AMIS, Martin (Louis)

(1949-)

   UK writer, son of Kingsley AMIS. From the first his novels have threatened and distressed their protagonists - and their readers - with narrative displacements that gnaw away at consensual reality, so that moments of normality in his work are, like as not, intended to reveal themselves as forms of entrapment. His interest in sf-like (and sf-mocking) venues dates back to his second novel, Dead Babies (1975), set in an indistinct NEAR FUTURE and featuring a protagonist who has made his pile by working at a local abortion factory. MA was responsible for the screenplay for SATURN 3 (1980), though Steve GALLAGHER wrote the book tie. Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) - which took its title from Jean-Paul Sartre's definition of Hell, in Huis Clos (1945; trans Stuart Gilbert as In Camera 1946 UK), as being other people - is an afterlife fantasy. Einstein's Monsters (coll 1987) assembles several sf stories variously concerned with the decay of the world into HOLOCAUSTS, nuclear and otherwise. London Fields (1989) is set in 1999 in a world approaching a dread millennium. Time's Arrow (1991) - which begins, as does Other People, at the moment at which its protagonist awakens into a radically displaced world - is a full and genuine sf novel, based on the premise that the arrow of time has been reversed (MA's acknowledged sf sources for this premise run from Philip K.DICK's Counter-Clock World 1967 to Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969), but very much complexifies the implications of the conceit by making the protagonist an old Nazi, whose involvement in the death camps now becomes a hymn to life. Throughout the book, the reversal of the 20th century reads as a reprieve. It is a tale whose joys encode ironies so grim that the happier moments of return and redemption are impossible to read without considerable pain. Time's Arrow was, inevitably, received as a FABULATION; at the same time, it reads with all the clarity of reportage. See also: PERCEPTION; TIME TRAVEL.