STRIEBER, Whitley

(1945-)

   US writer, much better known for horror novels like The Wolfen (1978) and The Hunger (1981) than for his sf. War Day: And the Journey Onward (1984) with James Kunetka (1944) is a remarkably detailed post- HOLOCAUST tour of the USA after a 1988 nuclear conflict. Wolf of Shadows (1985) is a juvenile set in a post-holocaust nuclear winter. Nature's End (1986), again with Kunetka, is set in a NEAR FUTURE world devastated by OVERPOPULATION (see also ECOLOGY). Communion: A True Story (1987) and Transformation: The Breakthrough (1988) purport to be nonfictional accounts of his encounters with visiting ALIEN intelligences (UFOS). Communion was filmed as COMMUNION (1989). Also centred on ufology is hissf novel Majestic (1989; rev 1990), whose subject is the so-called Roswell Incident of 1947 (when, some claim, a UFO crashed in the New Mexico desertand the US Government mounted an extraordinary cover-up that persists to this day); putatively based on meticulously researched background detail, the novel incorporates, without acknowledgement or permission, a summary derived from secondary sources of David LANGFORD's fictional An Account of a Meeting with Denizens of Another World, 1871 (1979 as by William Robert Loosley, ed Langford) (PSEUDO-SCIENCE).

   JC

   Other works: Black Magic (1982); The Night Church (1983); Cat Magic (1986 as Jonathan Barry with WS; 1987 as WS alone); The Wild (1991); Unholy Fire (1992); The Forbidden Zone (1993).

   See also: PARANOIA.