FINCH, Sheila (Rosemary)

(1935-)

   UK-born writer, in the USA from 1962 or earlier, who began publishing sf with "The Confession of Melakos" for Sou-wester in 1977. Her first novel, Infinity's Web (1985), rather confusedly describes the lives of five versions of one protagonist who live in various ALTERNATE WORLDS, and who gradually gain a sense of the mutual web they inhabit. Though far more devoted to generic pleasures than Joanna RUSS in THE FEMALE MAN (1975), whose structure is superificially similar, the novel stillgenerates a clear and telling FEMINIST perspective. Her professional training in linguistics permeates her second novel, Triad (1986), another very full story, involving a woman-run Earth government, a female mission to a planet where several ALIEN races seem to congregate, and pirates. She is now, perhaps unfairly, best known for the Shaper Exile sequence - The Garden of the Shaped (1987), Shaper's Legacy (1989) and Shaping the Dawn(1989) - as the first volume at least of this PLANETARY ROMANCE is awkwardly written, dumping three separate genetic versions of human stock upon a new planet, and sorting them out in terms of an unconvincing biological determinism. The second volume is more toughly argued, but the third moves too easily into the plot arabesques common to this subgenre. SF is still (1992) in the wings, but gives the impression she is capableof stepping into full view at any time.

   JC

   See also: GENETIC ENGINEERING.