GUIN, Wyman (Woods)

(1915-1989)

   US pharmacologist, advertising executive and writer who began publishing sf with "Trigger Tide" as Norman Menasco for ASF in 1950, though his career can be said really to have begun with "Beyond Bedlam" (1951) which, like most of his best work of the 1950s and early 1960s,appeared first in Gal and was subsequently included in Living Way Out (coll 1967; exp vt Beyond Bedlam 1973 UK). "Beyond Bedlam" is a brilliantnovelette describing an Earth about 1000 years hence where drugs enforce a strictly regulated schizophrenia (PARANOIA) in every human being in a five-days-on, five-days-off routine, each body being inhabited alternately by two personalities, the balance between whom nullifies Man's subconscious aggressions, thus eliminating the "paranoid wars" of the "ancient Moderns". But passion and art likewise disappear. The good andevil of this system are explored with a literacy and verisimilitude that make it a genuinely interesting variation on Aldous HUXLEY's vision of drug-enforced stability in BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932). Similar hyperbolic distortions of the "normal" world govern stories like "My Darling Hecate" (1953) and "The Delegate from Guapanga" (1964). The Standing Joy (1969), aPARALLEL-WORLDS story set in a nostalgically rendered other Earth, features a SUPERMAN, a good deal of harmless SEX and a general sense of missed focus. WG will be remembered for the power of his early stories.

   JC

   See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; PSYCHOLOGY; SOCIOLOGY.