ANDERSON, Kevin J(ames)

(1962-)

   US technical writer and author who began publishing sf with Luck of the Draw in Space \& Time 63 in 1982, and who gradually became a prolific contributor of short fiction and articles to various sf journals, over 100 items having been published by 1992. His first novel, Resurrection, Inc. (1988), combines elements of the usual sf near-future DYSTOPIA with elements of the horror novel, reanimated bodies serving a corrupt society as a worker-class. There followed the Gamearth trilogy - Gamearth (1989), Gameplay (1989) and Game's End (1990) - which treats with some verve a GAME-WORLD crisis involved the coming to life of game-bound personas who (or which) refuse to be cancelled. More interestingly, Lifeline (1990) with Doug BEASON sets up and solves a technically complex sequence of problems in space after a nuclear HOLOCAUST (the result of a USSR-US contretemps of the sort which, unluckily for the authors, had in the months before publication abruptly become much less likely) has stripped four habitats of all Earth support; the Filipino station boasts a GENETIC-ENGINEERING genius who can feed everyone, a US station has the eponymous monofilament, and so on. Some of the protagonists carrying on the quadripartite storyline are of interest in their own right. If one puts aside the whiplashes of Earth's realtime history, the book stands as a fine example of HARD SF and a gripping portrayal of the complexities of near space. The Trinity Paradox (1991), also with Beason, treats the now-standard sf TIME-PARADOX tale with overdue seriousness, suggesting that untoward moral consequences attend the sudden capacity of its protagonist - who has been accidentally timeslipped back to Los Alamos in 1943 - to stop nuclear testing in its tracks.

   See also: MEDICINE; NUCLEAR POWER; REINCARNATION.