ATTANASIO Alfred Angelo

(1951-)

   US writer, BA (biochemistry), MFA (creative writing), MA (linguistics). He began publishing sf with Once More, the Dream as aa Attanasio for New Worlds Quarterly 7 (anth 1974) ed Hilary BAILEY and Charles PLATT; this tale, in its experimental heat and dark extravagance, proved typical of his short fiction in general. Not particularly attractive to the magazine markets, most of his shorter works appeared for the first time in Beastmarks (coll 1985). AAA came to wide notice with the publication of his first novel, Radix (1981), the first volume of the Radix Tetrad sequence, which continues with In Other Worlds (1984), Arc of the Dream (1986) and The Last Legends of Earth (1989). As a whole, the sequence works as a complex meditation on metamorphosis couched in SPACE-OPERA terms, so that densely ambitious moments of poetic aspiration alternate with episodes out of the rag-and-bone shop of PULP-MAGAZINE fiction. After losing her radiation shield, which guards her against the full nakedness of the Universe, Earth begins to mutate savagely, a transformation articulated clearly in Radix itself through the story of a mutant SUPERMAN, who undergoes the same transcendental jumpstart that jolts his planet through terrors and DIMENSIONS. By the time The Last Legends of Earth has come to a close, long after Earth itself has become an inordinately complicated memory, human beings are strange creatures, resurrected out of dream, half-persona, half-godling. At the same time, however, a protagonist engages in a revenge fight with spiderlike ALIENS. AAA's next sf novel, Solis (1994), is a singleton whose plot and pacing initially remind one of an early Keith LAUMERadventure, but which expands upon and darkens its origins in space opera; the protagonist, after a millennium of CRYONICsleep, awakens into an extremely complex and cruel world run by AIs, where he is used for pornography and enslaved before his eventual rescue. It could not be said that AAA is a tempered writer; but the splurge and dance of his prose can be, at times, enormously enlivening. Of his other novels, Wyvern (1988) is a pirate-punk historical, with little or no fantasy content; Hunting the Ghost Dancer (1991) is an extremely late, and rather heated, example of prehistoric sf (ANTHROPOLOGY) in which a last Neanderthal is pitted against several of us; is an historical novel with fantasy elements; The Dragon and the Unicorn (1994 UK), with its sequel, Arthur (1995 UK), comprises an Arthurian cycle; and The Moon's Wife (1993) is a fantasy of supernatural seduction whose roots may well lie in psychosis. See also: MUTANTS.