FOWLER, Karen Joy

(1950-)

   US writer with degrees in political science and north Asian studies. She began publishing sf with "Recalling Cinderella" in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Vol I (anth 1985) ed Algis BUDRYS,and caused considerable stir in the sf field with the quality of the work assembled in her first collection, ARTIFICIAL THINGS (coll 1986), which helped gain her the 1987 JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer. Her short stories - later collections are Peripheral Vision (coll 1990 chap) and Letters from Home (anth 1991 UK), which contains separate tales by her, Pat CADIGAN and Pat MURPHY - gave a first and entirely deceptive appearance of reticence, but soon revealed steely ironies, an insistence on the essential solitude of her protagonists (which evoked FEMINIST arguments about alienation but did not dwell upon the specifics of oppression or male-female discord) and an urgent hilarity. Some stories, like "Face Values", are pure sf; others shift into fantasy or FABULATION, giving ambiguous cues as to any "proper" reading.This sure-footed refusal to give her readers much epistemological security - much sense that her worlds could be firmly apprehended - also governed the telling of KJF's first novel, the remarkable SARAH CANARY (1991), which - along with John FOWLES's A Maggot (1985) - may be the finest First Contact novel (COMMUNICATIONS) yet written. A strange female figure - woman or alien, no one knows, or can even formulate the question - arrives in the state of Washington in 1873 and is dubbed Sarah Canary, because of the birdlikesounds she makes. In attempting to deal with her, the Chinese worker to whom she has attached herself is exposed to a long array of those living beings that the sciences of the 19th century have attempted to control through "knowledge": Indians, Blacks, the insane, immigrants, women, animals, artists, confidence men. Sarah Canary, who stands for them all in the indescribable melody of her Being, finally disappears, never having said a word. As an emblem of the enigma behind the idea of First Contact she is perhaps definitive. As a dramatization of the self-deluding imperialisms of knowledge, SARAH CANARY is equally convincing.

   JC

   Other work: The War of the Roses (1985 IASFM; 1991 chap).

   See also: INTERZONE; SOCIOLOGY; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.