ELGIN, Suzette Haden

   Working name of US poet, author and teacher Patricia Anne Suzette Wilkins Elgin (1936-) for her sf. She combines writing with a professional specialization in LINGUISTICS, having a PhD in linguistics from the University of California, San Diego; she was a professor of linguistics at San Diego State University 1972-80, now emeritus, and has published widely in her specialist field. Her sf began in 1969 with "For the Sake of Grace" in FSF, which was incorporated into At the Seventh Level (1972), part of an ongoing series featuring the interstellar adventures of Trigalactic Intelligence Service agent Coyote Jones; with The Communipaths (1970 dos) and Furthest (1971), it was assembled as Communipath Worlds (omni 1980). Further titles, Star-Anchored, Star-Angered (1979) and Yonder Comes the Other End of Time (1986), did little to lessen the somewhat distressing discrepancy between the ramshackleness of the Coyote Jones plots and the terse eloquence of their descriptions of the meaning-systems of and COMMUNICATION with alien cultures, in which the condition of women (particularly in Furthest) is described with sufficient point that the books are used as FEMINIST texts.A second series, the Ozark trilogy - Twelve Fair Kingdoms (1981), The Grand Jubilee (1981) and And then There'll be Fireworks (1981), assembled as The Ozark Trilogy (omni 1982) - cannot be said to solve her inability to find plots of a sufficient knottiness to hold her attention (the young heroine of the series, whose magic secretly rules the planet Ozark, is in a coma for much of the final volume); but SHE's linguistic inventiveness, and her light-hearted detailing of the magic-based Ozark culture, give the books a charm they do not convey in synopsis. (Yonder Comes the Other End of Time is also set in this milieu.) Far more interesting, though still fumblingly plotted, is SHE's third series, the Native Tongue trilogy, comprising Native Tongue (1984), The Judas Rose (1987) and Earthsong (1994), which is based on a lame initial premise - a 1991 Amendment to the US Constitution declares women inferior to men on the basis of "scientific" evidence - which fails to significantly hamstring the heart of the book: tightly narrated tales of the creation of a "womanlanguage" for self-protection (though the tongue itself is only fleetingly presented). The caricatured unpleasantness of almost all men, which both heightens and trivializes the first volume, becomes less significant in the second; superior ALIENS have arrived, and the fragile carapace of male superiority gets short shrift; and in the third volume, women are forced by an alien quarantine - Earth has been sealed off because the human species is so violent - to work out an end to the "hunger" which leads to typical male behaviour. But the pleasures and lessons of SHE's texts continue to lie more in texture than in premise.In 1978, SHE founded the SCIENCE FICTION POETRY ASSOCIATION.

   JC

   See also: POETRY.