GOLDSTEIN, Lisa

(1953-)

   US writer who began writing work of genre interest with The Red Magician (1982), a fantasy based on Hungarian motifs and venues and set during the Holocaust; it won the American Book Award for that year. With considerable intensity, and in a style which treats sf and fantasy material through a MAGIC-REALIST looking-glass, LG has since then consistently submitted her protagonists - who are in any case generally alienated from mainstream life - to deeply alienating venues which are themselves threatened with radical transformation. The Dream Years (1985) - alternating sequences of which are set in a 1920s Paris succumbing tothe tenets of Surrealism, and at the crisis point of the Events of 1968 - is a timeslip romance which conflates the artistic movement for a transformed reality with the later moment in history when it seemed, for an instant, that the world might shift. A Mask for the General (1987), set in a DYSTOPIAN 21st-century USA, depicts an opposition between the General who rules the land and the mask-makers who tap tribal depths, who create totem visages for their friends and enemies, and who wish to transform the General into one of them, human again, no longer alienated. The alienationsuffered by the protagonists of Tourists (1989; rev 1994) - which is unconnected to an early short story, "Tourists" (1984 IASFM) - is superficially more conventional, for the land of Amaz in which they find themselves caught - as emissaries of a USA which represents a version of reality no longer valid in this new world - seems at first glance no more than a typical Middle Eastern backdrop. But the US family's search for a 1000-year-old document of seeming archaeological interest swervesdizzyingly into an attempt to trace a course between two converging topologies of reality, and to survive the clash. Though readable in sf terms, Tourists displays much of the same feel for the labyrinth of the Orient that found more fantastic expression in The Arabian Nightmare(1983) by Robert Irwin (1946-). Some of LG's relatively few short sf stories were assembled in Daily Voices (coll 1989), and her short fantasy stories were assembled in Travelers in Magic (coll 1994). Her 1990s work has in fact been heavily concentrated in that genre; both Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon (1993) and Summer King, Winter Fool (1994) are fantasies, both being impressively original.

   JC

   See also: ARTS; TIME TRAVEL.