CONSTANTINE, Storm

(1956-)

   UK writer whose name, initially a pseudonym, is now her name for all purposes. Her most successful work to date is probably the Wraeththu trilogy which began her career: The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit (1987), The Bewitchments of Love and Hate (1988) and The Fulfilments of Fate and Desire (1989), all three assembled as Wraeththu (omni 1993). The sequence follows the rise of a hermaphroditic race from men (not, at least initially, from women), who take possession of a post- HOLOCAUST Earth devastated by war and pollution. The books focus on the question of whether the Wraeththu, mystically aware and symbolically balanced between male and female yet frequently fascinated by violence and destruction, will prove to be any better than the humans they replace. The Monstrous Regiment (dated 1989 but 1990) is set on a colony world where FEMINISM has gone disastrously wrong and the psychotic ruler - the Dominatrix - plans to confine all men to compounds and milk them for semen to produce children. The sequel, Aleph (1991), is less inflamed. In Hermetech (1991) a woman saves an ecologically damaged Earth by means of a sexual coupling, the energies from which are technologically redirected into the planet's "consciousness". SC's novels, which are not really set within an sf framework, give equal weight to the underlying assumptions of science and modern pagan magick. They are all fundamentally concerned with sex and gender (especially androgyny), approached through the realities and potentials of both the male and female experience, a technique very considerably sophisticated in Calenture (1994), whose immortal protagonist (IMMORTALITY) traces - in his imagination, and ultimately in truth - two characters he has in a sense created as they trek through a world of CITIES whose wild divergences offer considerable scope for loose but invigorating SATIRE. Her writing continues to be vigorous, erotic, highly visual, aesthetically informed by a late punk/Goth sensibility, occasionally somewhat crudely executed, and linguistically shaped by an unusual fusion of intensely contemporary slang and ritualistic "High Style".

   NT

   Other works: Burying the Shadow (1992); When the Angels Came (1992 chap); Sign for the Sacred (1993).See also: CYBERPUNK; ESP; GAMES WORKSHOP; INTERZONE; NEW WORLDS.