HAIBLUM, Isidore

(1935-)

   US writer, born, educated and based in New York, where he has set much of his fiction. The humour expressed in his novels is Yiddish in style (IH is himself a Jew), especially in his first sf novel, The Tsaddik of the Seven Wonders (1971). IH writes a fluent though sometimes rather disarranged kind of comic sf, of which The Wilk are Among Us (1975; rev 1979) is a representative example, with its amusingly overcomplicatedplot, its frenetic spoofing of the ALIENS-in-our-midst theme, and its general failure to take hold of its materials. Nightmare Express (1979), a comparatively ambitious ALTERNATE-WORLD detective novel, and a later mystery series set in the 21st century - The Mutants are Coming (1984) and Out of Sync (1990) - maintain a similar tone. His attempts to amalgamateYiddish humour and sf themes are of technical interest.

   JC

   Other works: The Return (1973); Transfer to Yesterday (1973); three novels featuring a detective named Dunjer, being Interworld (1977), Outerworld (1979 dos) and Specterworld (1991); two novels featuring the Siscoe and Block detectiveteam, being The Identity Plunderers (1984) and The Hand of Ganz (1985).