RANDALL, Marta

(1948-)

   US writer and editor who has taught in several sf writing workshops and served in the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA as vice-president 1981-2 and president 1982-4. She began publishing sf with "Smack Run" in New Worlds 5 (anth 1973 ed Michael MOORCOCK) as by MartaBergstresser; the surname, her first husband's, was used only on this one occasion. Her stories since then have not been frequent, but are almost always of high quality, tightly and densely written, even epigrammatic at points, and generally impart elements of FEMINIST discourse, with unbemused clarity of effect, to genre material. The intense force of a late tale like "Lapidary Nights" (1987) derives at least in part-though no "didactic" argument occupies the foreground - from its thoroughassimilation of a feminist agenda.MR's first and perhaps most successful novel, Islands (1976; rev 1980), movingly depicts the life of a mortal woman in an age when IMMORTALITY is medically achievable for all but a few. To cope with her world she plunges into the study of archaeology, and makes a discovery which enables her to transcend her corporeal life. In A City in the North (1976) an ALIEN species self-destructs in a morallydubious response to the colonizing presence on their planet of the human race. The Kennerin or Newhome sequence - Journey (1978) and Dangerous Games (1980) - also treats its colony-world setting with some ambivalence,for the Kennerin family's decision to create a UTOPIA on the planet they own has complex consequences, some of them relating to ECOLOGY. The Sword of Winter (1983), like some of her later short fiction, is fantasy, though with PLANETARY-ROMANCE features; and Those who Favor Fire (1984) is a near-future DYSTOPIA set in an Apocalypse-prone California much like today's. With Robert SILVERBERG, MR edited 2 vols of the ongoing New Dimensions sequence, New Dimensions 11 (anth 1980) and \#12 (anth 1981);and was responsible solo for The Nebula Awards 19 (anth 1984). In the later 1980s she was less active as a writer, concentrating at least in part on the construction of "interactive time-travel games" (GAME-WORLDS) for the California State Department of Mental Health; but her fiction, when it appeared, remained vividly alive, and she has begun to publish mysteries, with Growing Light (1993) as by Martha Conley.

   JC

   See also: ISLANDS.