FINNEY, Jack

   Working name of US author Walter Braden Finney (1911-), whose career began when he was 35; he published his first work in the genre, "Such Interesting Neighbors" for COLLIER'S WEEKLY, in 1951. Although he is aswell known for sf as for anything else, he did not specialize in the field, adapting his highly professional skills to mysteries and general fiction as well. Stories from his first years as a writer of sf can be found in The Third Level (coll 1957; vt The Clock of Time 1958 UK) and later ones in I Love Galesburg in the Springtime: Fantasy and Time Stories (coll 1963) - both asembled as About Time: Twelve Stories (omni 1986) -and Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Stories (coll 1983). Many are evocative tales of escape from an ugly present into atranquil past, or into a PARALLEL WORLD, or wistful variants of the theme when the escape fails. His best-known work is The Body Snatchers (1955; vt Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1973; rev 1978), twice filmed as INVASIONOF THE BODY SNATCHERS: in 1956 by Don Siegel and in 1978 by Philip Kaufman. The book - perhaps less plausibly than the film versions-horrifyingly depicts the INVASION of a small town by interstellar spores that duplicate human beings, reducing them to dust in the process. The menacing spore-people who remain symbolize, it has been argued, theloss of freedom in a 1950s USA obsessed by the problems of "conformism". JF's further books were smoothly told, more involving, perhaps lesspertinent. The Woodrow Wilson Dime (1960 Saturday Evening Post; exp 1968) is a PARALLEL-WORLDS novel. Time and Again (1970) sets a time traveller in the New York of 1882, which is meticulously evoked. Marion's Wall (1973) movingly displaces the ghost of a 1926 film star into the present day. Generally, in a JF story, sf or fantasy devices open the door into newworlds and are then forgotten. The worlds thus made available are, all the same, engrossing.

   JC

   Other works: Both The Woodrow Wilson Dime and Marion's Wall appear with The Night People (1977) in 3 by Finney (omni 1987).

   See also: TIME TRAVEL; UTOPIAS.