ACKER, Kathy

(1948-)

   US-born writer and playwright, in the UK for many years before returning to the USA in 1989. KA expresses an apocalyptic sense of the latterday world in works whose tortured absurdity (FABULATION) sometimes catches the reader by surprise, or transfixes the spectator of one of her plays, which have been as a whole perhaps more telling than her prose. The Birth of the Poet (staged 1984 Rotterdam; in Wordplays 5, anth 1986) runs a gamut from the nuclear HOLOCAUST of the first act to the picaresque jigs and jags of the second and third. Two novels - Don Quixote (1986), a surrealistic afterlife fantasy, and Empire of the Senseless (1988), which features the not-quite terminal coupling of fleshly beings and ROBOTS - are of some interest. Her use of sf icons and decor in this book resembles that of William S.BURROUGHS, especially in the homage to CYBERPUNK it contains, conveyed by cut-ups of text by William GIBSON.