ALLEN, Roger MacBride

(1957-)

   US writer who began writing with a SPACE-OPERA series, The Torch of Honor (1985) and Rogue Powers (1986), whose considerable impact may seem excessive to anyone familiar only with the books in synopsis, as neither might have appeared to offer anything new. The Torch of Honor begins with a scene all too evocative of Robert A.HEINLEIN's sf juveniles from three decades earlier, as a batch of space cadets graduates from academy into interstellar hot water after learning - in a scene which any viewer of John Ford's Cavalry Westerns would also recognize - of the death of many of their fellows in a space encounter. But RMA, while clearly making no secret of his allegiance to outmoded narrative conventions, remained very much a writer of the 1980s in the physical complexity and moral dubiety of the Galaxy his crew enters, fighting and judging and having a fairly good time in the task of saving planets. The second novel, which features a no-nonsense female protagonist and a lovingly described ALIEN culture, builds on the strengths of the first while disengaging to some degree from the debilitating simplicities of military sf. Orphan of Creation (1988), a singleton, demonstrates with greater clarity than the series the clarity and scientific numeracy of RMA's mind and narrative strategies. The story of a Black anthropologist who discovers in the USA the bones of some Australopithecines who had been transported there by slave traders, the novel gives an impressive accounting of the nature of ANTHROPOLOGY as a science, and mounts a welcome attack on the strange 1980s vogue for Creationism. Farside Cannon (1988), in which the NEAR FUTURE Solar System witnesses political upheaval on time-tested grounds, and The War Machine (1989) with David A.DRAKE, part of the latter's Crisis of Empire sequence, were sufficiently competent to keep interest in RMA alive. Supernova (1991), with Eric KOTANI, relates, again with scientific verisimilitude, the process involved in discovering that a nearby star is due to go supernova and flood Earth with hard radiation. The Modular Man (1992) deals complexly with the implications of a ROBOT technology sufficiently advanced for humans to transfer their consciousnesses into machines. But potentially more interesting than any of these titles is the Hunted Earth sequence, comprising The Ring of Charon (1991) and The Shattered Sphere (1994). After the passing of a beam of phased gravity-waves - a new human invention - has awakened a long dormant semi-autonomous being embedded deep within the Moon, the Earth is shunted via wormhole to a new solar system dominated by a multifaceted culture occupying a DYSON SPHERE. The remnants of humanity must work out - over the course of the second volume - where Earth is while countering, or coming to terms with, the attempted demolition of the Solar System to make a new sphere. Although the human cultures described in the first volume are unimaginatively presented, the exuberance of RMA's large-scale plotting (and thinking) makes it seem possible that Hunted Earth will become one of the touchstone galactic epics of the 1990s. Other Works: Isaac Asimov's Caliban (1993) and its sequel, Isaac Asimov's Inferno (1994), both tied to ASIMOV's Robot universe.

   See also: ASTEROIDS; BLACK HOLES; MOON; OUTER PLANETS; WEAPONS.