KILWORTH, Garry (Douglas)

(1941-)

   UK writer who began to publish sf and fantasy stories and novels in the mid-1970s on retiring after 18 years' service as a cryptographer in the RAF; raised partly in Aden, he has travelled and worked in the Far East and the Pacific. He published his first sf story, "Let's Go toGolgotha"with the Sunday Times Weekly Review in 1974, having won the associated competition, and some of his many stories have been assembled as The Songbirds of Pain (coll 1984), In the Country of Tattooed Men (coll 1993) and Hogfoot Right and Bird-Hands (coll 1993 US). He has writtennovels as Garry Douglas. His first sf novel, In Solitary (1977), is set on an Earth whose few remaining humans have for over 400 years been dominated by birdlike ALIENS, and deals with a human rebellion whose moral impact is ambiguous; the novel is the first of several combining generic adventurousness-indeed opportunism, for GK seldom accords his full attention to the raw sf elements in his tales - and an identifiably English dubiety about the roots of human action. Consequences of suchaction in a GK novel are seldom simple, rarely flattering. The Night of Kadar (1978) places humans whose culture has an Islamic coloration, andwho are hatched from frozen embryos on an alien planet where they must attempt to understand their own nature. Split Second (1979) similarly isolates a contemporary human in the mind of a Cro-Magnon. Gemini God (1981) again uses aliens to reflect the human condition. A Theatre ofTimesmiths (1984) isolates a human society in an ice-enclosed city (POCKET UNIVERSE) as computers fail and questions about the meaning of human life must be asked. Cloudrock (1988) pits brothers - GK often evokes kinship intimacies - against themselves and each other in a further pocket-universe setting. Abandonati (1988), set in a desolate NEAR FUTURE London, reflects grittily upon the implications for the UK of the lastdecades of this century. GK's non-genre novels (see listing below) follow the same pattern; of them, Witchwater Country (1986), among his finest works, has autobiographical elements. At the end of the 1980s, in an apparent break with his sf career, he began to publish animal fantasies: Hunter's Moon: A Story of Foxes (1989; vt The Foxes of First Dark 1990US), Midnight's Sun: A Story of Wolves (1990) and Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares (1992), in all of which he scrutinized nonhuman terrestrial life with an unblinking eye. He has also moved into contemporary HORROR with Angel (1993) and its sequel, Archangel (1994). Much of his short fictionis uneven; but in his novels GK has developed into an observer whose reports are both subtle and frank.

   JC

   Other works: Spiral Winds (1987), In the Hollow of the Deep-Sea Wave: A Novel and Seven Stories (coll 1989) and Standing on Shamsan (1992), all containing some fantasy elements; a juvenile series comprising The Wizard of Woodworld (1987) and The Voyage of the Vigilance (1988); Trivial Tales (coll 1988 chap); The Rain Ghost (1989), Dark Hills, Hollow Clocks: Stories from the Otherworld (coll1990), The Drowners (1991), a ghost story, The Third Dragon (1991), associational, Billy Pink's Private Detective Agency (1993), The Electric Kid (1993) and The Phantom Piper (1994), all juveniles.As Garry Douglas:Highlander * (1986), a film novelization; The Street (1988), horror.

   See also: INTERZONE; ISLANDS; MESSIAHS; RELIGION; TIME TRAVEL.