) and The Sword of Forbearance (1985) - set, 1100 years after a meteor shower has instigated a devastating nuclear WAR, in the balkanized and barbarian heart of the USA at a time when fragmented local cultures must begin to come together once again, hopefully without warfare. The sequence is unusual - and in deep contrast to SURVIVALIST FICTION - in its disregard for violence and its lack of gear fetish; it has been compared with Edgar PANGBORN's Davy books. The Dome in the Forest, which tells of the discovery of an inhabited nuclear shelter, interestingly explores the psychology of the POCKET UNIVERSE; later volumes, in which the tempo of technological change begins to increase, are perhaps less engaging. The series as a whole suffers from a certain leadenness of narrative diction, but never fails to question generic assumptions about the nature of a post- HOLOCAUST civilization. The Gifts of the Gorboduc Vandal (1989) is not part of the sequence. [JC]See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; HISTORY IN SF. WILLIAMS, RAYMOND (HENRY) (1921-1988) Welsh writer, professor of drama and cultural critic, long famous for his incisive studies of the interconnections between literature and society like Culture and Society (1958) and The Country and the City (1973). Of sf interest is The Volunteers (1978), a tale set in the late 1980s when political conflict in the UK has come to a violent head. [JC]Other works: George Orwell (1971), nonfiction; Keywords (1976), nonfiction; The Fight for Manod (1979).See also: PROTO SCIENCE FICTION. WILLIAMS, ROBERT MOORE (1907-1977) US writer, active in the sf field under his own name and various pseudonyms, including John S. Browning, H.H. Harmon, Russell Storm and the house name E.K. JARVIS. He began publishing sf as Robert Moore with "Zero as a Limit" for ASF in 1937, and by the 1960s had published over 150 stories. Though most are unremarkable, he was an important supplier of competent genre fiction during these decades. Typically adequate is the Jongor series: Jongor of Lost Land (1940 Fantastic Adventures; 1970), The Return of Jongor (1944 Fantastic Adventures; 1970) and Jongor Fights Back (1951 Fantastic Adventures; 1970). He did not begin publishing books until The Chaos Fighters (1955), but thereafter released many novels of the same general calibre as his short fiction. Notable were Doomsday Eve (1957 dos), a post- HOLOCAUST drama in which the world serves as an arena for struggling SUPERMEN, and the Zanthar series: Zanthar of the Many Worlds (1967), Zanthar at the Edge of Never (1968), Zanthar at Moon's Madness (1968) and Zanthar at Trip's End (1969). Zanthar is a professor with the gifts of a HERO. RMW wrote few original words, but rarely a dull one. [JC]Other works: Conquest of the Space Sea (1955 dos); The Blue Atom (1958 dos); The Void Beyond and Other Stories (coll 1958 dos); To the End of Time and Other Stories (coll 1960 dos); World of the Masterminds (1960 dos); The Day They H-Bombed Los Angeles (1961), which includes a RECURSIVE reference to Doomsday Eve; The Darkness Before Tomorrow (1962 dos); King of the Fourth Planet (1962 dos); Walk Up the Sky (1962); The Star Wasps (1963 dos); Flight from Yesterday (1963 dos); The Lunar Eye (1964 dos); The Second Atlantis (1965); Vigilante-21st Century (1967); The Bell from Infinity (1968); When Two Worlds Meet: Stories of Men on Mars (coll of linked stories 1970); Beachhead Planet (1970); Now Comes Tomorrow (1971); Seven Tickets to Hell (1972). Nonfiction: Love is Forever - We Are for Tonight (1970), autobiography.See also: ROBOTS. WILLIAMS, TAD [r] DAW BOOKS. WILLIAMS, T. OWEN [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. WILLIAMS, WALTER JON (1953- ) US writer whose first works were nautical tales as by Jon Williams, beginning with The Privateer (1981). He began to publish sf with Ambassador of Progress (1984), an unexceptional novel in which a female agent whose mission is to revive civilization makes contact with an abandoned, semi-feudal colony planet. Knight Moves (1985) describes the attempts of an immensely powerful immortal and his old friends and enemies to discover a technique of MATTER TRANSMISSION and to repopulate an almost abandoned Earth with fantastic creatures taken from MYTHOLOGY, in a style reminiscent of the early Roger ZELAZNY. But it was with the appearance of CYBERPUNK that WJW seemed to have found his true voice as a writer. In the Hardwired sequence - Hardwired (1986), stories like "Video Star" (1986), Voice of the Whirlwind (1987) and Solip:system (1989 chap) - he displayed a fascination with intensely detailed surfaces, biologically invasive gadgetry, and the effects of powerful corporations and rapidly changing technology on (romanticized) social outsiders. The first tale, in which underdogs of a repressed Earth rebel against dominant orbital corporations - proved sufficiently popular to spawn a role-playing game ( GAMES AND TOYS) based on it, despite the unlikelihood of much of its plot; the game is presented in Hardwired: The Sourcebook (1989 chap). In the rather better second tale the CLONE of an alienated one-time corporate soldier, brought to life on the original's death, hunts for clues to that first demise in a narrative richly informed by Zen and speculations on the nature of identity.The Crown Jewels sequence - The Crown Jewels (1987) and House of Shards (1988) - comprises two "divertimenti" describing the adventures of a Raffles-like burglar in a cod-Oriental future human culture heavily influenced by ALIENS to whom style is sacred. But WJW retained a cyberpunk outlook for his next major novel, Angel Station (1989), in which family groups of interstellar traders both fight to survive as major corporations squeeze down their markets, and also betray each other for the chance to deal with a newly discovered alien race. Facets (coll 1990) assembles most of his short fiction. In the tautly told Days of Atonement (1991) WJW moved to a NEAR-FUTURE USA where a macho small-town sheriff struggles with the physics needed to understand an apparent outbreak of bodily resurrections at the nearby Advanced Technological Laboratories. ARISTOI (1992) goes in the other direction, into a FAR-FUTURE venue once again evocative of Zelazny. Wall, Stone, Craft (1993 chap) ingeniously posits an ALTERNATE WORLD in which Lord Byron, unhampered by a club foot, becomes one of the heroes of Waterloo, and subsequently interacts with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, here powerfully imagined, so that Frankenstein (1818), and all of sf to come, is inevitably created. Ingenious and energetic and knowing, WJW seems very much at home with the mature GENRE SF of the 1980s and 1990s. [NT]Other works: Elegy for Angels and Dogs (1990 dos), a sequel to Zelazny's The Graveyard Heart (1964 Fantastic; 1990 chap dos), with which it is bound sequentially ( DOS-A-DOS); Dinosaurs (1991 chap).See also: CYBORGS; PSI POWERS; WILD CARDS. WILLIAMSON, JACK Working name of US writer John Stewart Williamson (1908- ) from the beginning of his career in 1928, though his Seetee stories were originally signed Will Stewart. JW was born in Arizona and raised (after stints in Mexico and Texas) on an isolated New Mexico homestead; he described his early upbringing and his encounter with 1920s sf in the introduction and notes to The Early Williamson (coll 1975), which assembles some of the rough but vigorous stories he published 1928-33; and amplified this material in Wonder's Child: My Life in Science Fiction (1984), which won a 1986 HUGO. These reminiscences reconfirm the explosively liberating effect early PULP-MAGAZINE sf had on its first young audiences, especially those who like JW grew up in small towns or farms across a USA hurtling out of its rural past.After discovering AMAZING STORIES, and specifically being influenced by its 1927 serialization of A. MERRITT's The Moon Pool (1919), JW immediately decided to try to write stories for that magazine. His first published fiction, "The Metal Man" in 1928 for AMZ, was deeply influenced by Merritt's lush visual style, but like most of his early work conveyed an exhilarating sense of liberation. JW was from the first an adaptable writer, responsive to the changing nature of his markets, and his collaborations over the years seemed to be genuine attempts to learn more about his craft as well as to produce saleable fiction. His first great teacher after Merritt was Miles J. BREUER, whom he came across through his early association with fan organizations like the International Science Correspondence Club and the American Interplanetary Society, and to whom he deliberately apprenticed himself. Breuer, he reported in The Early Williamson, "taught me to curb my tendencies toward wild melodrama and purple adjectives"; what JW gave Breuer in return was an inspiring fount of energy, and both of their book collaborations - The Girl from Mars (1929 chap) and The Birth of a New Republic (1931 AMZ Quarterly; 1981 chap [but large pages]) - were written primarily by the younger man, following Breuer's ideas.JW's development was swift. From the very first he was equally comfortable with both story and novel forms; indeed, by 1940 he had published over 12 novels in the magazines, including The Alien Intelligence (1929 Science Wonder Stories; with 2 shorter stories as coll 1980 chap [but large pages]) and the unreprinted "The Stone from the Green Star" (1931), "Xandulu" (1934), "Islands of the Sun" (1935), "The Blue Spot" (1937) and "Fortress of Utopia" (1939); and in his later career he concentrated even more heavily on longer forms. The best of his pre-WWII work was probably the Legion of Space series, which initially comprised The Legion of Space (1934 ASF; rev 1947) and The Cometeers (coll 1950) - itself containing 2 items, The Cometeers (1936 ASF; rev for 1950 coll; 1967) and One Against the Legion (1939 ASF; with the new "Nowhere Near" added, as coll 1967) - all this material being subsequently assembled as Three from the Legion (omni 1979). The Queen of the Legion (1983) was a very late and significantly less energetic addendum. The series depicts the far-flung, Universe-shaking, SPACE-OPERA adventures of 4 buccaneering soldiers. (Giles Habibula, the most original of the lot - though his conception clearly owed much to RABELAIS and to Shakespeare's Falstaff - became a frequently used model for later sf life-loving grotesques, including Poul ANDERSON's Nicholas van Rijn.) More or less unaided, they save the human worlds from threats both internal and external in conjunction with the woman whose hereditary role it is to guard from evil a doomsday device called AKKA. The influence of E.E. "Doc" SMITH's Lensmen saga can be felt throughout; and JW's relative incapacity to impart a sense of scale was perhaps balanced by a very much greater gift for characterization. Other early novels, like The Green Girl (1930 AMZ; 1950) and Golden Blood (1933 Weird Tales; rev 1964), share a crude narrative brio, adaptability to various markets, vivid characters, and some lack of ambition. The exception, perhaps, was the Legion of Time sequence (not connected to the Legion of Space sequence), assembled as THE LEGION OF TIME (coll 1952; vt Two Complete Novels: After World's End; The Legion of Time 1963), containing THE LEGION OF TIME (1938 ASF; cut 1961 UK) and After World's End (1939 Marvel Science Stories; 1961 UK). One of the earliest and most ingenious stories of ALTERNATE WORLDS and TIME PARADOXES - with conflicting potential future worlds battling through time, each trying to ensure its own existence and deny its opponent's - the sequence inspired one of the most penetrating studies yet written about a pulp-sf novel, Brian W. ALDISS's "Judgement at Jonbar" (1964), published in SF Horizons.By the 1940s, however, John W. CAMPBELL Jr's GOLDEN AGE OF SF had begun, and JW was suddenly an old-timer. Though JW did not much participate in its inception, he did adapt to the new world with commendable speed, and by the end of the decade had published what will probably remain his most significant work. A transitional series - the Seetee ANTIMATTER tales - came first: Seetee Ship (1942-3 ASF; fixup 1951) and Seetee Shock (1949 ASF; 1950), both published as by Will Stewart but reissued in 1968 as by JW, assembled as Seetee Ship/Seetee Shock (omni 1971; vt Seetee 1979), and designed to be read in the original magazine order. These confront the world with the engineering challenge of coping with the antimatter that is found to make up part of the ASTEROID belt; more smoothly told than its predecessors, the series still unchallengingly presents its asteroid miners and their crises in the old fashion, with a great deal of action but little insight. Its success led to JW's creation of a COMIC strip, Beyond Mars, which ran for 3 years in the New York Daily News. Far more significant was DARKER THAN YOU THINK (1940 Unknown; exp 1948), a remarkable speculative novel about lycanthropy which early presented the thesis that werewolves are genetic throwbacks to a species cognate with Homo sapiens ( SUPERNATURAL CREATURES). Also in the 1940s came JW's most famous sequence, the Humanoids series: "With Folded Hands" (1947), The Humanoids (1948 ASF as ". . . And Searching Mind"; rev 1949) - both assembled as The Humanoids (coll of linked stories 1980) - "Jamboree" (1969) and The Humanoid Touch (1980). Once again at an early point in the genre's history, these confronted the near impossibility of assessing the plusses and minuses of a humanoid (i.e.,artificial- INTELLIGENCE-driven) hegemony over the world, however benevolent. In The Humanoids itself it is suggested that humanity's new masters are contriving to force people to transcend their condition; in The Humanoid Touch this ambiguity is lost for, at the end of the Galaxy, long hence, the euphoria induced by humanity's keepers is both impossible to perceive and mandatory.In the early 1950s JW began to suffer from a writer's block which he did not fully escape for more than two decades, though he continued to produce novels of interest like Dragon's Island (1951; vt The Not-Men 1968), whose presentation of GENETIC ENGINEERING once again conceals a prescient numeracy under a bluff, slightly archaic narrative style. Much of his new work from this point was collaborative, and the continued modernizing of his techniques and concerns can be seen as an ongoing demonstration of his remarkable willingness to learn from the world and from others. Star Bridge (1955) with James E. GUNN was just a competent space opera, but JW's ongoing partnership with Frederik POHL was of more interest, though their first sequence, the Eden series of juveniles - Undersea Quest (1954), Undersea Fleet (1956) and Undersea City (1958) - was routine; all 3 were eventually assembled as The Undersea Trilogy (omni 1992). The second, the Starchild tales - The Reefs of Space (1964), Starchild (1965) and Rogue Star (1969), assembled as The Starchild Trilogy (omni 1977) - also fails to combine space opera and METAPHYSICS convincingly as it traces the problematic epic of humanity's EVOLUTION into a mature planet-spanning species ( LIVING WORLDS). The Cuckoo series - The Farthest Star (fixup 1975) and Wall Around a Star (1983), both assembled as The Saga of Cuckoo (omni 1983) - does not quite succeed in bringing to life its cosmogonic premises or its LINGUISTIC concerns. On the other hand, Land's End (1988), with Pohl, is an enjoyable singleton; in it a comet destroys the ozone layer and humanity seeks refuge UNDER THE SEA. The Singers of Time (1991), with Pohl, is also strong.In the 1950s JW embarked on a second career at Eastern New Mexico University, where he took a BA in English and an MA with an unpublished 1957 thesis, "A Study of the Sense of Prophecy in Modern Science Fiction". He taught the modern novel and literary criticism until his retirement in 1977, while being deeply involved in promoting sf as an academic subject ( SF IN THE CLASSROOM). He had taken a PhD with the University of Colorado in 1964 on H.G. WELLS's early sf, and expanded his thesis into H.G. Wells: Critic of Progress (1973), a book which, despite some methodological clumsiness, valuably examines Wells's complex development of ideas as they relate to the idea of progress. In 1973 JW received a PILGRIM AWARD for his academic work relating to sf.In the meanwhile he began slowly to enter the Indian summer of his writing career, though novels like The Moon Children (1972) and The Power of Blackness (fixup 1976) are surprisingly insecure and the series continuations (see above) lack the force of their models. It seemed that his old age would demonstrate his slow - even though technically productive - decline. But The Best of Jack Williamson (coll 1978) again demonstrated his early strengths, and although Brother to Demons, Brother to Gods (1979) was weak, in the 1980s JW began to produce work of an astonishing youthfulness. Manseed (1982) uses the space-opera format to investigate, with renewed freshness, the imaginative potential of genetic engineering. Lifeburst (1984) is an exercise in interstellar Realpolitik, grim and engrossing in its depiction of the parcelling out of Earth, sophisticated in its presentation of sexual material; its sequel, Mazeway (1990), has the air of a juvenile in its vivid presentation of the eponymous galactic test that the young protagonists must pass to render humanity eligible for higher things. Firechild (1986) generates a rhetoric of transcendence - very much in the fashion of the 1980s - out of BIOLOGY. Into the Eighth Decade (coll 1990) serves as a brief resume of JW's post-WWII career. Beachhead (1992) describes an expedition to a MARS according to contemporary knowledge, although the plot itself is redolent of a much earlier era. Despite its title, Demon Moon (1994) is also - highly coloured - sf. In 1976 he was given the second Grand Master NEBULA award (his sole predecessor was Robert A. HEINLEIN). He has been an sf writer of substance for over 60 years. In his work and in his life he has encompassed the field. [JC]Other works: Lady in Danger (1934 Weird Tales as "Wizard's Isle"; 1945 chap UK), a novelette with a short story by E. Hoffmann PRICE added; Dome Around America (1941 Startling Stories as "Gateway to Paradise"; rev 1955 dos); The Trial of Terra (fixup 1962 dos); The Reign of Wizardry (1940 Unknown; rev 1964; again rev 1979); Bright New Universe (1967); Trapped in Space (1968), a juvenile; The Pandora Effect (coll 1969); People Machines (coll 1971); Passage to Saturn (1939 TWS; 1973 chap UK); Dreadful Sleep (1938 Weird Tales; 1977 chap).As Editor: Teaching Science Fiction for Tomorrow (anth 1980).Nonfiction: Science Fiction Comes to College (1971 chap; exp 1971 chap); Science Fiction in College (1971 chap; exp 1972 chap); Teaching SF (1972 chap; exp 1973 chap; again exp 1973 chap; exp 1974 chap).About the author: Jack (John Stewart) Williamson, Child and Father of Wonder (1985 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr.See also: AIR WONDER STORIES; ALIENS; ANDROIDS; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; AUTOMATION; BLACK HOLES; CHILDREN IN SF; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FASTER THAN LIGHT; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GREAT AND SMALL; HEROES; HISTORY IN SF; HISTORY OF SF; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MACHINES; MATTER TRANSMISSION; MESSIAHS; MONSTERS; MOON; MUTANTS; MYTHOLOGY; ORIGIN OF MAN; OUTER PLANETS; PARALLEL WORLDS; POLITICS; POWER SOURCES; ROBOTS; SF MAGAZINES; SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA; SPACESHIPS; STARS; SUN; SUPERMAN; TERRAFORMING; TIME TRAVEL; TRANSPORTATION; WAR; WEAPONS; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST. WILLINGHAM, CALDER (BARNARD Jr) (1922-1995) US novelist and scriptwriter whose flamboyant Southern regionalism was most fully expressed in Eternal Fire (1963). His sf novel, The Building of Venus Four (1977), a SEX-loaded spoof SPACE OPERA, fails to convey much sense of his best work. An original filmscript for Stephen SPIELBERG had been completed just before his death. [JC] WILLIS, CHARLES [s] Arthur C. CLARKE. WILLIS, CONNIE Working name of US teacher and writer Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis (1945- ). She began publishing sf with "Santa Titicaca" for Worlds of Fantasy in 1971, but appeared only intermittently in the field until the early 1980s, when she began to write full-time, winning several awards almost immediately. Most of her best work of the 1980s was in short-story form, and her first book, Fire Watch (coll 1985), assembled a remarkable range of tales. "Fire Watch" (1982) itself, which won both NEBULA and HUGO, uses its TIME-TRAVEL premise - a future institute of historiography sends individuals back in time to study artifacts in situ - to embed its protagonist in a richly conceived UK at the time of the Blitz, when he engages himself in attempts to save St Paul's Cathedral from bombing. "All My Darling Daughters" - published as an original in Fire Watch because its language and theme were still unacceptable in the US magazine market of 1980 - is a significantly harsh tale of alienation and SEX set in a boarding school in an L5 orbit, where the male students rape alien lifeforms which have vagina-like organs, making them scream in pain; and the female protagonist tries to make sense of her hyperbolic adolescence in terms strongly reminiscent of J.D. Salinger (1919- ). Among other tales of interest in this first collection are Daisy, in the Sun (1979 Galileo; 1991 chap), "A Letter from the Clearys" (1982), which won a Nebula, "The Sidon in the Mirror" (1983) and the comic "Blued Moon" (1984). A later novella, "The Last of the Winnebagos" (1988), won CW both the Hugo and the Nebula;"At the Rialto" (1989) won a Nebula;"Even the Queen" (1992) won a Hugo and a Nebula for Short Story and"Death on the Nile" (1993) won a Hugo for Short Story.As a novelist, CW began slowly with the relatively lightweight Water Witch (1982) with Cynthia FELICE, set on a sand planet where the ability to dowse for water is a precious gift. Light Raid (1989) with Felice also skids helter-skelter through an sf environment, in this case a post- HOLOCAUST balkanized USA fighting off Canadian royalists, featuring the adventures en route to spunky maturity of a young female protagonist much like those found in Robert A. HEINLEIN's less attractive books. But it seemed clear that both CW and Felice were treating their collaborations as jeux d'esprit, and CW's first solo novel, Lincoln's Dreams (1987), aimed successfully at a very much higher degree of seriousness, winning the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD. Once again - as with much of her most deeply felt work - the enabling sf instrument is time travel, though in this case via a psychic linkage between a contemporary woman and General Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), while at the same time the male protagonist increasingly, and without a breath of frivolity, seems to be taking on the psychic attributes of General Lee's famous horse, Traveller (himself the protagonist of Traveller [1988 US] by Richard Adams [1920- ]). The power of Lincoln's Dreams lies in the haunting detail of CW's presentation of the American Civil War, which seems in her hands terrifyingly close - both geographically and psychically - to the contemporary world. Her second solo novel, DOOMSDAY BOOK (1992), which shared the 1993 Hugo award and won the Nebula, is another time-travel story. The frame setting - a mid-21st-century historiographic unit attached to Oxford University - is shared with "Fire Watch", but the tale itself is set at the time of the Black Death (around 1350), and mounts gradually to a climax whose intensely mourning gravity is rarely found in sf, even in novels of travel to times past, where a sense of irretrievable loss is commonly expressed.In the best of CW's stories, and in her novels, a steel felicity of mind and style appears effortlessly married to a copious empathy. Her more recent fascination with the intersections of film realities and worlds of the past or future may constitute something of a byway in her career, though several of the stories in IMPOSSIBLE THINGS (coll 1994) - as well as the hilarious spoofing of Hollywood Westerns in space in Uncharted Territory (1994; with 2 stories added, as coll 1994 UK), and the delving into the Marilyn Monroe mythos embedded into Remake (dated 1994 but 1995) - are of sustained interest. She continues to seem to be one of those writers from the 1980s who are now approaching their best work. [JC]Other works:Distress Call (in The Berkley Showcase #4, anth 1982; 1991 chap); The New Hugo Winners: Volume III (anth 1994) with Martin H. GREENBERG.See also: ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; OMNI; PHYSICS; PSYCHOLOGY; WEAPONS. WILLIS, MAUD [r] Eileen LOTTMAN. WILLIS, WALT [r] HUGO; HYPHEN; NEBULA SCIENCE FICTION; QUANDRY; Bob SHAW; SLANT; WARHOON; XERO. WILLUMSEN, DORRIT [r] DENMARK. WILSON, [Sir] ANGUS (FRANK JOHNSTONE) (1913-1991) UK writer best known for Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) and other novels sharply anatomical of modern life. His one sf novel, The Old Men at the Zoo (1961), applies MAINSTREAM techniques to a 1970s NEAR-FUTURE vision of the UK threatened internally by loss of nerve and by neofascism, and externally by a federated Europe. AW was an early supporter of the hardcover PUBLISHING of GENRE SF in the UK, and edited the book of the best stories entered for the Observer sf prize in 1954, A. D. 2500 (anth 1955). The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (1977), nonfiction, analyses KIPLING in terms which elucidate the haunting power of that author's genre work. AW was knighted in 1980. [JC]See also: HISTORY OF SF. WILSON, ANNA (1954- ) UK-born writer, now resident in the USA. Her novels are sharp FEMINIST parables. Altogether Elsewhere (1985) depicts a NEAR-FUTURE feminist backlash against male violence. Hatching Stones (1991) portrays a society in which males largely abandon females when GENETIC ENGINEERING allows them to clone "sons", although a modified form of the family survives in a quasi- UTOPIAN society where all the adults are female. [BS/JC] WILSON, COLIN (HENRY) (1931- ) UK writer of speculative works best known for his first book, The Outsider (1956) (in which he gave graphic expression to the brilliant autodidactism, the erratic system-building mentality, and the voracity for new mental sensations that would mark the very numerous titles he would produce over the next several decades, many of them of indirect interest to sf and fantasy writers and readers), for his numerous books on crime, notably A Criminal History of Mankind (1984) and Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection (1989), and for his investigations of the paranormal, of which the most important are The Occult (1971), Mysteries: An Investigation into the Occult, the Paranormal, and the Supernatural (1978), Poltergeist! (1981) and Beyond the Occult (1988). Sf critics have not generally responded with much warmth to CW's later work, perhaps because his eagerness to penetrate the barriers of "orthodox" science has led him into assumptions about and formulations of the nature of consciousness that seem to lurch dangerously far into the realms of PSEUDO-SCIENCE; that is, the science he uses as underpinning for his sf is often not generally accepted as such. A further difficulty is that, as his total oeuvre has grown, it has become harder to work out which texts are deeply considered, which are blarney, and which are potboilers.Nevertheless, his sf is of considerable interest. The Return of the Lloigor (in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, anth 1969 US; rev 1974 chap UK) is fantasy. His only sf short story is "Timeslip" (in Aries 1 [anth 1979] ed John Grant [Paul BARNETT]). His first sf novel, The Mind Parasites (1967), combines the long temporal perspectives of H.P. LOVECRAFT's Cthulhu Mythos with the transcendental solipsism of A.E. VAN VOGT and the metabiological pathos of George Bernard SHAW in a tale which suggests that humanity has for eons been deliberately hampered by ALIEN entities, and that these shackles could be cast off. The Philosopher's Stone (1969), perhaps the most intellectually stimulating of his novels, with an appealingly ramshackle construction, again invokes Cthulhu to suggest that the Old Ones who seem to be keeping humanity in thrall are in fact asleep and indifferent. The Space Vampires (1976; vt Lifeforce 1985 US), filmed as LIFEFORCE (1985), promulgates the same message in the form of a partly SPACE-OPERA horror tale featuring, once again, parasitic aliens and a human race of thwarted (but infinite) potential. A similar dynamic of oppression and release serves as the philosophical base underlying the boys'-fiction dramaturgy of the later Spider World sequence - Spider World: The Tower (1987; vt in 3 vols as Spider World 1: The Desert 1988 US, Spider World 2: The Tower 1989 US and Spider World 3: The Fortress 1989 US), Spider World: The Delta (1987) and Spider World: The Magician (1992) - set in a FAR-FUTURE Earth whose human remnants live in thralldom to giant arachnids. [JC/JGr]Other works: Many works including the Gerard Sorme series - Ritual in the Dark (1960), Man Without a Shadow: The Diary of an Existentialist (1963; vt The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme 1963 US and 1968 UK) and The God of the Labyrinth (1970; vt The Hedonists 1971 US)-of which the 2nd is borderline fantasy and the 3rd fantasy proper; The Black Room (1971), about sensory deprivation; the Chief Superintendent Gregory Saltfleet series of psi/occult whodunnits, being The Schoolgirl Murder Case (1974) and The Janus Murder Case (1984); The Personality Surgeon (1985).Nonfiction: Many works including The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1962); The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (1970; vt The Haunted Man 1979 US) with E.H. VISIAK and J.B. Pick, on David LINDSAY; Tree by Tolkien (1973 chap); Science Fiction as Existentialism (1978 chap); Starseekers (1980); Frankenstein's Castle (1980); The Quest for Wilhelm Reich (1981); Afterlife (1985).As Editor: Dark Dimensions: A Celebration of the Occult (anth 1978 US); The Book of Time (anth 1980) with John Grant; The Directory of Possibilities (1981), also with Grant; The Mammoth Book of the Supernatural (anth 1991) with Damon Wilson.About the author: Colin Wilson: The Outside and Beyond (1979) by Clifford P. Bendau; The Novels of Colin Wilson (1982) by Nicolas Tredell; The Work of Colin Wilson: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide (1989) by Colin Stanley.See also: GREAT AND SMALL; MONSTERS; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; SUSPENDED ANIMATION; TIME TRAVEL. WILSON, F(RANCIS) PAUL (1946- ) US physician and writer who began publishing sf with "The Cleaning Machine" for Startling Mystery Stories in 1971, and who has written some associational work as by Colin Andrews. His early career was much influenced by John W. CAMPBELL Jr, in whose ASF he published several of his best 1970s stories, including the early versions of tales which reached book form as the LaNague Federation series - Healer (1972 ASF as "Pard"; exp 1976), which was elected to the Prometheus Hall of Fame in 1990; Wheels within Wheels: A Novel of the LaNague Federation (1971 ASF; exp 1978), which won the first Prometheus AWARD for LIBERTARIAN SF; and An Enemy of the State (1980), all 3 being assembled as The LaNague Chronicle (omni 1992). The sequence engagingly deployed FPW's knowledgeability, the deft clarity of his writing, and his unabashed and comfortable use of pulp concepts - like the protagonist Steven Dalt, an immortal psychiatric healer who repeatedly saves the Solar System from enemies internal and external - to express what might be called philosophical perspectives on the world: the influence of Albert Camus (1913-1960) upon the creation of Dalt has been adduced.In the 1980s, FPW began to concentrate on novels like The Keep (1981), the first novel in the Adversary sequence, an impressive horror tale set in WWII in the Transylvanian Alps, where a Nazi garrison is being slowly destroyed by vampires indigenous to the eponymous lodging; it was filmed in 1983. The first sequel, Reborn (1990), is less assured, and demonstrates some lack of commercial facility during those moments when the buried Evil from the first book is unconvincingly shown to be living-dead; but Reprisal (1991; vt Reprisals 1991 UK) more successfully broadens the compass of the conflict between humans and a dark nemesis, a broadening which also marks Nightworld (1992 UK). Although Dydeetown World (fixup 1989) is an sf thriller reminiscent of his 1970s work, FPW had clearly evolved from the genre by this point, and in 1991 he stands as a potentially major HORROR writer, an estimate not materially affected by novels like The Select (1994), a medical sf thriller amply tinged with horror. [JC]Other works: The Tery (1973 Fiction 4 as "He Shall Be John"; exp 1979 chap dos; with stories added, further exp as coll 1990); The Tomb (1984); The Touch (1986); Black Wind (1988); Soft and Others (coll 1989); Ad Statum Perspicuum (coll 1990); Midnight Mass (1990 chap); Pelts (1990 chap); Sibs (1991; vt Sister Night 1993 UK); Buckets (1991 chap); The Barrens (1992); Freak Show (anth 1992).See also: PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS. WILSON, (JOHN) GROSVENOR (1866-? ) US writer in whose sf novel, The Monarch of Millions, or The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (1900), a 1950s USA is strictly organized according to wealth, with the Emperor richest of all; the sciences have advanced remarkably but the people remain potentially restive, and young Demos from Alaska is able to topple the old plutocracy. Unfortunately - despite this cosmetic democratization - the power structure remains intact. The book's cynicism tends to neutralize some of the foggy allegory. WILSON, J. ARBUTHNOT [s] Grant ALLEN. WILSON, RICHARD (1920-1987) US writer and director of the News Bureau of Syracuse University until his retirement in 1982. Involved in sf from an early age, he was a founder of the FUTURIANS in the 1930s, publishing his first sf story, "Murder from Mars", with Astonishing Stories in 1940; "Stepsons of Mars", which he wrote with fellow Futurian C.M. KORNBLUTH under the house name Ivar TOWERS, appeared in the same issue. A further Towers story, "The Man without a Planet" (1942), was by RW alone; he later used the pseudonym Edward Halibut for "Course of Empire" (1956). War service interrupted his career, but after 1950 - perhaps finding the new atmosphere in sf congenial to his gently satirical, humorous bent - he contributed prolifically to the magazines for some years, and soon published his first novel, The Girls from Planet 5 (1955), the first of 3 in which ALIENS comically invade Earth ( INVASION; SEX; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION); the others were And Then the Town Took Off (1960 dos) and 30-Day Wonder (1960). In each, RW made use of the arrivals from outer space to generate mocking perspectives on our own behaviour: from the strident patriarchy still attempting, in the first novel, to keep Texas pure although the rest of the USA has become a matriarchy, to the appalling consequences, in the third, of being exposed to aliens who observe to the literal letter all Earth laws and enforce similar behaviour on us. Similarly couched SATIRE dominated his first 2 collections, Those Idiots from Earth (coll 1957) and Time Out for Tomorrow (coll 1962).Unfortunately, from the mid-1960s RW published no books at all - Adventures in the Space Trade (1986 chap dos), a memoir, A Rat for a Friend (1986 chap), a story, and The Kid from Ozone Park & Other Stories (coll 1987 chap), though welcome, were pamphlet-length - and most of the graver, smoother, finer stories of his last decades remained uncollected. He won a 1968 NEBULA for his novelette "Mother to the World" (1968); other late stories of interest include "See Me Not" (1967), "A Man Spekith" (1969), "The Day They had the War" (1971) and the contents of The Kid from Ozone Park (all originals). In his later years, RW reportedly made it clear to colleagues that he remained too content in his professional life to continue seriously in a writing career. It is understood that a long story awaits publication in Harlan ELLISON's projected Last Dangerous Visions. [JC]About the author: A Richard Wilson Checklist (1986 chap dos) by Chris DRUMM. WILSON, ROBERT ANTON (1932- ) US writer who remains best known for the first Illuminatus! sequence - The Eye in the Pyramid (1975), The Golden Apple (1975) and Leviathan (1975), assembled as The Illuminatus Trilogy (omni 1984) - all written with Robert SHEA. Shea did not collaborate on Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977), The Illuminati Papers (1980), Masks of the Illuminati (1981) or Right Where You Are Sitting Now: Further Tales of the Illuminati (coll 1982) - some of these volumes being presented as nonfiction - or on The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, set in the 18th century: The Earth Will Shake (1984), The Widow's Son (1985) and Nature's God (1991). Shea did, however, write continuations of his own (see his entry). The series combines detective, FANTASY and sf components into the extremely complex tale of a vast conspiracy on the part of the Illuminati, historically a late-18th-century German association of freethinkers but here rendered into the gods of H.P. LOVECRAFT's Cthulhu Mythos, among other incarnations, so that mortals cohabit irretrievably with warring gods; throughout, the PARANOIA engendered by any and all attempts to understand immortal conspiracies, of which all the things of the world were emblems, reminded many readers of Thomas PYNCHON, but an unPynchonesque lightheartedness permeates the sequence. On the basis of their other works, this nihilistic gaiety derived in the main from RAW, and was clearly evident as well in The Sex Magician (1974), which was expanded and transformed into the ultimately opaque complexities of Schrodinger's Cat: The Universe Next Door (1979), II: The Trick Top Hat (1980) and III: The Homing Pigeons (1981), all 3 assembled as Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (omni 1988), a sequence which transformed the worlds of subatomic physics into a pattern of ALTERNATE WORLDS. It might be thought that RAW, like many 1980s writers, would slip into VIRTUAL-REALITY venues when attempting to manipulate levels of perception; but ultimately he refused to supply comforts of that ilk, for in his work there is no centre to the labyrinth, no master waiting to reward the heroes of the quest. [JC]Other works: Semiotext(e) SF (anth 1990) with Rudy RUCKER and Robert Lamborn Wilson; Reality is What You Can Get Away With (1992), an sf spoof.See also: HUMOUR; LIBERTARIAN SF; MUSIC; PHYSICS; THEATRE. WILSON, ROBERT CHARLES (1953- ) US-born writer, in Canada from 1962, who began to publish sf with "Equinocturne" for ASF in 1974, though he did not make a significant impact on the field until the 1980s, when he began to publish his polished and inventive novels. His first, A Hidden Place (1986), prefigures much of his work in positing an emotion-drenched binary between the mundane world and an ALTERNATE WORLD, in this case the latter being the realm of Faery, though presented in an sf idiom; as in his later work, a protagonist embedded in everyday reality must come to terms with - and perhaps take ethically acceptable advantage of - the fragile opening to a better place that seems to be on offer. The "other place" in Memory Wire (1987) is a kind of LOST WORLD temporally removed from a CYBERPUNK 21st century; the protagonists make contact with it through "oneiroliths" or dream stones. In Gypsies (1989 US) an entire family of Earth children live in various states of pathological denial of their capacity to walk through the walls of this world into a variety of parallel existences ( PARALLEL WORLDS); out of one of these, which is profoundly DYSTOPIAN, comes the Grey Man who haunts the family in his attempts to lure the children "back" to the dreadful world in which he claims they belong. But they escape him, ending in a pastoral world much like a realm of the Pacific Rim in which it does not rain much. The Divide (1990 US) locates the binary within the skull of a character who contains 2 utterly distinct selves; the book slips into melodrama - it is perhaps RCW's weakest novel - and its split-brain conundra are solved by a blow to the head. In A Bridge of Years (1991 US) the divide lies between the present and 1961, which are connected through TIME TRAVEL and a plot which deals, in familiar terms, with a long-ranging time-war between vying reality-lines. The persistency of RCW's basic concerns allows him, on occasion, to slide into routine formulations; but, throughout, he expresses with vigour and imagination the great Canadian theme (for the sense of being on the lonely side of a binary has sparked much of the best Canadian sf) of geographical alienation. In The Harvest (1993), his most ambitious novel to date, an alien group intelligence offers humanity gifts of immortality, undying curiosity and wisdom; most accept, for a variety of reasons presented by RCW with the kind of informed sympathy found in writers of the 1990s - but not generally in more optimistic decades - for actions of this sort. Mysterium (1994) returns poignantly to the theme of alienation, describing in considerable detail what happens to the residents of a small town when it is translated into a parallel world.RCW should not be confused with the author of The Crooked Tree (1980), Robert C(harles) Wilson (1951- ). [JC]See also: CANADA; SUPERMAN. WILSON, ROBERT HENDRIE [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. WILSON, ROBIN SCOTT (1928- ) US editor, writer and academic, currently President of California State University, Chico. He began publishing sf with "The State of the Art" for FSF in 1970; his best story is probably "For a While There, Herbert Marcuse, I Thought You Were Maybe Right About Alienation and Eros" (1972). His early work was published as by Robin Scott. RSW was most influential as the founder, with Damon KNIGHT and others, of the CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP in Clarion, Pennsylvania, in 1968. In addition to directing the workshop, he ed Clarion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from the Clarion Writers' Workshop (anth 1971), Clarion II (anth 1972) and Clarion III (anth 1973); in the last he announced his retirement from Clarion. Additionally, RSW ed Those who Can: A Science Fiction Reader (anth 1973), in which, interestingly, writers discuss their own and others' stories in the anthology under various critical headings. [JC] WILSON, SNOO (1948- ) UK playwright and novelist whose sf novels Spaceache (1984) and Inside Babel (1985) comprise a short series of SATIRES whose targets are contemporary politics and culture. Unfortunately, his use of sf instruments is significantly less than competent - most notably, his attempt to make fun of SPACE OPERA founders on his manifest ignorance of its conventions and, indeed, of the scientific rationales underpinning them. [JC]See also: OVERPOPULATION; RADIO. WILSON, STEVE (1943- ) UK writer who published non-sf short fiction and 3 biker thrillers before the appearance of The Lost Traveller (1976) - not to be confused with Ruthven TODD's The Lost Traveller (1943). SW's version, set in a desolate post- HOLOCAUST venue at century's end, extols the survival capacity of a group of Hell's Angels, one of whom becomes a MESSIAH figure. At novel's end, after a battle with the army, it looks as though agriculture will be revived. [JC] WILSON, WILLIAM (? -? ) UK writer, one of several contemporaries with the same name, who devoted 2 chapters of his book of criticism, A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject (1851), to "The Poetry of Science", defining there a species of literature called "Science-Fiction" (the first use of the term) as writing "in which the revealed truths of science may be given, interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true - thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of Science, clothed in a garb of the Poetry of Life". His (unconvincing) example is The Poor Artist by R.H. HORNE (c 1844; 1871). [BS]See also: DEFINITIONS OF SF. WILTSHIRE, DAVID [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. WINDLING, TERRI (1958- ) US editor, artist and writer who began in the first capacity in 1979 at ACE BOOKS, where she developed the company's fantasy line, discovering such authors as Steven BRUST and Charles DE LINT, and launching the Ace Fantasy Specials with Emma BULL's War for the Oaks (1987). Also while at Ace she launched the Fairy Tales series with Brust's The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars (1987). She moved to TOR BOOKS in 1987 as consulting editor; the 4th and subsequent Fairy Tales books were published by that house. The winner of 4 World Fantasy Awards for her editorial work, TW also edited with Mark Alan Arnold Elsewhere (anth 1981), Elsewhere, Volume II (anth 1982) and Elsewhere, Volume III (anth 1984), and edits with Ellen DATLOW (whom see for details) the Year's Best Fantasy annual anthology. [PNH] Other works: Faery! (anth 1982); the Borderlands SHARED-WORLD anthology series, the first 2 vols ed with Mark Alan Arnold: Borderland (anth 1986), Borderland 2 (anth 1986) and Life on the Border (anth 1991); and 2 anthologies of Twice-Told Wonder Tales with Datlow: Snow White, Blood Red (anth 1993) and Black Thorn, White Rose (anth 1994). WINGED SERPENT, THE Q. WINGRAVE, ANTHONY S. Fowler WRIGHT. WINGROVE, DAVID (JOHN) (1954- ) UK writer whose career breaks into 2 logical sequences. In the first he concentrated on critical work, the earliest significant example of which - The Immortals of Science Fiction (written 1980) - was printed but never released (although apparently copies have been circulated). Apertures: A Study of the Writings of Brian Aldiss (1984), with Brian GRIFFIN, was both admiring and reasonably comprehensive, and marked a close association with its subject, who introduced The Science Fiction Source Book (1984), which packs into relatively few pages a surprisingly comprehensive "Consumer's Guide" to sf novels; its main flaw is its sublimely overcomplicated quadripartite rating system. Aldiss then invited DW to participate with him in revising his energetic history of sf, Billion Year Spree (1973); the result, published as Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1986), with DW listed as co-author, attempts with partial success to sustain the elan of its much shorter parent, but falters in its coverage of the late 1970s and 1980s. It received a HUGO.DW's career then changed direction, being subsequently dominated by the release of the first vols of his enormous Chung Kuo sequence, projected to reach 8 vols, and to date comprising The Middle Kingdom (1989), The Broken Wheel (1990), The White Mountain (1991), The Stone Within (1992), Beneath the Tree of Heaven (1993) and White Moon, Red Dragon (1994). Set in a 22nd- and 23rd-century Earth dominated by a monolithic Chinese hegemony which has successfully stymied all technological development, the sequence elaborately delineates a stalled and static culture, and clearly seems to be preparing the scene for a radical transformation of the world; the early volumes, perhaps consequently, are stronger as dynastic history than as sf. [JC]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DEFINITIONS OF SF; GOTHIC SF; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION. WINIKI, EPHRIAM [s] John Russell FEARN. WINSOR, G(EORGE) McLEOD (? -? ) Author, generally thought to be UK, in whose first sf novel, Station X (1919), a psychic INVASION from Mars is repelled by an Earth-Venus alliance; the book was reprinted (1975 US) with an intro by Richard Gid Powers which mystifyingly claims it to be an important work. In The Mysterious Disappearances (1926; vt Vanishing Men 1927 US) a criminal scientist uses a kind of ANTIGRAVITY to commit the sort of "impossible crime" so popular in the detective fiction of the early decades of this century. [JC/PN] WINSTON, STAN [r] PREDATOR 2; The TERMINATOR. WINTER, H.G. [s] Harry BATES; Desmond W. HALL. WINTERBOTHAM, RUSS(ELL ROBERT) (1904-1971) US newspaperman and writer, active as an author of sf and Westerns, as the creator of at least 60 Big Little Books ( DIME-NOVEL SF; JUVENILE SERIES) - including tales about Maximo the Amazing Superman (all 1941) - and as the author of various COMIC strips throughout his career (he retired in 1969), initiating Chris Welkin, Planeteer in 1951 and scripting it into the 1960s. He published his first sf story, "The Star that Would not Behave", with ASF in 1935, and contributed most prolifically to the genre before WWII. After concentrating on work for Whitman Publishing Company (generator of the Big Little Books and other series for children), he returned to sf writing from 1952 and was again noted as a prolific author of unambitious work, soon publishing his first novel, The Space Egg (1958), about an INVASION of Earth; several other sf adventures followed, including The Other World (1963) as by J. Harvey Bond, and Planet Big Zero (1964), as by Franklin Hadley. [JC]Other works: The Red Planet (1962); The Men from Arcturus (1963); The Puppet Planet (1964); The Lord of Nardos (1966). WISE, ARTHUR (1923- ) UK writer and drama consultant, most of whose works were thrillers; he wrote also as John McArthur. Most of his sf was borderline, using genre elements to heighten the suspense. The best known of these tales was probably The Day the Queen Flew to Scotland for the Grouse Shooting (1968), about the abduction of the monarch. A second NEAR-FUTURE, political novel was Who Killed Enoch Powell? (1970), where the assassination of that politician sets a complex thriller in motion, escalating to racial violence at Wimbledon. The displacement into sf of all his work is minimal. [JC]Other works: The Little Fishes (1961); The Death's-Head (1962); Leatherjacket (1970).As John McArthur: Days in the Hay (1960); How Now Brown Cow (1962). WISE, ROBERT (1914- ) US film director. RW began as a film-cutter at RKO Studios and by 1939 was a fully qualified editor. He worked on Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) and also - at the studio's insistence when the director was out of the country - directed a few scenes in Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). He then worked with the Val Lewton unit at RKO, first as editor, then as director. He made 3 films for Lewton - Curse of the Cat People (1944; co-dir with Gunther von Fritsch), Mademoiselle Fifi (1944) and The Body Snatcher (1945) - and stayed with RKO until 1949. In 1951 he dir The DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL . He did not return to the genre until The ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1971). A versatile director, he has made many kinds of films, including the musicals West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1964). He has made 2 superior contributions to the supernatural genre aside from his Lewton films: The Haunting (1963), based on Shirley JACKSON's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Audrey Rose (1977). He returned spectacularly to sf with the controversial STAR TREK - THE MOTION PICTURE (1979), an ambitious attempt to fuse the simplistic original tv series with post- STAR WARS special effects and a transcendental 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY vision. Subsequently he has directed only the feeble youth musical, Rooftops (1989). RW's work in sf and supernatural fantasy, at least until 1971, did more than that of most directors to bring some maturity to these genres in the cinema. [JB/PN/KN] WISE, ROBERT A. Pseudonym of UK writer Fred J. Gebhart (? - ), whose sf novel was the routine 12 to the Moon (1961). He is unconnected with the film director Robert WISE. [JC] WISMER, DON(ALD RICHARD) (1946- ) US writer who began publishing sf with Starluck (1982), a competent sf adventure. Warrior Planet (1987) combines sf and fantasy elements in the story of an interstellar conflict between wizards and thieves. Planet of the Dead (1988) rather more convincingly sets a cadre of PSI-POWERED samurai warriors in pursuit of an interstellar drug gang. [JC]Other works: A Roil of Stars (1991). WITKACY Stanislaw Ignacy WITKIEWICZ. WITKIEWICZ, STANISpsAW IGNACY (1885-1939) Polish playwright, novelist and painter, who also signed himself Witkacy; he committed suicide just after the Nazi invasion of his country when he learned that Soviet armies had attacked from the east, the direction in which he was fleeing. Much of his work, some eerily prophetic, deals darkly and humorously with the theme of a conservative world suddenly subjected to change, the clash of cultures, apocalypse and future totalitarianism. Of his 30 surviving plays, the most notable in this vein include the DYSTOPIAN fantasy Gyubal Wahazar, czyli Na przeleczach besensu ["Gyubal Wahazar, or Along the Cliffs of the Absurd"] (written 1921; 1962), Matwa, czyli Hyrkanicznyswiatopoglad ["The Cuttlefish, or The Hyrcanian World View"] (written 1922; 1923), and most of the violent dramas of a surreal future assembled in The Madman and the Nun and Other Plays (all written 1920-30, published 1925-62; coll trans Daniel C. Gerould and C.S. Durer 1968 US); of these, perhaps the most important is the blackly terrifying Szewcy (written 1930; 1948; here trans as The Shoemakers), which predicts WWII. His 2 published novels are sf: Pozegnanie jesieni ["Farewell to Autumn"] (1927) and Nienasycenie (1930; trans Louis Iribarne as Insatiability 1977 US). In the former, Communists take over a future Poland. The latter, set in the 21st century, shows a fractured, ersatz West, a consumer society subject to a growing appetite for novelty, being taken over by Chinese Communists and Eastern mysticism, whose purveyors also provide happy pills. It is a distinguished and important novel. An uncompleted further tale, Jedyne wyjecie ["The Only Way Out"] (written 1931-3; 1968), furthers the discourse of its predecessor. It was not until 1962 that the Polish Government began, gingerly, to publish a collected edition of his work. [PN/JC]About the author: Witkacy: Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz as an Imaginative Writer (1981) by Daniel C. Gerould.See also: POLAND. WITT, OTTO [r] SCANDINAVIA. WITTIG, MONIQUE (1935- ) French writer whose first sf novel, Les Guerilleres (1969; trans David Le Vay as The Guerilleres 1971 US), transforms the arguments of FEMINISM into a series of narrative litanies that work movingly to describe an abstract "tribe" of lesbian Amazons in a constant state of warfare with their natural enemy; the novel balances exquisitely between sf (when its images are taken literally) and poetry. In Virgile, Non (1985; trans David Le Vay as Across the Acheron 1987 UK), DANTE ALIGHIERI's Inferno is taken as a model of destructive patriarchy, and a deadly threat to any lesbian (a category which MW uses to designate a condition beyond the binary oppositions of our "normal" state) future. [JC]See also: WOMEN SF WRITERS. WLUDYKA, PETER (? - ) US writer whose The Past is Another Country (1988) describes a USA, 143 years after a Russian invasion, in which thought-control is almost complete. The young protagonist discovers some of the truth about Christ and the disappeared city of New York, but only at great cost. Unfortunately for the book, the basic premise - that mutual disarmament was a Russian trick to gull pacifistic Americans - very soon became dated. [JC] WOBIG, ELLEN (1911-1989) US writer whose The Youth Monopoly (1968 dos) is an unremarkable sf adventure about rejuvenation. [JC] WODEHOUSE, [Sir] P(ELHAM) G(RENVILLE) (1881-1975) UK writer, resident in the USA from long before WWII, known mainly for his non-genre novels, most of them comic, published in an unbroken stream from 1902 to the end of his life. The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England: A Tale of the Great Invasion (1909) spoofed the future- WAR/INVASION genre so popular in the UK before 1914 with its description of 9 simultaneous invasions, 7 of which collapse, leaving the German and the Russian armies in command. Their chiefs compete with one another in music-hall recitals of their feats until Boy Scout Clarence Chugwater exposes the fact that one of them is being paid more than the others; the invasions end in ignominy. In Laughing Gas (1936) rival dentists' anaesthetics cause an identity switch between an earl and an obnoxious child star; the resulting story has all the marks of the typical PGW comedy, however, and is not easy to think of as sf. [JC]See also: CLUB STORY; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. WODHAMS, JACK (1931- ) UK-born writer, in Australia from 1955, who began publishing sf with "There is a Crooked Man" for ASF in 1967, and who has since contributed actively (though less prolifically since the 1970s) to magazine markets, both in Australia and in the USA, specializing in clear-cut tales about problem-solving; he primarily writes short fiction, with over 70 stories published. His cold style is sometimes marred by facetiousness, in the Sunday-writer manner typical of many HARD-SF figures. Although the 4 novelettes assembled in Future War (coll 1982) were original to that volume, the thrust of his ASF style can still be felt in tales whose overwhelming message is one of bleak disdain for sf's own visions of the wars of the future. His novels are The Authentic Touch (1971 US), Looking for Blucher (1980) and Ryn (1982). The first, perhaps rather hopefully, suggests that things might get out of control in a planet made over into theme parks; Looking for Blucher investigates similar material in a loose-structured narrative about shared dreams; Ryn, probably his best novel, tells of a 62-year-old Black Zimbabwean reincarnated, to his bafflement, as a white baby in the Brisbane of a reticently depicted NEAR-FUTURE Australia. JW's hard-bitten humour can be tiresome at novel length, and he structures longer works badly. His short fiction is proficient, often witty, and good on military matters. Notable and typical is "Mostly Meantime" (ASF Feb 1981), about the difficulties of ordering replacement computer parts over galactic distances. [PN/JC] WOJNA SWIATOW-NASTEPNE STULECIE POLAND. WOLD, ALLEN L(ESTER) (1943- ) US writer who began with an unremarkable sf adventure, The Planet Masters (1979), followed by the more ambitious Star God (1980). He then became known for some "V" ties: "V": The Pursuit of Diana * (1984), "V": The Crivit Experiment * (1985) and "V": Below the Threshhold * (1988). In Jewels of the Dragon (1986) a young man in search of his lost father finds himself involved in events on a planet choked with romantic ruins. The Eye in the Stone (1988) is a fantasy. Crown of the Serpent (1989) is juvenile sf. The Lair of the Cyclops (1992) returns to the mode of Jewels of the Dragon, following the quest of a young man who finds something ancient on a planet. [JC] WOLF, CHRIS L. [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. WOLF, GARY K. (1941- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Love Story" for Worlds of Tomorrow in 1970, and followed with several sharply SATIRICAL tales over the next few years; the best of them, like "Dr Rivet and Supercon Sal" (1976), are generally thought to scan US society with a sharper, cleaner vision than that attained in his longer work. Soon, however, he began to concentrate on novels, beginning with Killerbowl (1975), a briskly violent portrait of a world - rather similar to that of ROLLERBALL (1975) - in which games are used to sublimate more politically dangerous passions ( GAMES AND SPORTS). A Generation Removed (1977) depicts a NEAR-FUTURE society in which the young have violently taken the reins of power and euthanasia of the middle-aged is common; here the analogy would be with LOGAN'S RUN (1976). The Resurrectionist (1979), which develops the MATTER-TRANSMISSION premise of "The Bridge Builder" (1974), again exposes a corrupt world to violent retribution. Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (1981), filmed by Walt Disney in conjunction with Steven SPIELBERG's Amblin Entertainment as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) dir Robert Zemeckis, could not in retrospect compete with the extraordinary and moving animation techniques which made the film an instant classic. A sequel, Who P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit? (1991), involves the same cast in another adventure, this time a quest of the truth behind a rumoured love affair between Clark Gable and Roger's girl. The film itself has been followed by 2 Roger Rabbit shorts, Tummy Trouble (1989) and Rollercoaster Rabbit (1990); work on a further feature is (1992) at drawing-board stage. [JC] WOLFE, AARON Dean R. KOONTZ. WOLFE, BERNARD (1915-1985) US writer best known for his work outside the sf field. He gained a BA in psychology from Yale in 1935, worked for 2 years in the Merchant Marine, and for a time was a bodyguard to Leon Trotsky (1874-1940) in Mexico. He subsequently became a war correspondent, newsreel editor and freelance writer, and contributed stories and articles to many leading magazines. His first contribution to sf was a novelette in Gal, "Self Portrait" (1951), soon followed by his only sf novel, LIMBO (1952; vt Limbo '90 1953 UK; cut 1961 US). This large and extravagant book is perhaps the finest sf novel of ideas to have been published during the 1950s. It portrays a future in which men have deliberately chosen to cut off their own arms and legs in order to avoid the risk of war. Complex (making use of many ideas from CYBERNETICS), ironic, hectoring and full of puns, LIMBO was firmly based on BW's knowledge of psychoanalysis and in particular on his understanding of the masochistic instinct in modern Man. It is perhaps for this last quality that J.G. BALLARD has hailed it several times as the greatest US sf novel; Ballard may have sensed, too, that LIMBO also functions as a corrosive assault upon the premises and instruments of sf itself. BW wrote very little subsequent sf, although Harlan ELLISON persuaded him to contribute 2 stories to Again, Dangerous Visions (anth 1972): "The Bisquit Position", an impassioned anti-Vietnam-War story, centres on the image of a napalmed dog, and "The Girl with Rapid Eye Movements" is about sleep research and ESP. In his "Afterword" to these stories, BW expressed an extreme hostility to science and also to sf, which he considered its handmaiden. Further details of BW's remarkable career can be found in his Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer (1972). [DP]See also: CYBERPUNK; CYBORGS; DYSTOPIAS; MEDICINE; WEAPONS. WOLFE, GARY K(ENT) (1946- ) US academic and writer, long associated with Roosevelt University in Chicago, since 1991 as its Professor of Humanities at its School of Continuing Education. Some of his earlier essays, like "The Known and the Unknown: Structure and Image in Science Fiction" (1977), prefigured the typology of sf he presented in full in his most significant work, The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (1979), in which sf texts and their essential icons are defined according to their relationship to the permeable membrane separating us from the unknown, which GKW feels all sf attempts - or pretends to attempt - to pierce. The discussion is arranged around a lucid disposition of icons - the SPACESHIP, the city, the wasteland, the ROBOT and the MONSTER - and the book has served as an admirable mapping of its thesis ( CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH). In Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Scholarship (1986) GKW made a first attempt - a revised edn would be welcome - to describe the critical vocabulary used by scholars in their attempts to encompass this protean genre. [JC]Other works: Science Fiction Dialogues (anth 1982); David Lindsay (1982 chap.See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DEFINITIONS OF SF; GENRE SF; PILGRIM AWARD; PLANETARY ROMANCE; SPECULATIVE FICTION. WOLFE, GENE (RODMAN) (1931- ) US writer, born in New York, raised in Texas, and now living in Illinois. After serving in the Korean War - his experiences there are recorded in Letters Home (coll 1991), which contains correspondence with his mother between 1952 and 1954 - he graduated in mechanical engineering from the University of Houston and worked in engineering until becoming an editor of a trade periodical, Plant Engineering, in 1972. Since retiring from this post in 1984, he has written full-time. Though neither the most popular nor the most influential author in the sf field, GW is today quite possibly the most important.He started writing early, but did not find it easy to break into print; his first published story, "The Dead Man" for Sir, appeared as late as 1965, years after he had begun to create fiction of some distinction. In his early career, much of his best work tended to appear in various volumes of Damon KNIGHT's Orbit anthologies, starting with "Trip, Trap" (1967) and climaxing with the superb KAFKA-esque allegory, "Forlesen" (1974). In the middle of the series came "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" (1970 Orbit 7), which was assembled - along with The Death of Doctor Island (1973 Universe 3, anth ed Terry CARR; 1990 chap dos), "The Doctor of Death Island" (1978), and "Death of the Island Doctor" (original to the coll) - as The Wolfe Archipelago (coll 1983). These 4 stories, each fully autonomous though each mirroring the others' structural and thematic patterns, comprise an intensely interesting cubist portrayal of the mortal trap (or coffin) of identity, written in terms that are instrinsically sf in nature. From the first, in other words, GW created texts which - almost uniquely-married Modernism ( FABULATION) and sf, rather than putting them into rhetorical opposition; his ultimate importance to world literature derives from the success of that marriage, though his use of a thoroughly natural sf idiom has of course ensured that the response to his work, on the part of non-sf critics, has been poverty-stricken. CHILDREN - as very often in his work - tend to be the viewpoint characters in the Archipelago stories, giving the texts a supremely deceptive air of clarity-for although the surface is nearly always described with precision in a GW tale, the true story within is generally conveyed by indirection, revealing itself through the reader's ultimate comprehension of the proper and hierarchical sorting of its parts. Constrained to metaphorically fecund ISLAND contexts, the Archipelago tales are particularly intricate. The first treats with assurance the shifting line that divides fantasy and reality as a young boy retreats from a harsh adult environment into the more clear-cut world generated by a pulp magazine. "The Death of Doctor Island" expands and reverses this theme in describing the treatment of a psychologically disturbed child constrained to an artificial environment which responds to his state of mind. In "The Doctor of Death Island" a cryogenically frozen prisoner is awakened to find that his bound isolation has been hardened into IMMORTALITY. All 3 protagonists must attempt - it is a compulsion that GW would inflict upon many of his characters - to decipher and to penetrate the stories that tell them, and by so doing to leap free. GW won a Nebula for "The Death of Doctor Island".During the 1970s, GW continued to publish short stories at a considerable rate, at least 70 reaching print before the end of the decade; in the 1980s, as he concentrated more and more fully on novels, this production decreased markedly. His short work has been assembled in THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR DEATH AND OTHER STORIES AND OTHER STORIES (coll 1980), Gene Wolfe's Book of Days (coll 1981), Bibliomen: Twenty Characters Waiting for a Book (coll of linked stories 1984 chap), Plan[e]t Engineering (coll 1984), Storeys from the Old Hotel (coll 1988 UK) and Endangered Species (coll 1989). Short stories of particular interest include "Three Million Square Miles" (1971 Ruins of Earth, anth ed Thomas M. DISCH), "Feather Tigers" (1973 Edge), "La Befana" (1973 Gal), The Hero as Werwolf (1975 The New Improved Sun, anth ed Disch; 1991 chap), "Tracking Song" (1975 In the Wake of Man, anth ed Roger ELWOOD), "The Eyeflash Miracles" (1976 Future Power, anth ed Gardner DOZOIS and Jack DANN), Seven American Nights (1978 Orbit 20, anth ed Damon Knight; 1989 chap dos), "The War Beneath the Tree" (1978 Omni) and "The Detective of Dreams" (1980 Dark Forces, anth ed Kirby McCauley). Later work was variously interesting, though in the 1980s GW was increasingly inclined, in short forms, to restrict his energies to the composition of oneiric jeux d'esprit.GW's first novel, Operation ARES (1970), in which a 21st-century USA is invaded by its abandoned Martian colony, was heavily cut by the publisher, and reads as apprentice work. His next, THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS (fixup 1972), comprises 3 separate tales, one previously published but all so closely linked as to be crippled in isolation. Set on a distant two-planet system colonized by settlers of French origin, the book combines ALIENS, ANTHROPOLOGY, CLONES and other elements in a richly imaginative exploration of the nature of identity and individuality. It was the first significant demonstration of the great difficulty of reading GW without constant attention to the almost subliminal - but in retrospect or after rereading almost invariably lucid and inevitable - clues laid down in the text to govern its comprehension. As with all his most important work to date, the protagonist (in this case there is also a more elusively presented second protagonist) tells from a conceptual or temporal remove the story of his own childhood, in the form of a confession whose truth value is unrelentingly dubious. The parenthood of the clone who narrates the first part of the novel is problematical - or concealed - as is usual in GW's work; questions of identity are poignantly intensified as it becomes clear - perhaps only upon a second reading - that, before the main action of the tale has begun, a shapeshifting alien (the second protagonist) from the oppressed second planet has taken on the identity of a visiting anthropologist. By the end of the novel, both protagonists - one a clone engineered into repeating previous identities, the other an impostor caught in the coffin of his fake self and literally imprisoned as well - have come to represent a singularly rich, singularly bleak vision of the shaping of a conscious life through time.Peace (1975), an afterlife fantasy set in the contemporary middle USA, was, word for word, perhaps GW's most intricate and personal work; though not sf, it is central to any full attempt to understand his other novels, his sense of the great painfulness of any shaped life, or his methods in general. The protagonist of the book - who tells the story of his childhood, all unknowingly, from beyond the grave - is both a self-portrait of the artist as a teller of stories and a rounded, and murderous, character in his own right. The Devil in a Forest (1976), a juvenile set at the time of King Wenceslas, with little or no fantasy element, shares some of the lightness of tone of Pandora by Holly Hollander (1990), which some feel may have been written around this time, a non-fantastic detective novel which might also be described as a juvenile of sorts.It was his next and most ambitious work - the long central tale and appendages of The Book of the New Sun sequence - which finally brought GW to a wide audience. The heart of the sequence was a single sustained long novel broken into 4 parts for commercial reasons and published as THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER (1980), The Claw of the Conciliator (1981), The Sword of the Lictor (1982) and The Citadel of the Autarch (1983); the first pair were assembled as The Book of the New Sun, Volumes I and II (omni 1983 UK; vt Shadow and Claw 1994 US), and the second pair as The Book of the New Sun, Volumes III and IV (omni 1985 UK; vt Sword and Citadel 1994 US). Essays and tales in explanation of The Book of the New Sun were assembled as The Castle of the Otter (dated 1982 but 1983); tales supposedly extracted from one of the seminal books carried throughout his travels by Severian, the protagonist of The Book of the New Sun, were published as The Boy who Hooked the Sun: A Tale from the Book of Wonders of Urth and Sky (1985 chap) and Empires of Foliage and Flower: A Tale from the Book of Wonders of Urth and Sky (1987 chap); "A Solar Labyrinth" (1983) was a metafiction about the entire Book; and the whole edifice was sequeled in The Urth of the New Sun (1987 UK). The 1st volume gained a World Fantasy Award and the 2nd a Nebula.As a synthesizing work of fiction - a type of creation which tends to come, for obvious reasons, late in the period or genre it transmutes - The Book of the New Sun owes clear debts to the sf and fantasy world in general, and in particular to the dying-Earth ( FAR FUTURE) category of PLANETARY ROMANCE initiated by Jack VANCE. Though it is a full-blown tale of cosmogony, the entire story is set on Urth, eons hence, a world so impacted with the relics of humanity's long residence that archaeology and geology have become, in a way, the same science: that of plumbing the body of the planet for messages which have become inextricably intermingled over the innumerable years. The world into which Severian is born has indeed become so choked with formula and ritual that early readers of THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER could be perhaps forgiven for identifying the text as SWORD AND SORCERY, though hints that the book was in fact sf-oriented SCIENCE FANTASY were - in the usual GW manner - abundant. Apparently an orphan, Severian is raised as an apprentice torturer in the Matachin Tower which nests among other similar towers in the Citadel compound of the capital city of Nessus, somewhere in the southern hemisphere (one of the easier tasks of decipherment GW imposes is that of understanding that the Towers are in fact ancient spaceships). Severian grows to young adulthood, falls into too intimate a concourse with an exultant (a genetically bred aristocrat) due to be tortured to death, is banished, travels through the land, becomes involved in a war to the far north where he meets-not for the first time - the old Autarch who dominates the world and who recognizes in Severian his appointed heir, and himself becomes Autarch.It is a classic plot, and superficially unproblematic. But Severian himself is very distant in conception from the normal sf or science-fantasy hero he seems, at some moments, to resemble. As usual with GW, the protagonist himself narrates the story of his childhood and early youth from a period some years later; Severian makes it clear that he has an infallible memory (but is less clear about the fact that he is capable of lying); he also makes it clear that he has known from an early age that he is (or has been, or will be) the reborn manifestation of the Conciliator-a MESSIAH figure from a previous, or through TIME PARADOXES, a possibly concurrent reality - whose rebirth is for the purpose of bringing the New Sun to Urth. At this point, sf and Catholicism - GW is Roman Catholic - breed together, for the New Sun is both white hole and Revelation. The imagery and structure of The Book of the New Sun make it explicitly clear that Severian himself is both Apollo and Christ, and that the story of his life is a secular rendering of the parousia, or Second Coming. His cruelty to himself and others is the cruelty of the Universe itself; and his reverence for the world constitutes no simple blessing. His family is a Holy Family, lowly and anonymous, but ever-present; and their absence from any "starring" role - GW refuses in the text to identify any of them - has religious implications as well as aesthetic. (Much attention, some of it approaching the Talmudical, has been spent on identifying this Family, which does clearly include: Dorcas, Severian's paternal grandmother; his unnamed though Charonian paternal grandfather; his father Ouen; his mother Katherine; and-almost certainly - a sibling, who may be the homunculus found in a jar in The Citadel of the Autarch.) The sequel, The Urth of the New Sun, takes Severian through reality levels of the Universe to the point-ambiguous in time and space, though related to the Omega Point posited by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) - where he will be judged as to his Autarchal fitness to bring the New Sun home. As foreordained, he passes the test. Urth is drowned in the floods that mark the passing of the white hole, the rebirth of light. Some survive, to begin again; or to continue in their ways.Subsequent 1980s novels were very various. Free Live Free (1984) is a TIME-TRAVEL tale, extremely complex to parse, through which shines a retelling of L. Frank BAUM's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). There Are Doors (1988), set in a bleak PARALLEL WORLD redolent of the USA during the Depression, most ambivalently depicts a man's life-threatening exogamous passion for a goddess. Castleview (1990) implants very nearly the entirety of the Arthurian Cycle in contemporary Illinois, where a new Arthur is recruited for the long battle. Most interesting perhaps is the Latro sequence, comprising Soldier of the Mist (1986) and Soldier of Arete (1989), with further volumes projected. Set in ancient Greece about 500BC, it is narrated in short chapters each representing a day's written-down recollections on the part of Latro, a soldier whom a goddess has punished by removing his capacity to remember anything for more than 24 hours. The sequence thus works, on every possible level, as a mirror image of The Book of the New Sun, with Latro's memory-loss reversing Severian's inability to forget, ancient Greece reversing Urth - being at the start rather than the end of things - and the series as a whole being conspicuously open-ended rather than shaped inexorably around Severian's Coming.In The Book of the Long Sun - comprising Nightside the Long Sun (1993) and Lake of the Long Sun (1994), both assembled as Litany of the Long Sun (omni 1994), plus Calde of the Long Sun (1994), with 1 further volume projected - GW returned to the New Sun universe, though to a setting some thousands of years earlier, and to the large-scale sf mythopoeisis that so profoundly characterizes the earlier novel. Like New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun is in fact a single narrative, and cannot properly be assessed until its completion. What can be said is that the entire tale is - so far - set within a vast GENERATION STARSHIP, in closed universe called the Whorl, and that the protagonist, Pater Silk - having had a vast infodump of memories epiphanically given him on the first page of the story by an AI who seems to be the avatar of some figure from Urth, and perhaps a proclaimer of Christ - gradually becomes a central figure in the destiny of the decaying cultures of the ship.It may be that GW has never had an original sf idea, or never a significant one, certainly none of the calibre of those generated by writers like Larry NIVEN or Greg BEAR. His importance does not reside in that kind of originality. Setting aside for an instant his control of language, it is possible to claim that GW's importance lies in a spongelike ability to assimilate generic models and devices, and in the quality of the transformations he effects upon that material - a musical analogy might be the Baroque technique of the parody cantata, in which a secular composition is transformed by reverent parody into a sacred work (or vice versa). GW's actual language, too, is eloquently parodic, and many of his short stories are designed deliberately and intricately to echo earlier models, from G.K. CHESTERTON and Rudyard KIPLING on through the whole pantheon of GENRE SF. GW's importance has been, therefore, twofold: the inherent stature of his work is deeply impressive, and he wears the fictional worlds of sf like a coat of many colours. [JC]Other works: At the Point of Capricorn (1983 chap); The Arimaspian Legacy (1987 chap); For Rosemary (coll 1988 chap UK), poetry; Slow Children at Play (1989 chap); The Old Woman whose Rolling Pin is the Sun (1991 chap); Castle of Days (omni 1992), assembling Gene Wolfe's Book of Days, The Castle of the Otter, plus new material; The Young Wolfe (coll 1992).About the author: Gene Wolfe (1986) by Joan Gordon; A Checklist of Gene Wolfe (1990 chap) by Christopher P. STEPHENS; Gene Wolfe: Urth-Man Extraordinary: A Working Bibliography (1991 chap) by Gordon BENSON JR and Phil STEPEHENSEN-PAYNE; Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle (1994) by Michael Andre-Driussi.See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; ESP; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FANTASY; GODS AND DEMONS; GOTHIC SF; JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD; LINGUISTICS; METAPHYSICS; MYTHOLOGY; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; POCKET UNIVERSE; SERIES; SUN; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; TIMESCAPE BOOKS; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST. WOLFE, LOUIS (1905-1985) US writer in whose Journey of the Oceanauts: Across the Bottom of the Atlantic Ocean (1968) 3 genetically engineered ( GENETIC ENGINEERING) humans make the eponymous trek. [JC] WOLFMAN, MARV [r] Ted WHITE. WOLLHEIM, DONALD A(LLEN) (1914-1990) US editor and writer, and one of the first and most vociferous sf fans; with Forrest J. ACKERMAN, DAW was perhaps the most dynamic member of the embryo FANDOM of the 1930s. A lifetime resident of New York City, he published innumerable FANZINES, was co-editor of the early semiprozine FANCIFUL TALES OF TIME AND SPACE in 1936, founded the Fantasy Amateur Press Association ( FAPA), and was one of the founders in 1938 of the FUTURIANS, becoming deeply involved in its pursuits and feuds. His long-standing quarrel with James BLISH - whom he does not mention in his anecdotal analysis of sf, The Universe Makers (1971), whose premises reflect 1930s enthusiasms - began at this time, and was at least partially rooted in political differences, for in the years before WWII DAW stood far to the left and Blish far to the right. DAW's part in early fandom was extensively chronicled in The Immortal Storm (1954) by Sam MOSKOWITZ and in The Futurians (1977) by Damon KNIGHT. DAW ed Operation: Phantasy: The Best from the Phantograph (anth 1967 chap), a collection of early fanzine material.His first published story was "The Man from Ariel" for Wonder Stories in 1934, but he did not begin to publish fiction with any regularity until the 1940s, by which time he had already embarked on his major career as an editor. In 1941 he became editor of COSMIC STORIES and STIRRING SCIENCE STORIES, both of which he produced creditably on a minute budget, publishing many stories by his fellow Futurians (most prolifically C.M. KORNBLUTH). He also compiled 2 pioneering sf ANTHOLOGIES: The Pocket Book of Science Fiction (anth 1943) and Portable Novels of Science (anth 1945). For his short stories he often used the pseudonyms Millard Verne Gordon and Martin PEARSON, as well as the collaborative pseudonyms Arthur COOKE and Lawrence WOODS, and he once wrote as Allen Warland; as Pearson he published the Ajax Calkins series which later formed the basis of his novel Destiny's Orbit (1962) as by David Grinnell, sequelled by Destination: Saturn (1967) as by Grinnell with Lin CARTER.After WWII DAW worked for Avon Books (1947-52), for whom he edited the AVON FANTASY READER and the AVON SCIENCE FICTION READER anthology-like series (which we treat as magazines) as well as OUT OF THIS WORLD ADVENTURES, 10 STORY FANTASY and, uncredited, the first sf ORIGINAL ANTHOLOGY, The Girl with the Hungry Eyes (anth 1949). He subsequently moved to ACE BOOKS in 1952, where he created and for the next 20 years ran one of the 2-3 most dominant US sf lists, winning a 1964 HUGO for his work. Taking advantage of the Ace Double Novel format ( DOS-A-DOS), he published the first or early works of many writers who later achieved fame, including John BRUNNER, Samuel R. DELANY, Philip K. DICK, Thomas M. DISCH, Harlan ELLISON, Ursula K. LE GUIN and Robert SILVERBERG, though the bulk of the list was cannily built around colourful sf adventures with a strong emphasis on SPACE OPERA; by the 1960s, the list had begun to fade seriously, though it is clear in hindsight (see discussion of DAW BOOKS below) that he himself had lost nothing of his acumen. During the 1950s he also worked editorially on the magazines ORBIT and SATURN, and edited a great many anthologies, often for Ace; these included such theme collections as The End of the World (anth 1956), Men on the Moon (anth 1958 dos; rev 1969) and The Hidden Planet (anth 1959), the latter being of stories set on VENUS.DAW's own writing in the 1950s and 1960s consisted largely of novels. These divided into CHILDREN'S SF published as DAW and adult novels as by David Grinnell, none of the latter being particularly notable. However, the Mike Mars series of children's books, exploring different facets of the space programme, was popular: Mike Mars, Astronaut (1961), Mike Mars Flies the X-15 (1961), Mike Mars at Cape Canaveral (1961; vt Mike Mars at Cape Kennedy 1966), Mike Mars in Orbit (1961), Mike Mars Flies the Dyna-Soar (1962), Mike Mars, South Pole Spaceman (1962), Mike Mars and the Mystery Satellite (1963) and Mike Mars around the Moon (1964).In 1965, DAW began to issue an annual "year's best" anthology, World's Best Science Fiction; this continued until the end of his life in an unbroken yearly succession, although there was some highly confusing retitling (occasioned in the first instance by his shift from Ace to DAW Books). The sequence was: #1: World's Best Science Fiction: 1965 (anth 1965) with Terry CARR (who was co-editor through the 1971 volume); #2: 1966 (anth 1966); #3: 1967 (anth 1967); #4: 1968 (anth 1968); #5: 1969 (anth 1969); #6: 1970 (anth 1970); #7: 1971 (anth 1971); #8: The 1972 Annual World's Best SF (anth 1972; vt Wollheim's World's Best SF: Series One 1977) with Arthur W. SAHA (who was co-editor through the 1990 volume); #9: 1973 (anth 1973; vt Wollheim's World Best SF: Series Two 1978); #10: 1974 (anth 1974; vt World's Best SF Short Stories #1 1975 UK; vt Wollheim's World Best SF: Series Three 1979); #11: 1975 (anth 1975; vt World's Best SF Short Stories #2 1976 UK; vt Wollheim's World Best SF: Series Four 1980 US); #12: 1976 (anth 1976; vt The World's Best SF - 3 1979 UK; vt Wollheim's World Best SF: Series Five 1981 US); #13: 1977 (anth 1977; vt The World's Best SF - 4 1979 UK; vt Wollheim's World Best SF: Series Six 1982 US); #14: 1978 (anth 1978; vt The World's Best SF - 5 1980 UK; vt Wollheim's World Best SF: Series Seven 1983 US); #15: 1979 (anth 1979; vt Wollheim's World Best SF: Series Eight 1984); #16: 1980 (anth 1980; vt #9 1985); #17: 1981 (anth 1981); #18: 1982 (anth 1982); #19 (anth 1983); #20 (anth 1984); #21: 1985 (anth 1985); #22: 1986 (anth 1986); #23: 1987 (anth 1987); #24: Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1988 Annual World's Best SF (anth 1988); #25: 1989 (anth 1989) and #26: 1990 (anth 1990).In 1971, DAW left Ace and in 1972 he founded DAW BOOKS, which he continued to run until 1985, when ill-health induced him to appoint his daughter, Betsy Wollheim, president. With his new firm, he began almost immediately to shift from the format- and content-constraints that had plagued his later career at Ace: series were emphasized heavily; space opera gave way to PLANETARY ROMANCE; authors like C.J. CHERRYH and Tanith LEE, who were comfortable with science fantasy, were strongly encouraged; and he allowed his authors very considerable latitude (compared with his days at Ace) to explore moderately TABOO areas (John NORMAN moved over from BALLANTINE BOOKS, presumably to take advantage of this liberty) and to write at very varying lengths. Though he continued not to pay well enough to retain best-selling authors, he kept his firm healthy and active for the remaining years of his career.For 50 years DAW remained one of the most important editorial influences on sf, and in his later years - despite his very well known capacity to carry on disputes half a century old - he became a revered figure. His death marked - as clearly as those of Isaac ASIMOV and Robert A. HEINLEIN - the passing of the generation of the founders. [JC/MJE]Other works: The Secret of Saturn's Rings (1954), The Secret of the Martian Moons (1955), One Against the Moon (1956) and The Secret of the Ninth Planet (1959), all juveniles; Two Dozen Dragon's Eggs (coll 1969); The Men from Ariel (coll 1982); Up There and Other Strange Directions (coll 1988).As David Grinnell: Across Time (1957); Edge of Time (1958); The Martian Missile (1959); To Venus! To Venus! (1970 dos).As Editor: The Fox Woman & Other Stories (coll 1949), stories by A. MERRITT; Flight into Space (anth 1950); Every Boy's Book of Science Fiction (anth 1951); Prize Science Fiction (anth 1953; vt Prize Stories of Space and Time 1953 UK); Adventures in the Far Future (anth 1954 dos); Tales of Outer Space (anth 1954 dos); The Ultimate Invader and Other Science Fiction (anth 1954); Adventures on Other Planets (anth 1955) and More Adventures on Other Planets (anth 1963); Terror in the Modern Vein (anth 1955; vt in 2 vols as Terror in the Modern Vein 1961 UK and More Terror in the Modern Vein 1961 UK); The Earth in Peril (anth 1957 dos); The Macabre Reader (anth 1959) and More Macabre (anth 1961); Swordsmen in the Sky (anth 1964); Ace Science Fiction Reader (anth 1971; vt Trilogy of the Future 1972 UK); The Best from the Rest of the World (anth 1976); The DAW Science Fiction Reader (anth 1976).See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; GREAT AND SMALL; HISTORY OF SF; NEAR FUTURE; NEW WAVE; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PUBLISHING. WOLVERTON, DAVE (1957- ) US writer. He began entering literary contests in 1985, winning a few small competitions and then the Best of the Year award in the WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST for 1986, with "On My Way to Paradise", which appeared in L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future, Volume III (anth 1987). This novella was the basis for his first novel, On My Way to Paradise (1989), a thoughtful but violent tale of a Latin-American mercenary force conscripted to fight for a conservative Japanese colony on another planet. It is packed with sociobiological speculation, and veers interestingly between HEINLEIN-esque and CYBERPUNK scenarios, and is not altogether accepting of the LIBERTARIAN ideas which in part it dramatizes; it was runner-up in 1990 for the PHILIP K. DICK AWARD. Serpent Catch (1991) - along with its sequel, Path of the Hero (1993) - confirmed him as belonging to the central extrapolative tradition of sf. Big and almost over-packed like its predecessor, the first volume is set on a terraformed moon of a GAS GIANT, whose continents are separated by eco-barriers, part of an experiment in closed environments and reconstructed geological eras. Genetically engineered human scientists are driven from space by advanced aliens and forced down into this zoo they have created, where they interact complexly (the future meeting the past) with Neanderthals and other prehumans, dinosaurs, sea-serpents and so on, as the eco-barriers break down. The novel - which seems to require sequels - is conceptually ambitious and very idea-driven.His initial involvement with the Writers of the Future organization deepened with the partial retirement of A.J. BUDRYS in 1991; DW subsequently co-edited Writers of the Future #8 (anth 1992) with Budrys; and edited solo Writers of the Future #9 (anth 1993) and Writers of the Future#10 (anth 1994). [PN]Other works: Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia *(1994); The Golden Queen (1994). WOMACK, JACK (1956- ) US writer whose first 5 novels are stylish and potent exercises in a post- CYBERPUNK urban idiom, and comprise the first instalments in a loose ongoing series about the NEAR-FUTURE state of the USA. The sequence, reminiscent at points of the baroque New York detective fictions of Jerry Oster (1943- ), is projected to stop after 5 vols. AMBIENT (1987), set in the complexly desolated warzone which New York has become in the early 21st century, evokes comparisons with James Joyce (1882-1941) and Anthony BURGESS in its sensuous, choked, eloquent, linguistically foregrounded presentation of the victims of a radioactive accident who populate the fringes of the fragmented city, and who so hypnotically manifest the Goyaesque horrors of the scene that volunteer "normals" mutilate themselves and join the ranks of the sinking. In the story itself, however, JW exhibits a certain lack of plotting imagination, and neither tycoon Thatcher Dryden nor the megacorporation, Dryco, which he runs nearly singlehanded are particularly convincing when set against the mise en scene. Out of that venue, the protagonists of Terraplane (1988) hurtle pastwards into an ALTERNATE-WORLD version of late-1930s New York, an apartheid-ridden DYSTOPIA - the oppressed lives of Black Americans are described with haunting intimacy - whose vileness may, or may not, be seen as worse than the radiation-corrupted, corporation-dominated nightmarishness of our own new era. Somewhat less scourgingly, Heathern (1990 UK) returns to New York and to Thatcher Dryden, who on this occasion must try (he fails) to make sense of a MESSIAH figure whose fate in this venue is dourly predictable and whose humaneness seems, in this context, otherworldy. Elvissey (1993) - which tied for the 1994 PHILIP K. DICK AWARD with Richard GRANT's Through the Heart (1993) - incorporates the Elvis Presley myth into the ongoing sequence; and Random Acts of Senseless Violence (1993 UK) brings the sequence close to the present, conflating the ravaged life of a streetwise girl with the increasing entropy of a social system that has lost both energy and heart. JW's vision of the world continues, perhaps, to lack some focus, though not heat; with completion of his New York quintet, that focus will almost certainly sharpen, and the heat will burn deep. [JC]See also: MUSIC. WOMAN IN THE MOON, THE Die FRAU IM MOND. WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION In "The Image of Women in Science Fiction" (1971 Red Clay Reader) Joanna RUSS wrote, "There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women." Things have changed in the subsequent decades, chiefly due to the impact of FEMINISM and to the increasing numbers of women writing sf in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, but the absence of realistic female characters remains a glaring fault of the genre.Since GENRE SF developed in a patriarchal culture as something written chiefly by men for men (or boys), the lack of female protagonists is unsurprising. When women do appear they are usually defined by their relationship to the male characters, as objects to be desired or feared, rescued or destroyed; often, especially in recent, more sexually explicit times, women characters exist only to validate the male protagonist as acceptably masculine - that is, heterosexual. Before the 1970s even WOMEN SF WRITERS tended to reflect the prevailing view about women's place by writing about men's adventures in future worlds where women stayed home to work the control panels in automated kitchens. The main alternative to men's adventure stories was ladies' magazine fiction, in which the domestic virtues of the sweet, intuitive housewife-heroine somehow saved the day.It would be hard for even the most ardent fan to list a dozen sf novels written before 1970 which feature female protagonists: Naomi MITCHISON's MEMOIRS OF A SPACEWOMAN (1962), Robert A. HEINLEIN's Podkayne of Mars (1963), Samuel R. DELANY's BABEL-17 (1966), Alexei PANSHIN's RITE OF PASSAGE (1968), Joanna Russ's Picnic on Paradise (1968) and Anne MCCAFFREY's The Ship who Sang (1969) are probably the best known, and all date from the transitional period of the 1960s. Betty King provides a detailed and apparently exhaustive list from 1818 on in Women of the Future: The Female Main Character in Science Fiction (1984). Moreover, as Suzy McKee CHARNAS pointed out in an essay on how and why she came to write ("No-Road" in Denise Du Pont's Women of Vision [anth 1988]), it is easy to write a thoroughly sexist story around a female protagonist, and the real test of whether or not female characters are being written about as human beings is whether the protagonist is connected in any important way to other complex female characters, or if she is significantly connected only to males.Not allowed the variety or complexity of real people, women in sf have been represented most frequently by a very few stereotypes: the Timorous Virgin (good for being rescued, and for having things explained to her), the Amazon Queen (sexually desirable and terrifying at the same time, usually set up to be "tamed" by the super-masculine hero), the Frustrated Spinster Scientist (an object lesson to girl readers that career success equals feminine failure), the Good Wife (keeps quietly in the background, loving her man and never making trouble) and the Tomboy Kid Sister (who has a semblance of autonomy only until male appreciation of her burgeoning sexuality transforms her into Virgin or Wife). But of course the vast majority of male characters in sf are stereotypes too. David KETTERER in New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction and American Literature (1974), among others, has argued that the "weaknesses" of poor characterization and lack of human interest in much sf can be seen as a strength, at least in "cosmic" fictions in which individual concerns - including gender - are unimportant.Some find the lack of any female characters in much sf more disturbing than the use of stereotypes, but Gwyneth JONES (in "Writing Science Fiction for the Teenage Reader", in Where No Man has Gone Before [anth 1990] ed Lucy Arnitt) has argued that "Accepting a male protagonist on the printed page does not mean accepting one's own absence. Indeed the almost total absence of female characters makes simpler the imaginative sleight of hand whereby the teenage girl substitutes herself for the male initiate in these stories." Jones went on to argue that the "feminization" of teenage sf, through the presentation of more realistic female protagonists, "does not necessarily mean a better deal for girls", because such stories reinforce the status quo of a subordinate role for women. Although Jones was writing about teenage sf, her point may be more widely applied. Susan WOOD, in her essay "Women and Science Fiction" (in ALGOL, Winter 1978/79), expressed the desire that women should reclaim rather than reject the archetypes which lie behind the usually disparaged stereotyped characters that populate sf. Many women have done so, as well as creating new possibilities for the expression of female humanity.From the 1960s, sf was increasingly seen to have the potential to explore serious human issues, while at the same time many writers (especially those identified as members of the NEW WAVE) were rejecting the old PULP-MAGAZINE conventions in favour of experimentation and more artistic values. As more women were attracted by the changing image of sf (and here the influence of STAR TREK should not be underestimated), as sf became more than a minority taste and began to sell in numbers previously unimaginable, and as more women moved into editorial positions, the role of female characters in sf became more important not only for aesthetic, personal or political reasons but also for commercial ones: surveys have shown that more women than men buy books, so a would-be bestseller cannot afford to alienate the female audience.The old stereotypes are still around, although women writers more often give them a subversive twist: the Good Wife is married to a lesbian star-pilot, the Spinster Scientist has a rich and fulfilling sex life, the Amazon Queen triumphantly refuses to be tamed. If women writers feel able to play around with archetypes and stereotypes, male writers are more likely to avoid them for fear of being misunderstood and alienating much of their likely audience. Sometimes their efforts to include female characters are mere tokenism: a few female spear-carriers, soldiers or scientists appear, but questions of who's minding the kids and how does this apparently egalitarian society really work are never even posed. A few of the newer male writers - among them Greg BEAR, Colin GREENLAND, Paul J. MCAULEY, Ian MCDONALD and Bruce STERLING - have written novels about strong and interesting self-motivated women, although female protagonists - particularly ones who are more than a fantasy figure with an all-male supporting cast - are still more likely to be found in books by women writers.Unfortunately, these positive changes in the literature have been countered by a retrogressive movement in popular sf films, where women's roles are limited and male-determined: if involved in the action they are victims, ROBOTS or prostitutes (sometimes all three at once), otherwise they are waiting patiently for the hero in kitchen or bedroom. The role played by Sigourney Weaver in ALIEN (1979) stands out as a notable exception: a female HERO. She is just as human as the rest of the mixed-sex crew, and is menaced by the alien to the same degree and in the same way. She is no weaker because she is a woman, and no more special. But in the sequel, ALIENS (1986), the human/alien battle has become a heavily symbolic fight between two females. Weaver's character is lumbered with a stray child to make the final battle acceptable to even the most fearful of immature male viewers: this isn't a woman fighting a MONSTER, but two mothers doing what comes naturally, battling to protect their children. [LT]See also: CLICHES. WOMEN SF WRITERS In the opinion of many it was a woman, Mary SHELLEY, who created sf with Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818; rev 1831). But after such a strong start women's contributions to the genre, while never entirely absent, were not substantial until the late 1960s.As a commercial genre, sf was formed chiefly by the men who edited, wrote for and read the US PULP MAGAZINES of the 1920s and 1930s. For decades the belief that most sf readers were adolescent males imposed certain restrictions on subject matter and style - women, and women's supposed interests, were sentimentalized or ignored, and SEX was TABOO. Yet women not only read but wrote sf, sometimes under androgynous bylines, real or assumed. Pamela SARGENT has drawn attention to some of the more memorable stories written by and about women in her excellent anthologies Women of Wonder (anth 1974) and More Women of Wonder (anth 1976). Among the most popular some, like Leigh BRACKETT, C.L. MOORE and Andre NORTON, wrote vivid, action-packed adventure tales, as ungendered as their names, while others, like Mildred CLINGERMAN, Zenna HENDERSON and Judith MERRIL, wrote often sentimental stories dealing with more acceptable feminine concerns. Other women known for writing sf prior to the 1960s include Marion Zimmer BRADLEY, Miriam Allen DEFORD, Clare Winger HARRIS, Joan Hunter HOLLY, Lilith LORRAINE, Katherine MacClean, Margaret ST CLAIR, Wilmar H. SHIRAS, Evelyn E. SMITH, Francis STEVENS, Leslie F. STONE and Thea VON HARBOU. In addition, there have always been women producing borderline sf in the MAINSTREAM or in sf-related fields such as FABULATION, surrealism and ABSURDIST, experimental, GOTHIC and UTOPIAN fiction. And women have quite often been unattributed collaborators in works published under the names of their male partners, a role that has only recently begun to be recognized.By the 1960s the sf field was changing in ways that would make it more accessible and exciting to a wider audience. Younger writers, in particular, rebelled against the old pulp limitations and set about writing sf which would combine the old-fashioned SENSE OF WONDER with more sophisticated literary values. New editors, some of them women, none of them committed to the concept of a primarily adolescent readership, played a large part in this expansion. In particular, Cele GOLDSMITH encouraged many new writers during her editorship of AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC (1958-65). Ursula K. LE GUIN, now one of the most respected and influential of all contemporary sf writers, credits Cele Goldsmith with "opening the door to me".In 1972 Harlan ELLISON stated (in his intro to "When it Changed" by Joanna RUSS in Again, Dangerous Visions [anth 1972]) that "the best writers in sf today are the women" - an opinion echoed by other knowledgeable readers throughout the 1970s, occasionally with the caveat "excepting James TIPTREE Jr". Despite Robert SILVERBERG's now notorious claim that there was something "ineluctably masculine" in the Tiptree stories (in "Who is Tiptree, What is He?", intro to Tiptree's Warm Worlds and Otherwise [coll 1975]), in 1977 Tiptree was revealed to be Alice Sheldon. Of the response to her unmasking, Sheldon commented in an interview with Charles PLATT (in Dream Makers: Volume II [coll 1983]), "The feminist world was excited because, merely by having existed unchallenged for years, 'Tiptree' had shot the stuffing out of male stereotypes of women writers."The reason that sf began to change in the 1960s and 1970s was that increasingly writers were drawn to it not because of an interest in its pulp traditions but for its still largely unexplored potential. The effect of the (largely male) NEW WAVE is often cited, but the impact made on the field by such diverse writers as Le Guin, Kate WILHELM, Russ, C.J. CHERRYH and Tiptree was undoubtedly stronger and more lasting than that of any single, self-proclaimed movement. Others might agree with Suzy McKee CHARNAS (in Aurora #26, Summer 1990): "My own view of the matter was and is that in the 1960s SF was a dying or at least moribund genre (the New Wave was an effort, not very successful in my opinion, to remedy this by importing some technical stunts from the mainstream), and feminism came along in the 1970s and rescued it." ( FEMINISM.)Among the women sf writers who came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s are E.L. ARCH, Bradley, Rosel George BROWN, Octavia E. BUTLER, Charnas, Cherryh, Jo CLAYTON, Juanita COULSON, Sonya DORMAN, Suzette Haden ELGIN, Carol EMSHWILLER, M.J. ENGH, Gertrude FRIEDBERG, Phyllis GOTLIEB, Diana Wynne JONES, Lee KILLOUGH, Tanith LEE, Madeleine L'ENGLE, Le Guin, A.M. LIGHTNER, Elizabeth A. LYNN, Anne MCCAFFREY, Vonda MCINTYRE, Janet MORRIS, Doris PISERCHIA, Marta RANDALL, Kit REED, Russ, Sargent, Josephine SAXTON, Jody SCOTT, Kathleen SKY, Tiptree, Lisa TUTTLE, Joan D. VINGE, Cherry WILDER, Kate WILHELM, Chelsea Quinn YARBRO and Pamela ZOLINE.Writers who became better known in the 1980s and 1990s include Gill ALDERMAN, ANNA LIVIA, Lois McMaster BUJOLD, Pat CADIGAN, Storm CONSTANTINE, Candas Jane DORSEY, Carol Nelson DOUGLAS, Sheila FINCH, Caroline Forbes (1952- ), Karen Joy FOWLER, Sally Miller GEARHART, Mary GENTLE, Lisa GOLDSTEIN, Eileen Gunn, Barbara HAMBLY, Gwyneth JONES, Janet KAGAN, Leigh KENNEDY, Nancy KRESS, Kathe Koja, R.A. MACAVOY, Julian MAY, Judith MOFFETT, Pat MURPHY, Jane PALMER, Rachel POLLACK, Kristine Kathryn RUSCH, Melissa SCOTT, Joan SLONCZEWSKI, Sheri S. TEPPER and Connie WILLIS. In addition, a number of MAINSTREAM writers have made detours into sf, even if their publishers have not always labelled their novels as such. They include Margaret ATWOOD (THE HANDMAID'S TALE [1985]), Maureen DUFFY (The Gor Saga [1981]), Zoe FAIRBAIRNS (Benefits [1979]), Cecelia HOLLAND (Floating Worlds [1976]), Rhoda Lerman (1936- ) (The Book of the Night [1984]), Doris LESSING (the Canopus in Argos series), Marge PIERCY (WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME [1976]), Fay WELDON (The Cloning of Joanna May [1989]) and Monique WITTIG (Les guerilleres [1969; trans 1971]). Writers as diverse as Jean M. AUEL, Christine BROOKE-ROSE, Angela CARTER, Anna KAVAN, Ayn RAND, Emma TENNANT and Christa Wolf (1929- ) have also, upon occasion, been claimed for sf.The above lists make no claim to being anything like complete, but their very existence should make it clear that, while women writers of sf may still be outnumbered by men, they are by now far too numerous to be considered rare, and too various to be generalized about or compressed into a subset of "women's sf". Women contribute to all areas of the genre. Where once anthologies of stories entirely by men were customary, now they are unusual.Between 1953, when it was established, and 1967 there were no women winners of the HUGO; between 1968 and 1990 there were 21 awards to women out of 92 in the fiction categories, while of the NEBULA awards for the years 1968-90 the figures are better still, at 28 awards to women out of 91. Better again are the results of the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer, with 8 of the 19 awards to date going to women. In all cases, more men than women vote.Have women writers been discriminated against? Such things are hard to quantify or prove, and, although most women in the field can cite occasional instances of sexism (the editor who declares that sf by women doesn't sell; the disgruntled author who scents a feminist conspiracy when his novel fails to win awards; the claim from an old-time fan that the values of HARD SF are being destroyed by female editors with an innately feminine preference for fantasy), on the whole the Old Boy Network of sf has been remarkably receptive to any women who care to join. The catch is one common to most societies: those who join are expected to do so on terms already established, to follow the rules and, as newcomers, know their place. Unfortunately, even after 30 years women are still considered "newcomers" by most men, and women who become too successful or break the unspoken rules and stretch the boundaries of sf, all too often arouse male hostility. Hence the antagonism so often directed at Joanna Russ - "the single most important woman writer of science fiction" according to Sarah LEFANU (in In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction [1988]) - is probably as much for her challenging literary experimentation as for her uncompromising feminism. Presumably because she is so respected outside the genre, Le Guin is every so often unfairly accused by men who are not of having "renounced" sf.Women writers are by now a well established presence within sf, but this situation may not last. In How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983) Russ has argued, polemically but effectively, that even the most popular and influential female writers have been peculiarly subject to excision from the male-controlled canons of literary history. An economic contraction, followed by a redefinition of genre boundaries, might send written sf the way of Hollywood, where sf films are as narrowly confined to catering to the fears and desires of the adolescent US male as the old-fashioned pulp magazines ever were. [LT]See also: WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION. WONDERS OF THE SPACEWAYS UK pocketbook-size magazine, 10 numbered, undated issues 1951-4, published by John Spencer, London; ed Sol Assael and Michael Nahum, both uncredited. One of the 4 poor-quality Spencer juvenile-sf magazines, all very similar, the others being FUTURISTIC SCIENCE STORIES, TALES OF TOMORROW, and WORLDS OF FANTASY. They contain some fiction by R.L. FANTHORPE. [FHP] WONDER STORIES 1. US magazine amalgamated from AIR WONDER STORIES and SCIENCE WONDER STORIES, 66 issues as WS. Volume numeration continued from Science Wonder Stories, thus beginning with vol 2 #1. WS was published by Hugo GERNSBACK's Stellar Publishing Corporation June 1930-Oct 1933, and by Gernsback's Continental Publications, Inc. Nov 1933-Apr 1936. The title was then sold to Better Publications, to reappear as THRILLING WONDER STORIES in Aug 1936, with vol numbers continuing from WS. WS was monthly June 1930-June 1933, skipped to Aug 1933, monthly Oct 1933-Oct 1935, then 3 last issues: Nov/Dec 1935, Jan/Feb 1936 and Apr 1936. It began as a BEDSHEET-size pulp, but was forced to revert to standard PULP-MAGAZINE format Nov 1930-Oct 1931, returning to bedsheet size Nov 1931 and shrinking again from Nov 1933 until it was sold. David Lasser was managing editor until Oct 1933, being succeeded by Charles D. HORNIG, although Gernsback remained editor-in-chief throughout. Illustrator Frank R. PAUL was the cover artist for all issues.WS was Gernsback's most successful magazine. It encouraged the growth of sf FANDOM by sponsoring the SCIENCE FICTION LEAGUE in 1934. Notable stories include John TAINE's The Time Stream (Dec 1931-Feb 1932; 1946), Stanley G. WEINBAUM's classic "A Martian Odyssey" (July 1934) and Jack WILLIAMSON's "The Moon Era" (Feb 1932). John Beynon Harris (John WYNDHAM) had his first story and much of his early work in WS, and Clark Ashton SMITH published his best sf stories in it, including "City of the Singing Flame" (July 1931) and "The Eternal World" (Mar 1932). One author particularly associated with WS was Laurence MANNING, all of whose major work appeared there: "The Wreck of the Asteroid" (Dec 1932), the Stranger Club series (1933-5) and the Man who Awoke series (1933). Leslie F. STONE, a woman writer (in those days a rarity), had 5 stories in WS.If Gernsback had paid his authors more (or, in some cases, at all) the magazine might have continued longer, but by 1936 he was finding it difficult to attract decent writers, circulation had dropped, and WS was sold.2. After the demise of TWS in Winter 1955, the Wonder Stories title was resuscitated for a reprint magazine, subtitled "An Anthology of the Best in Science Fiction", ed Jim Hendryx Jr, of which there appeared only 2, widely separated, issues, dated 1957 and 1963, the first a digest, the second a pulp. These continued the TWS numeration, as vol 45, #1 and #2. [BS/PN] WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY US PULP MAGAZINE, BEDSHEET-size Fall 1929-Summer 1932, pulp-size Fall 1932-Winter 1933, 14 issues, published by Hugo GERNSBACK's Stellar Publishing Corporation as a quarterly companion to SCIENCE WONDER STORIES and AIR WONDER STORIES, and then to WONDER STORIES, the first 3 issues appearing as Science Wonder Quarterly. David Lasser was the managing editor. WSQ featured mostly space stories. A complete novel was featured in every issue, and the magazine was notable for its translations (by Francis Currier) from the German ( GERMANY), including Otto Willi GAIL's "Shot into Infinity" (1925 Germany as Der Schuss ins All; trans Fall 1929) and its sequel "The Stone from the Moon" (1926 Germany as Der Stein vom Mond; trans Spring 1930), and Otfried Von Hanstein's "Electropolis" (1928 Germany as Elektropolis; trans Summer 1930) and "Between Earth and Moon" (1928 Germany as Mond-Rak 1. Eine Fahrt ins Weltall; trans Fall 1930). There were 2 stories by the early woman pulp writer Clare Winger HARRIS, and WSQ published the 1st fan letter from Forrest J. ACKERMAN. [BS/PN] WONDER STORY ANNUAL US reprint PULP MAGAZINE published by Better Publications, 1950, and Best Books, 1951-3, ed 1950-51 Sam MERWIN Jr and 1952-53 Samuel MINES. The lead novels were reprinted from WONDER STORIES and STARTLING STORIES, the most notable being Manly Wade WELLMAN's Twice in Time (1940 Startling Stories; 1950; 1957) and Jack WILLIAMSON's "Gateway to Paradise" (1941 Startling Stories; 1953; vt Dome around America 1955. [BS] WONDER WOMAN US tv series (1974-9), based on Wonder Woman, the COMIC book inaugurated by DC COMICS in 1942. Warner Bros TV for ABC, then for CBS. The complex production history falls into 3 parts.1. The 2hr pilot for ABC, Wonder Woman (1974) dir Vincent McEveety, written John D.F. Black, starring Cathy Lee Crosby. This flopped.2. Series for ABC with a new Wonder woman, Lynda Carter: The New Original Wonder Woman, with a 1975 2hr pilot, and 12 50min episodes 1975-6. This endeavoured to recapture the feeling of the original comics. Wonder Woman (Carter) leaves her Amazon home of Paradise Island to help out the USA during WWII, taking with her a golden belt (for strength) and a golden lariat whose movements she controls. Prod Wilfred Baumes, this was perhaps the best of Wonder Woman's 3 tv phases; its writers included Jimmy Sangster, and its dirs Herb Wallerstein and Stuart Margolin. It was scheduled erratically by ABC, so never really had a chance.3. The commercially most successful phase. CBS took over the series, now retitled The New Adventures of Wonder Woman and set in the present day, but still starring Lynda Carter and made by Warner Bros; this was the version that was most widely circulated outside the USA. Now prod Charles B. Fitzsimons and Mark Rodgers, it opened with the story The Return of Wonder Woman in 1977. 2 seasons, 1 80min pilot and 45 50min episodes, 1977-9. Dirs included Jack ARNOLD, Alan Crosland, Michael Caffey, Curtis Harrington, Gordon Hessler. Writers included Stephen Kandel, Alan BRENNERT, Anne Collins.In 2 and 3 Wonder Woman (herself more a figure of fantasy than of sf, and looking rather like a busty, glitzy cheerleader) is regularly confronted by sf-style problems, ranging from a Nazi superwoman and an alien visitor in 2 to artificial volcanic eruptions, malign ANDROIDS, a disembodied brain and mind-capturing pyramids with alien occupants in 3, though for the pure-fantasy fans there was also a leprechaun. Like so much sf on TELEVISION, there was an air of camp parody about the whole thing (rather as in the Batman series whose great success 1966-8 set the pattern for this sort of SUPERHERO-on-tv enterprise). [PN] WOOD, J.A. [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. WOOD, PETER [s] Barrington J. BAYLEY. WOOD, R(OBERT) W(ILLIAM) (1868-1955) US writer and optical physicist whose sf works were written with Arthur TRAIN (whom see for details). [JC]About the author: Dr Wood, Modern Wizard of the Laboratory (1941) by William Seabrook. WOOD, SAMUEL ANDREW (1890-? ) UK author and journalist who wrote 2 minor LOST-WORLD novels, Winged Heels (1927) and, as by Robin Temple, The Aztec Temple (1955), as well as a reworking of the airborne-pirate theme, I'll Blackmail the World (1934 The Blue Book Magazine as "The Man who Bombed The World"; rev 1935). [JE]See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. WOOD, SUSAN (JOAN) (1948-1980) Canadian sf critic and academic, with a PhD in 19th-century Canadian literature, who taught English (including sf) at the University of British Columbia. An sf fan of great energy, she won a 1973 HUGO as Susan Wood Glicksohn with her then husband Mike Glicksohn for Best Fanzine (Energumen), a 2nd (now as Susan Wood again) for Best Fan Writer in 1974, and a 3rd for Best Fan Writer (tied with Richard E. GEIS) in 1977; her 4th, also for Best Fan Writer, was awarded posthumously in 1981. SW wrote much criticism, including introductions for GREGG PRESS books and a review column in ALGOL which campaigned vigorously against sexism ( FEMINISM), as did her essay in book form The Poison Maiden & The Great Bitch: Female Stereotypes in Marvel Superhero Comics (as Susan Wood Glicksohn 1974 chap; as Susan Wood 1990). An important essay was "Women and Science Fiction" (1978), reprinted in Teaching Science Fiction (anth 1980) ed Jack WILLIAMSON. She edited and introduced The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (coll 1979) by Ursula K. LE GUIN. SW's health was delicate and she drove herself too hard; her death was untimely. She wrote the CANADA entry for the 1st edn of this encyclopedia. [PN]See also: SCI FI; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION. WOOD, WALLY Working name of US illustrator Wallace A. Wood (1927-1981). His first work was in newspaper COMIC strips in the late 1940s; he soon moved to comic books, joining EC COMICS in 1951 and working on their sf titles Weird Science and Weird Fantasy. His sf-comics and war-comics work won high praise, as did his slightly later work on EC's very successful MAD Magazine, founded 1952, for which he drew the famous sequence "Superduperman". One of the most influential comics artists of the century, WW has been claimed as the best of all artists ever to work in sf in comic-book form. When EC folded its comic books in 1955 and began to concentrate on MAD, he remained as one of the senior artists.WW had already done some sf-magazine illustration (in 1953, for Planet Stories) when, in 1957, he branched out more fully into this field, mostly black-and-white interiors, especially for Gal and its sister magazines If and Worlds of Tomorrow; he also painted 6 covers for Gal. His interior illustrations were some of the finest ever printed; the chiaroscuro in his black-and-white work gave it an unmatched feeling of depth.However, WAW's first love remained comics, though he had resented the restrictions, from 1954, imposed by the Comics Code Authority. From 1966 (8 issues) and again in 1976 he published an underground magazine, Witzend, featuring stronger material, sometimes erotic. In the mid-1960s, a boom-time for comics, WAW gave up most of his sf-magazine illustration and did some good work for Warren Publications on their horror comics Creepy and Eeerie; in the 1970s he worked on Vampirella. Also important was the SUPERHERO strip Dynamo which appeared in Tower Comics's THUNDER Agents (1965-9). Some of WAW's erotic work for National Screw is collected in the book Cons de Fee ["Fairy Tails" would be a loose translation of this obscene French pun] (1977 France). He continued in comics until his suicide in 1981. [PN/JG] WOODBURY, DAVID O(AKES) (1896-1981) US writer in whose Mr Faraday's Formula (1965) enemy agents steal a GRAVITY-control device. Part of a non-sf series, the book verges on being a TECHNOTHRILLER. [JC] WOODCOTT, KEITH John BRUNNER. WOODRUFF, CLYDE [s] David V. REED. WOODS, LAWRENCE Pseudonym used on magazine stories in 1941 by Donald A. WOLLHEIM, 1 solo ("Strange Return"), 1 with Robert A.W. LOWNDES ("Black Flames"), and 1 with John Michel ("Earth Does Not Reply"). [PN] WOODS, P.F. [s] Barrington J. BAYLEY. WOOLF, VIRGINIA (1882-1941) UK writer famous for novels whose structures sensitively emblematized the forms of inner consciousness. Of sf interest is Orlando: A Biography (1928), whose androgynous hero/heroine survives from Elizabethan to modern times, changing SEX more than once, and coming ultimately to represent a vision of the nature of England itself. [JC]Other works: A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (coll 1943). WOOTTON, BARBARA (1897-1988) UK economist, academic and writer; created a life peer in 1958, becoming Baroness Wootton of Abinger. London's Burning: A Novel for the Decline and Fall of the Liberal Age (1936) was set in 1940 and described the totalitarian implications of the aftermath of a general strike. [JC] WORLDS OF FANTASY AND HORROR WEIRD TALES. WORLD OF GIANTS US tv series (1959). CBS TV. Prod and created William Alland. 1 season. Each episode 25 mins. B/w.Marshall Thompson played a man who, on a secret mission, becomes the victim of atomic radiation and is shrunk to 6in (15cm). The government keeps him on as a secret agent, using him for assignments where his small size will be an advantage. His full-size partner on these missions was played by Arthur Franz. The short-lived series was really an excuse to use all the giant-sized props left over from The INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957), which Alland had produced for Universal. [JB] WORLD ON A WIRE WELT AM DRAHT. WORLDS BEYOND US DIGEST-size magazine. 3 issues, monthly Dec 1950-Feb 1951, published by Hillman Periodicals; ed Damon KNIGHT. WB was divided between original and reprint material, and between sf and fantasy. New stories of note included "Null-P" by William TENN (Dec 1950) and Harry HARRISON's first story, "Rock Diver" (Feb 1951); Harrison also did illustrations for the magazine. Other contributors included C.M. KORNBLUTH, Richard MATHESON and Jack VANCE. Knight wrote book reviews. WB was cancelled by the publisher after adverse sales reports on #1. #2 and #3 were by then advanced in preparation and duly appeared. [MJE] WORLD SCIENCE FICTION SOCIETY HUGO. WORLD SF International association of sf professionals (not only writers, but also artists, critics, editors, agents, publishers, etc.), founded in Dublin, Sep 1976, by professionals at the First World Science Fiction Writers' Conference, and coming into operation as of the 1978 Dublin meeting. WSF's stated aim is "the general dissemination of creative sf, the furthering of scholarship, the interchange of ideas . . . the fostering of closer bonds between those who already hold such deep interests in common around the globe". Presidents have been Harry HARRISON (1978-80), Frederik POHL (1980-82), Brian W. ALDISS (1982-4), Sam J. LUNDWALL (1984-6), Gianfranco Viviani (1986-8), Norman SPINRAD (1988-90) and Malcolm EDWARDS (1990-92). Pohl instituted the Karel Award for excellence in sf translation. Under Aldiss the Harrison Award, for improving the status of sf internationally, and the President's Award, for independence of thought, were added. WSF-related books have been The Penguin World Omnibus of Science Fiction (anth 1986) ed Aldiss and Lundwall and Tales from Planet Earth (anth 1986) ed Pohl and Elizabeth Anne Hull. The 1st World SF Newsletter appeared in 1980 ed Niels DALGAARD and the 3rd in 1991 ed James Goddard. Annual meetings after 1978 were: 1979 Stockholm, Sweden; 1980 Stresa, Italy; 1981 Rotterdam, Netherlands; 1982 Linz, Austria; 1983 Zagreb, Yugoslavia; 1984 Brighton, UK; 1985 Fanano, Italy; 1986 Vancouver, Canada; 1987 Brighton, UK; 1988 Budapest, Hungary; 1989 San Marino; 1990 The Hague, Netherlands; 1991 Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China; 1993 (none in 1992) Jersey, Channel Islands, UK. [RH] WORLDS OF FANTASY 1. UK pocketbook-size magazine, 14 numbered, undated issues 1950-4, published by John Spencer, London; ed anon Sol Assael and Michael Nahum. WOF is almost identical to the other 3 Spencer juvenile-sf magazines, FUTURISTIC SCIENCE STORIES, TALES OF TOMORROW and WONDERS OF THE SPACEWAYS, all containing fiction of very low quality.2. US DIGEST-size magazine. 4 issues 1968-71, #1 published by Galaxy Publishing Corp., #2-#4 by Universal Publishing; #1-#2 ed Lester DEL REY, #3-#4 ed Ejler JAKOBSSON. This attempt to produce a fantasy companion to GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION - it published a lot of SWORD-AND-SORCERY material - might well have succeeded had it had better distribution. The standard was good: WOF published The Tombs of Atuan (WOF 1970; exp 1971) by Ursula K. LE GUIN and early stories by Michael BISHOP and James TIPTREE Jr. [FHP/PN] WORLDS OF IF SCIENCE FICTION IF. WORLDS OF THE UNIVERSE UK pocketbook-size magazine. 1 undated issue 1953, published by Gould-Light Publishing, London; ed anon (though probably Norman Light). No notable stories. Copies are rarely seen. [FHP] WORLDS OF TOMORROW US DIGEST-size magazine. 26 issues in all, originally published by Barmaray Co. (Apr 1963) and then by Galaxy Publishing Co. as a bimonthly companion to GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION and IF, Apr 1963-May 1967, 23 issues, ed Frederik POHL. The bimonthly schedule slipped when Aug 1964 was followed by Nov 1964, and it went quarterly May 1966-May 1967. WOT was briefly revived by the Universal Publishing and Distributing Co. after they bought the Galaxy group, with 3 disappointing issues published 1970-71 ed Ejler JAKOBSSON. Notable stories included Philip K. DICK's "All We Marsmen" (Aug-Dec 1963; exp vt Martian Time-Slip 1964), Samuel R. DELANY's "The Star Pit" (Feb 1967), Larry NIVEN's first novel World of Ptavvs (Mar 1965; exp 1966) and the early stories in Philip Jose FARMER's Riverworld series, including "Day of the Great Shout" (Jan 1965), which was incorporated into the HUGO-winning TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO (fixup 1971). A much-discussed article on CRYONICS by R.C.W. Ettinger (June 1963) ultimately led to the magazine publishing a symposium on the subject (Aug 1966). WOT was absorbed into its senior partner Worlds of If Science Fiction after May 1967.The UK edition, published by Gold Star, ran for 4 issues Spring-Winter 1967. [BS/PN] WORLD'S WORK TALES OF WONDER. WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL, THE Film (1959). Sol Siegel-Harbel/MGM. Dir Ranald MacDougall, starring Harry Belafonte, Inger Stevens, Mel Ferrer. Screenplay MacDougall, based on The Purple Cloud (1901) by M.P. SHIEL. 95 mins. B/w.As in Arch Oboler's FIVE (1951), this wordy film tells of a tiny group of survivors in a nuclear-bomb-ravaged USA. In this case there are 3: a young White woman, a Black man and a cynical adventurer (White and male). The film is evocative, as in the Black man's entry into the empty metropolis (although no explanation is offered for the lack of bodies) and in the final hunt through the deserted streets of New York. The plot is simple: Black man finds White woman but hesitates to form a relationship with her; White man finds both of them and wants woman, who is willing to remain with Black man; a running duel takes place between the men. Eventually they realize the futility of it all, and the film ends with all 3 walking off (rather daringly for the time) hand in hand. The script is more sophisticated than the banality of the plot would suggest, but the treatment of the racial theme is embarrassingly tentative, and compromised by the use of so handsome and light-skinned a Black as Belafonte. There were just 2 survivors in Shiel's The Purple Cloud (1901; rev 1929), on which this film is based only remotely. [JB/PN] WORLD WITHOUT END Film (1956). Allied Artists. Written/dir Edward Bernds, starring Hugh Marlowe, Nancy Gates, Rod Taylor, Lisa Montell, Nelson Leigh. 80 mins. Colour.After orbiting Mars, a spaceship goes through a timewarp. The 4 astronauts land on a post- HOLOCAUST Earth in AD2508 and find the surface inhabited by grotesque MUTANTS and giant spiders, while the remaining humans live underground - the men impotent, the women sexy, the race dying out. The astronauts stay, clearing the surface with bazookas. This is not a particularly low-budget film, and the effects (by Milton Rice) are passable, but direction and design are poor. The story is an unacknowledged inversion of H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895), with Morlock surrogates on the surface and Eloi surrogates underground. Wells's novel was to be better filmed by George PAL as The TIME MACHINE (1960). [PN/JB] WORMHOLES BLACK HOLES. WORMSER, RICHARD (EDWARD) (1908-1977) US writer in various genres. He wrote a Green Hornet comic-book/tv tie, The Green Hornet in the Infernal Light * (1966) as by Ed Friend. Under his own name and of some sf interest were Thief of Bagdad * (1961) and The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah * (1962), both film ties, and Pan Satyrus (1963). [JC] WORNER, HANS [r] GERMANY. WORTH, PETER A ZIFF-DAVIS house name used on magazine stories; it appeared in their various sf magazines 10 times 1949-51, usually concealing Chester S. GEIER or Roger Phillips Graham (Rog PHILLIPS). [PN] WOUK, HERMAN (1915- ) US writer known primarily for meaty bestsellers like The Caine Mutiny (1951) and The Winds of War (1971). His sf SATIRE, The "Lomokome" Papers (1956 Collier's; 1968), somewhat clumsily puts allegorically opposing UTOPIAN societies on the MOON and sets them at each other's throats. [JC]See also: HISTORY OF SF. WRATISLAW, A(LBERT) C(HARLES) (1862-? ) UK writer in whose King Charles & Mr Perkins (1931) a TIME MACHINE transports Perkins to Restoration England and retrieves him just before he would have been executed. [JC] WRAY, REGINALD William Benjamin HOME-GALL. WREN, M.K. Working name of US writer Martha Kay Renfroe (1938- ) whose early work - the Phoenix Legacy trilogy, comprising Sword of the Lamb (1981), Shadow of the Swan (1981) and House of the Wolf (1981) - was fantasy. A Gift Upon the Shore (1990), on the other hand, is an ambitious and eloquently written post- HOLOCAUST sf novel in which two women seek to preserve knowledge - in the form of books - for future and more fortunate generations, in the face of destructive and attemptedly murderous enmity from the religious zealots with whom one of them must learn to live. [JC/JGr] WREN, THOMAS Thomas T. THOMAS. WRIGHT, AUSTIN TAPPAN (1883-1931) US lawyer who spent much of his leisure time composing numerous manuscripts about a very large imaginary ISLAND called Islandia, a place easily described as a UTOPIA, though in fact too densely imagined and free of cognitive shaping to fit happily into that conventional category; the island was conceived as being set near the Antarctic and relating complexly to the real world. Unlike J.R.R. TOLKIEN, whose The Lord of the Rings (1954-5) originated in similar private activities, ATW died before putting his work into publishable form, and his daughter, Sylvia Wright, with the help of Mark SAXTON (whom see for his continuations), condensed a number of his manuscripts into the novel Islandia (1942; with intro by Basil DAVENPORT), an enormous book ostensibly describing the travels of a visitor to the island, and in fact providing an extremely elaborate picture of an invented alternative society and its - richly drawn - inhabitants. [JC] WRIGHT, FARNSWORTH (1888-1940) US editor. An early contributor to WEIRD TALES - his first story was "The Closing Hand" in 1923 - FW became editor in November 1924 after #13, and continued in the post until December 1939, at which point he had produced 177 issues. Under his guidance Weird Tales presented a unique mixture of horror stories, sf, occult fiction, FANTASY and SWORD AND SORCERY. In 1930 he began a companion magazine, Oriental Stories, featuring borderline-fantasy stories (many by regular Weird Tales contributors) in an exotic and largely imaginary Eastern setting. Oriental Stories became Magic Carpet in 1933 and ceased publication in 1934. Another project was a PULP-MAGAZINE edn of A Midsummer Night's Dream; FW was a Shakespeare enthusiast. He suffered from a form of Parkinson's disease which made it impossible for him even to write his name, except with a typewriter. Very soon after deteriorating health had forced him to leave Weird Tales he died. In its field, FW's Weird Tales rivals John W. CAMPBELL Jr's ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION in terms of the number of stories of lasting interest which it produced in its field. [MJE] WRIGHT, HAROLD BELL (1872-1944) US clergyman and enormously popular writer whose only sf novel, The Devil's Highway (1932) with John Lebar, pseudonym of his son Gilbert Munger Wright (1901- ), features a wicked SCIENTIST whose thought-control device suppresses the better instincts of its victims, who are then inclined to further his plots. [JC]Other work: The Uncrowned King (1910), fantasy. WRIGHT, HELEN S. (? - ) UK writer whose A Matter of Oaths (1988) engagingly presents a familiar sf character - the amnesiac protagonist who experiences flashback hints of a destiny larger than any of those around him dare contemplate - within a cogently described post- CYBERPUNK frame dominated by The Guild of Webbers, starship pilots who mediate between complex interstellar empires. [JC] WRIGHT, KENNETH [s] Lester DEL REY. WRIGHT, LAN Working name of UK writer and white-collar worker Lionel Percy Wright (1923- ) for all his fiction. He began publishing sf with "Operation Exodus" for NW in 1952, and was active for over a decade. His Johnny Dawson series in NW, about intrigues between Earth and the planet Luther, were partly assembled in Assignment Luther (1955-7 NW; fixup 1963); "Joker's Trick" (1959) and "The Jarnos Affair" (1960) remained uncollected. LW had earlier begun publishing novels with Who Speaks of Conquest? (1957 dos US). [JC]Other works: A Man Called Destiny (1958 dos US); Exile from Xanadu (1964 dos US; vt Space Born 1964 UK); The Last Hope of Earth (1965 US; vt The Creeping Shroud 1966 UK); The Pictures of Pavanne (1968 dos US; vt A Planet Called Pavanne 1968 UK).See also: MATTER TRANSMISSION. WRIGHT, S(YDNEY) FOWLER (1874-1965) UK writer. SFW worked until middle-age as an accountant, was twice married and had 10 children. In 1917 he was a founder of the Empire Poetry League and edited the League's journal Poetry, which serialized his translations of DANTE ALIGHIERI's Inferno and Purgatorio; he also edited many anthologies for the League's Merton Press, publishing some early work by Olaf STAPLEDON. SFW's first book was Scenes from the Morte d'Arthur (coll of poetry 1919) as by Alan Seymour. His first-published novel, The Amphibians: A Romance of 500,000 Years Hence (1924; vt The World Below 1953 UK), was issued by the Merton Press. He later founded Fowler Wright Books Ltd to issue his translation of the Inferno (1928) and a novel which he had written in 1920, Deluge (1928).The Amphibians describes a FAR-FUTURE Earth where mankind is extinct and new intelligent species are engaged in their own struggle for existence; its imagery was strongly influenced by Wright's work on Inferno and its structure recapitulates HOMER's Odyssey. It was meant to be the part 1 of a trilogy, but part 3 was never written and the concluding chapters of part 2 - added to part 1 in The World Below (1929; vt in 2 vols as The Amphibians 1951 US and The World Below 1951 US; vt in 2 vols as The World Below 1953 UK and The Dwellers 1953 UK) - are rather synoptic. Deluge, a DISASTER story in which most of England sinks beneath the sea - so that the Cotswolds are converted into an archipelago - enjoyed considerable critical success and was filmed in 1933 as DELUGE (with New York as the setting); SFW promptly retired from accountancy and began a second career as a writer.The Island of Captain Sparrow (1928) deliberately recalls H.G. WELLS's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) in its image of an ISLAND inhabited by satyr-like beast-men who are prey to the corrupt descendants of castaway pirates. It also features a feral girl, the first of several similar figures used by SFW to celebrate the state of Nature in opposition to the brutality of "civilized" men. Dawn (1929), a sequel to Deluge - with which it was assembled as Deluge, and Dawn (omni 1975 US) - also contains much bitter commentary on the corruptions of comfort and civilization and carries forward a Rousseau-esque glorification of Nature and insistence on the fundamentality of the Social Contract. The Margaret Cranleigh trilogy began with Dream, or The Simian Maid (1931), which carries these philosophical arguments to further extremes in telling the story of a woman transported back to a lost prehistory to witness a battle for survival between a humanoid species and ratlike predators. The 2nd volume was ultimately published - shorn of connecting material - under the pseudonym Anthony Wingrave as The Vengeance of Gwa (1935; reprinted as by SFW); and the 3rd did not appear until much later, as Spiders' War (1954 US). Beyond the Rim (1932) is a determinedly eccentric lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) story set in the Antarctic; it is much more interesting than SFW's lacklustre later works in a similar vein, The Screaming Lake (1937) and The Hidden Tribe (1938), although its sf content is only marginal.SFW's vivid short fiction of this period was assembled in The New Gods Lead (coll 1932; exp vt The Throne of Saturn 1949 US), which groups 7 vitriolic DYSTOPIAN stories under the heading "Where the New Gods Lead" (the new gods in question being Comfort and Cowardice). These include a notable fantasy of IMMORTALITY, "The Rat" (1929), a trilogy of parables about the taking over of human prerogatives by MACHINES, "Automata" (1929), and 2 polemics against SFW'S pet hates, birth control and the motor car, "P.N.40" (1929 as "P.N.40 - and Love") and "Justice".Power (1933) belongs to that subgenre of SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES in which a lone man in possession of some awesomely destructive WEAPON attempts to blackmail the world. SFW's protagonist is among the more altruistic and ambitious, but the story ultimately fades into a mere thriller. SFW visited Nazi Germany in 1934 in order to write a series of newspaper articles, and this inspired a trio of highly melodramatic future- WAR stories: Prelude in Prague: The War of 1938 (1935 Daily Mail as "1938"; 1935; vt The War of 1938 1936 US), Four Days War (1936) and Megiddo's Ridge (1937). By this time he was falling prey to old age, but he produced a final vivid image of the future in The Adventure of Wyndham Smith (1938), partly based on a short story, "Original Sin" (which ultimately saw publication in The Witchfinder [coll 1946] and in The Throne of Saturn). In the novel the inhabitants of a stagnant and sterile quasi- UTOPIAN state decide to commit mass suicide, and unleash mechanical Killers to hunt down a handful of rebels. Apart from Spiders' War and the brief parables "The Better Choice" (1955) and "First Move" (1963), none of his later work was published; all the manuscripts have been lost except for the still unpublished fantasy novel Inquisitive Angel.He also wrote numerous detective stories, all as by Sydney Fowler in the UK although some appeared as by SFW in the USA. The Bell Street Murders (1931), as Sydney Fowler, features an invention which records moving images on a screen; its first sequel, The Secret of the Screen (1933), as Fowler, has negligible sf content. The weak futuristic thriller The Adventure of the Blue Room (1945) also appeared under the Fowler byline.Despite the considerable number of his published works, SFW's literary career was a chronicle of frustrations. The 2 projects dearest to his heart - the long Arthurian epic of which Scenes from the Morte d'Arthur is but a small part, and a long historical novel about Cortez, For God and Spain - were never published. Although self-publication led him to brief fame and fortune, he failed in his ambition to become a social commentator of Wellsian status and ended up trying to resuscitate his career by reprinting his early works under the Books of Today imprint while he was editing a trade journal of that title in the late 1940s. Even The World Below, despite its classic status as a vividly exotic novel of the far future, is only half the work it was originally intended to be. Nevertheless, he was a strikingly original writer and one of the key figures in the tradition of UK scientific romance. [BS]About the author: "Against the New Gods: The Speculative Fiction of S. Fowler Wright" by Brian M. STABLEFORD, Foundation #29 (Nov 1983); Sermons in Science Fiction: The Novels of S. Fowler Wright (1994) by Mary S. Weinkauf.See also: BIOLOGY; CITIES; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; HISTORY OF SF; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; MEDICINE; ORIGIN OF MAN; ROBERT HALE LIMITED; SOCIAL DARWINISM; SOCIOLOGY; TECHNOLOGY. WRIGHT, STEPHEN (1946- ) US writer whose only novel of sf interest, M31: A Family Romance (1988), is a FABULATION in an agglutinative style reminiscent of that used by William Gaddis (1922- ) in The Recognitions (1955). Abandoned by their parents - Dot and Dash, who claim descent from the inhabitants of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) - the protagonists of the book ricochet numbly through the nightmare shopping malls and 7-11s of the modern "rural" USA. The vacuum family they make together and the horrors they commit contribute to an extremely distressing vision of the latter moments of the century. Going Native (1994) is a road-novel, searingly and hilariously told, apocalyptic in tone, but not sf. [JC] WRIGHT, WEAVER [s] Forrest J. ACKERMAN. WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST This contest, originally sponsored by L. Ron HUBBARD and later, after his death, by Bridge Publications in the USA, is between short stories or novelettes of sf or fantasy submitted by novice authors who have previously published no more than 3 short stories or 1 novelette. Contests have been held quarterly since 1984; the 3 place-getters receive cash awards as well as publication in the L. RON HUBBARD PRESENTS WRITERS OF THE FUTURE series of original anthologies. Winners of the quarterly award receive $1000; in addition, from 1985, an annual winner, chosen from the quarterly winners, receives the "L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Award" and $4000.Sums very much larger than these have been spent on publicizing the awards. This practice has aroused controversy, being seen by some as part of a campaign by the Church of SCIENTOLOGY to elevate Hubbard's status within the sf community and the literary community at large. On the one hand, Algis BUDRYS, administrator of WOTFC until 1992, says that, though he is personally an admirer of Hubbard's fiction, there is no connection between WOTFC and the Church of Scientology. On the other hand, the sponsor, Bridge Publications, was originally set up to publish textbooks of DIANETICS and Scientology; the launch parties and general publicity given by Bridge to WOTF, which appear to be funded from an almost bottomless pocket, have been so lavish as to send frissons of pleasure or disgust through the entire sf community. The company called Author Services, Inc. - active in publicizing L. Ron Hubbard - which acts as co-host with Bridge at WOTFC award ceremonies, was alleged in 1984 newspaper reports to have at that time assets of $44 million derived from the Church of Scientology.WOTFC has had its successes. The first of these has been the astonishingly prestigious panel of judges it has built up, including Gregory BENFORD, Ben BOVA, Ramsey Campbell (1946- ), Anne MCCAFFREY, C.L. MOORE, Larry NIVEN, Frederik POHL, Robert SILVERBERG, Theodore STURGEON, John VARLEY, Jack WILLIAMSON and Gene WOLFE. Only the most determined of conspiracy theorists could see these writers as representing a secret pro-Scientology agenda; it seems clear that they wish merely to assist young writers. The second success has been the writers themselves. By no means all contest winners have gone on to greater things, but Robert REED (who entered the contest as Robert Touzalin), Dave WOLVERTON and David ZINDELL have certainly produced admirable work since, as has Karen Joy FOWLER, who though not a winner has been perhaps the most distinguished of all the WOTFC graduates. The general standard of the anthologies drawn from contestants' stories has been quite high. An Illustrators of the Future Contest is run in parallel. The WOTFC programme also includes writers' workshops, directed by Budrys in association with such other writers as Orson Scott CARD, Tim POWERS and Ian WATSON. These workshops are notable for being - at least in some sessions - based very specifically on advice to writers originally formulated by Hubbard many decades ago. Those who do not accept Hubbard as one of sf's real craftsmen, though he certainly could write vividly and excitingly, see an irony in this.The listing below is by the year in which the awards ceremony was held, and refers to work of the previous year. Those named for 1985 are quarterly winners; the first "L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Award" proper was presented the following year. [PN]Winners:1985: Dennis J. Pimple; Jor Jennings; David ZINDELL1986: Robert Touzalin (Robert REED)1987: Dave WOLVERTON1988: Nancy Farmer1989: Gary W. Shockley1990: James Gardner1991: James C. Glass WU, WILLIAM F(RANKING) (1951- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "By the Flicker of the One-Eyed Flame" for Andromeda 2 (anth 1977) ed Peter WESTON, and who has produced considerable work in various genres, receiving nominations for various awards; several tales make use of his own Chinese-US background. His novels are less impressive. The first, Masterplay (fixup 1987), though not set in a franchised GAME-WORLD, flirts with the intoxications of a role-playing venue whose outcomes determine real events. The protagonist of Hong on the Range (1989) had appeared earlier in "Hong's Bluff" (1985). The Shade of Lo Man Gong (1988 Pulphouse; 1991 chap) is also fantasy. His other books have been ties: 2 tales in the Robot City sequence, Isaac Asimov's Robot City #3: Cyborg * (1987) and #6: Perihelion * (1988); Dr Bones #2: The Cosmic Bomber * (1989); and a Time Tours tale, Robert Silverberg's Time Tours #1: The Robin Hood Ambush * (1990); 6 volumes of Isaac Asimov's Robots in Time sequence: #1 Predator* (1993), #2 Marauder *(1993), #3 Warrior* (1993), #4 Dictator* (1994), #5 Emperor *(1994) and #6 Invader* (1994); and Mutant Chronicles: In Lunacy *(1993). [JC]Other work: Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850-1940 (1982); Shaunessy Fong (1992 chap); Wong's Lost and Found Emporium (coll 1992). WUCKEL, DIETER Bruce Bingham CASSIDAY. WU DINGBO (1941- ) Chinese academic and sf scholar based at the English Department of the Shanghai International Studies University. His PhD in English is from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, his dissertation being titled "Utopias by American Women". With Patrick Murphy he ed Science Fiction from China (anth 1989 US), which contains 8 Chinese sf stories and a chronological bibliography. He is a member of WORLD SF and has had more than 40 articles and translations, in Chinese and English, published in the USA and China. He wrote the CHINESE SF entry in this encyclopedia. [PN]Other works as editor: Selections of American Science Fiction (anth 1983); Star Ducks (anth 1983). WU FANG The MYSTERIOUS WU FANG . WUL, STEFAN Pseudonym of French dental surgeon and writer Pierre Pairault (1922- ), who swept onto the sf scene with 11 consistent and imaginative novels, all published 1956-9. Niourk (1957) is a J.G. BALLARD-like account of a drowned world. Oms en serie ["Oms by the Dozen"] (1957) inspired the animated film La PLANETE SAUVAGE (1973). The apparently human protagonist of Le temple du passe (1958; trans Ellen Cox as The Temple of the Past 1973 US), having crashed on an ALIEN planet, attempts to save his colleagues after they have all been swallowed by an indigenous whale, enters SUSPENDED ANIMATION, and is discovered eons later by genuine human folk and identified as a survivor of ATLANTIS. After 1959, SW fell silent until the appearance of Noo (1977), a lengthy and flamboyant saga which, like his earlier novels, shows a deep understanding of the traditions of US pulp sf. [MJ/JC]Other works: Retour a O ["Back to O"] (1956); Rayons pour Sidar ["Rays for Sidar"] (1957); La peur geante ["The Immense Fear"] (1957); L'orphelin de Perdide ["The Orphan from Perdide"] (1958); La mort vivante ["Living Death"] (1958); Piege sur Zarkass ["Trap on Zarkass"] (1958); Terminus 1 (1959); Odyssee sous controle ["Controlled Odyssey"] (1959).See also: FRANCE; UNDER THE SEA. WULFF, EVE [r] James L. QUINN. WURF, KARL [s] George H. SCITHERS. WURLITZER, RUDOLF (1937- ) US novelist and screenwriter, most of whose tales may be read as FABULATIONS in which sf elements are bleakly pickled. Nog (1969; vt The Octopus UK), Flats (1970) and Quake (1972) share an apocalyptic mise en scene similar in feeling to, but not clearly identified as being, the post- HOLOCAUST world so familiar to sf readers. Slow Fade (1984) verges on similar territory. [JC] WYATT, B.D. [s] Spider ROBINSON. WYATT, PATRICK Pseudonym of a UK writer, possibly female. PW's Irish Rose (1975) is a love story set in a world where almost all white women have died - except in Ireland - as a result of taking the Pill. The RELIGION of the frustrated male population is, perhaps predictably, misogynist. [JC] WYKES, ALAN (1914- ) Prolific UK writer, mainly of nonfiction, whose sf SATIRE Happyland (1952) depicts an arcadian fantasy- ISLAND in which happiness is literally obtainable. A UK magnate turns the place into a holiday camp; a new kind of bomb finally eliminates it. [JC] WYLDE, THOMAS (1946- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Target of Opportunity" for Gal in 1974, and who has continued to produce short fiction regularly, some of it HARD SF tinged with ironies. His novels have all been ties: 2 tales in the Alien Speedway sequence, Roger Zelazny's Alien Speedway #2: Pitfall * (1988) and #3: The Web * (1988); and 2 in the Dr Bones sequence, Dr Bones #3: Garukan Blood * (1989) and the last in the series, #6: Journey to Rilla * (1990). [JC] WYLIE, DIRK Name adopted by Joseph H. Dockweiler, a member of the FUTURIANS fan group, for several stories written in collaboration with Frederik POHL. C. M. KORNBLUTH also had a hand in one. "Highwayman of the Void" (1944) is by Pohl alone. [BS] WYLIE, PHILIP (GORDON) (1902-1971) US author who became notorious for his penetrating surveys of US mores and behaviour, and who coined the term "Momism" to describe the US tendency to sacralize motherhood, thus making family dynamics and morality impenetrable to reflection; outside sf he probably remains best remembered for Generation of Vipers (1942), where the coinage appeared. In the sf field he was most significant for 4 works: Gladiator (1930), filmed as The Gladiator (1938), about a young man endowed with superhuman strength, a tale directly responsible for the appearance of the comic-book hero SUPERMAN (though there PW's traditional scepticism about the relationship of a superior being to normal humanity was safely displaced onto the morose Clark Kent); When Worlds Collide (1933) and its sequel, After Worlds Collide (1934), both with Edwin BALMER, a retelling of the Noah's ark legend involving the END OF THE WORLD and interplanetary flight (the 1st vol was adapted into an sf COMIC strip and a successful film, WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE [1951]); and The Disappearance (1951), which ingeniously assaults the double standard through a tale in which the men and women of Earth disappear from one another, having been suddenly segregated into 2 PARALLEL WORLDS.The first 3 of these novels were published early in PW's career, the period during which he produced his most highly regarded single work, Finnley Wren (1934), a baroque anatomy in fictional terms of the young century into which were embedded 2 tales of sf interest, "An Epistle to the Thessalonians" and "Epistle to the Galatians". Other work from the 1930s included The Murderer Invisible (1931), a tale inspired by H.G. WELLS's The Invisible Man (1897) (with R.C. SHERRIFF, PW scripted the 1933 film version of The INVISIBLE MAN ); the screenplay for The ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932), adapted from Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896); The Savage Gentleman (1932), in which a child is brought up isolated from humanity, and excoriates the social world when finally exposed to it; and scripts for 2 further films, The King of the Jungle (1933) and Murders in the Zoo (1933).In the early 1940s his attention became fixed upon the apocalyptic implications of nuclear energy, and in "The Paradise Crater" (October 1945 Blue Book) - upon whose earlier submission to American Magazine he was put under house arrest for undue prescience - he described a high-tech post-WWII 1965 threatened by an underground Nazi attempt to rule the world through the use of atomic bombs; fortunately the hero blows up the villains' Californian HQ, causing a tsunami which takes care of Japan as well. In Blunder: A Story of the End of the World (1946 chap), atomic experiments blow up the entire planet. In several later works PW continued to address the new vulnerability of the world. Titles include The Smuggled Atom Bomb (1951 Saturday Evening Post; in Three to be Read [coll 1951]; 1956), "Philadelphia Phase" (1951), The Answer (1955 chap) - a pacifist fantasy - Tomorrow! (1954) and Triumph (1963), the 2 latter novels being pleas for a nuclear Civil Defence. Towards the end of his life he turned from atomic DISASTER to ecological disaster in The End of the Dream (1972) ( ECOLOGY) and a The Name of the Game tv tie, Los Angeles: A.D. 2017 * (1971). He also wrote an essay on sf, "Science Fiction and Sanity in an Age of Crisis", which appeared in Modern Science Fiction (anth 1953) ed Reginald BRETNOR.PW was a highly successful commercial writer, much of whose work pretended to no more than entertainment value. In his sf, however, though he never abandoned a commercial idiom, he gave something like full rein to the anatomizing and apocalyptic impulses which made him, during his life, a figure of controversy to his large readership. [JC]Other works: The Golden Hoard (1934) with Edwin Balmer, a mystery; Night unto Night (1944), a ghost story; The Spy who Spoke Porpoise (1969).About the author: "Philip Wylie" in Explorers of the Infinite (1963) by Sam MOSKOWITZ; Still Worlds Collide: Philip Wylie and the End of the American Dream (1980 chap) by Clifford P. Bendan.See also: DYSTOPIAS; FEMINISM; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; INVISIBILITY; NUCLEAR POWER; POLLUTION; SEX; SOCIOLOGY; SPACESHIPS; SUPERMAN. WYNDHAM, JOHN That fraction of his full name used by UK writer John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (1903-1969) after WWII, and by far his best-known byline; before WWII, he had signed work as John Beynon Harris, John Beynon, Wyndham Parkes, Lucas Parkes and Johnson Harris. As well as changing names with frequency, JW often revised - or allowed others to revise - works from early in his working life; at times this led (as with Planet Plane; see below) to an excessive number of versions of unimportant titles.As a whole, JW's career broke into 2 parts: before WWII and after it, when he became Wyndham. His first career was inconspicuous. He began publishing sf in 1931 with "Worlds to Barter" as by John Beynon Harris for Wonder Stories, and contributed adventure sf and juveniles to various UK magazines throughout the 1930s. Some of this early work was assembled as Wanderers of Time (coll 1973) as by JW, the title story having been reprinted earlier as Love in Time (1933 Wonder Stories as "Wanderers of Time" as by John Beynon Harris; 1945 chap) as by Johnson Harris; most of the contents of Exiles on Asperus (coll 1979) as by John Beynon were also pre-WWII. His first novel, The Secret People (1935 as by John Beynon; rev 1964 US; text restored 1972 UK as by JW), was a juvenile sf adventure set in a underground world threatened by a project to transform the Sahara into a lake for irrigation purposes. Planet Plane (1936 Passing Show as "Stowaway to Mars" as by John Beynon; full text 1936 as by John Beynon; cut 1937 in Modern Wonder vt "The Space Machine"; differing cut [by another hand] vt Stowaway to Mars 1953; text restored 1972 as by JW) was a rather well told, though only intermittently subtle, narrative of humanity's first space flight to Mars, where Vaygan the Martian and the machines destined to succeed his dying species deal swiftly with 3 competing sets of Earthlings who have landed almost simultaneously. Vaygan himself impregnates Joan, the stowaway of the magazine title; given the moral strictures then applying to magazine fiction, it is unsurprising that she dies in childbirth and that her child is deemed illegitimate. The sequel, "Sleepers of Mars" (1938 Tales of Wonder as by John Beynon; as title story in Sleepers of Mars [coll 1973] as by JW), deals merely with some stranded Russians, not with the miscegenate offspring. In Bound to be Read (1975), the memoirs of UK publisher Robert Lusty, the John Beynon Harris of these years appears as a rather diffident, obscure, lounging individual at the fringes of the literary and social world; there was no great reason to suppose he would ever erupt into fame.WWII interrupted JW's writing career, and his later works showed a change in basic subject matter and a much more careful concern for the responses of the middle-class audience he was now attempting to reach in slick journals like COLLIER'S WEEKLY. Where much of his pre-WWII tales were SPACE OPERAS leavened with the occasional witty aside or passage, JW's post-WWII novels - most notably The Day of the Triffids (1951 US; rev [and preferred text] 1951 UK; orig version vt Revolt of the Triffids 1952 US), filmed as The DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1963), and The Kraken Wakes (1953; rev vt Out of the Deeps 1953 US), both assembled with Re-Birth (1955 US; rev vt The Chrysalids 1955 UK) as The John Wyndham Omnibus (omni 1964) - present an eloquent post-trauma middle-class UK response to the theme of DISASTER, whether caused by the forces of Nature, alien INVASIONS, EVOLUTION or Man's own nuclear warfare. JW did not invent the UK novel of secretly-longed-for-disaster, or what Brian W. ALDISS has called the COSY CATASTROPHE, for this had reached mature form as early as 1885, with the publication of Richard JEFFERIES's retrospective After London, or Wild England, and the techniques for giving actuality to the moment of crisis had been thoroughly established, by H.G. WELLS and others, well before WWI; but he effectively domesticated some of its defining patterns: the city (usually London) depopulated by the catastrophe; the exodus, with its scenes of panic and bravery; and the ensuring focus on a small but growing nucleus of survivors who reach some kind of sanctuary in the country and prepare to re-establish Man's shaken dominion. UK writers as diverse as John CHRISTOPHER, Aldiss and M. John HARRISON have used the pattern with notable success. Their natural tendency has been somewhat to darken JW's palette and to widen its social relevance, for his protagonists and their women tend to behave with old-fashioned decency and courage, rather as though they were involved in the Battle of Britain, a time imaginatively close to him and to his markets.Three considerably overlapping story collections assembled shorter material produced after WWII: Jizzle (coll 1954), Tales of Gooseflesh and Laughter (coll 1956 US) and The Seeds of Time (coll 1956). In them, JW again demonstrated his skill at translating sf situations into fundamentally comfortable tales of character, however prickly their subject matter might be. In the UK, though not in the USA, he was marketed as a middlebrow writer of non-generic work, and was not strongly identified with sf.Though published and associated with the cosy catastrophe tales, Re-Birth - JW apparently preferred the title The Chrysalids, by which the book has always been known in the UK - marked a new phase, in which the invasion comes not from abroad but in the form of MUTANTS who must survive in a normal world, and whose threat to "normal" humans was expressed in bleakly Social Darwinist terms; in the end, a somewhat traumatized "cosy" normalcy is retained when the novel's mutant protagonists are forced to leave the human hearth. In his next - The Midwich Cuckoos (1957; rev 1958 US; vt Village of the Damned 1960 US), filmed as VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960) and as CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1963) - the incursion is unqualifiedly inimical: the ALIEN invaders who inseminate the women of Midwich, and the consequent very effectively spooky offspring, mark a decided inturning from the comfortable assumptions of earlier books. Later novels, like Trouble with Lichen (1960; rev 1960 US), are conspicuous for their facetious unease, and it might be suggested that the potency of JW's impulse to cosiness may well have derived from some profound cultural and/or personal insecurity he was unable to articulate directly. But he wrote effectively for a specific UK market at a specific point in time - the period of recuperation that followed WWII - and he will be remembered primarily for the half decade or so during which he was able to express in telling images the hopes, fears and resurgent complacency of a readership that recognized a kindred spirit. During that period, in the UK and Australia at least, he was probably more read than any other sf author. As late as 1992, his books appeared regularly on school syllabuses in the UK. [JC]Other works: The Outward Urge (coll of linked stories: 1959; with 1 story added, rev 1961), published as by JW and Lucas Parkes; Consider Her Ways & Others (coll 1961) and The Infinite Moment (coll 1961 US), 2 titles whose contents are similar, though each book was conceived separately; Chocky (1963 AMZ; exp 1968 US); The Best of John Wyndham (coll 1973; without intro or bibliography vt The Man from Beyond and Other Stories 1975; full version in 2 vols vt The Best of John Wyndham 1932-1949 1976 and The Best of John Wyndham 1951-1960 1976) ed Angus WELLS; Web (1979); John Wyndham (omni 1980) assembling The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, The Seeds of Time, The Midwich Cuckoos and Trouble with Lichen.About the author: John Wyndham, Creator of the Cosy Catastrophe: A Working Bibliography (latest rev 1989 chap) by Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: BOYS' PAPERS; CHILDREN IN SF; CLICHES; FEMINISM; GOTHIC SF; HISTORY OF SF; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; IMMORTALITY; MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; MONSTERS; MUSIC; PSI POWERS; PUBLISHING; RADIO; SEX; UFOS; VENUS. WYNNE-JONES, DIANA Diana Wynne JONES. WYNNE-TYSON, ESME [r] J.D. BERESFORD. WYSS, JOHAN RUDOLF (1781-1830) Swiss philosopher and writer, of sf interest for Der Schweizerische Robinson (1812-13; trans - perhaps by William Godwin [1756-1836] - as The Family Robinson Crusoe 1814 UK; new trans as The Swiss Family Robinson 1818 UK), which, together with the tale which inspired it, Daniel DEFOE's Robinson Crusoe (1719), served as a central model for sf tales of the COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS. (For fuller discussion ROBINSONADE.) [JC] |