KINGSBURY, Donald (MacDonald)

(1929-)

   US-born academic and writer, in Canada from 1948, a teacher of mathematics at McGill University from 1956 until his retirement in 1986. He began publishing sf with "Ghost Town" for ASF in 1952; although heproduced relatively little for nearly 30 years, his intermittent appearances in ASF, with both fiction and nonfiction, were generally noticed. What could not have been noted - because of the sparseness of his production and the wide-ranging nature of his underlying construct - was that almost everything he wrote shared a common future HISTORY, somewhere into the middle of which his first novel, COURTSHIP RITE (1982 US; vt Geta 1984 UK), fitted smoothly; indeed, the polished sweep and exuberance ofthis large epic PLANETARY ROMANCE must have owed something to DK's long familiarity with its sustaining Universe. The planet Geta is a venue which amply contains: several warring cultures for whom all aspects of life are agonistic; complicated group marriages; an elaborate ethical and ecological justification of cannibalism in a world of terrible scarcity (ECOLOGY); and the highly productive worship of a God in the sky (in fact,in a standby orbit, the starship that seeded the world) who rewards worship by raining down computer chips full of precious data. The plot, involving the forced courtship of a woman from another culture by members of a group marriage, is perhaps less convincing than the background; but the pace is sufficient to intrigue and to engage even those readers who might be dubious about the Libertarian assumptions underlying certain elements of the unrelenting agons of Geta.DK's second novel, The Moon Goddess and the Son (1979 ASF; exp 1986), is set so early in his FutureHistory that the NEAR FUTURE setting of certain parts of the tale seems directly extrapolative of current thinking about space technologies. The HARD-SF arguments, about the design and construction of space stationscapable of grappling space freighters into dock, are as gripping as this sort of narrative can sometimes be; and later sections, featuring the eponymous Diana a generation or so further on, adequately point a way forward into romance. A third novel, "The Survivor", forms the bulk of Man-Kzin Wars IV * (anth 1991) in the Larry NIVEN Man-Kzin WarsSHARED-WORLD enterprise; it is bleak and exorbitant, and constitutes a self-sufficient tale.DK is a writer whose energy is conspicuous, and whose imagined Universe does not lack ambition. At the time of writing, further connective tissue is still wanting, but can be hoped for.

   JC

   See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; CANADA; GODS AND DEMONS.