KUBE-McDOWELL, Michael P.

   Pseudonym of US writer Michael Paul McDowell (1954-), who attached his wife's name, Kube, in 1975; some years later this proved useful when both he and Michael M. McDowell were writing scripts for the tv series Tales from the Darkside. His first published sf story, "The Inevitable Conclusion" for AMZ in 1979, also marked the inception of his TrigonDisunity sequence, comprising his first three novels - Emprise (1985), Enigma (1986) and Empery (1987) - along with other tales like "Antithesis" (1980). Though failing to rise above some of the less attractive assumptions held by popular writers in the sf field about the comical incompetence of politicians compared to the world-changing nerve of scientific entrepreneurs (EDISONADE), the series triumphs through the expansive exuberance of its premise: that an earlier wave of humanity had long ago colonized the Galaxy, and that the apparent ALIENS whose probing has reawakened contemporary humanity's interest in the stars - and revitalized a decaying planet - are in fact our own cousins; the final volume moves, less convincingly, into a vision of the human species melding its differences through a form of communion. Alternities (1988) similarly combines efficient action, in this case among a number of ALTERNATE WORLDS, and marginally vapourish speculations about the humanspecies; but THE QUIET POOLS (1990), MPK-M's best novel to date, successfully coordinates action and thought in a story about the ambiguous nature of humanity's drive outwards to the stars, carried through the troubled consciousness of a man who is genetically incapable - just as most of humanity has always been - of denying the planet, of leaping into space. The book's genetic determinism, which is much too explicit to have been inadvertent, is both bleak and bracing. Rather more baldly, Exile (1992) takes the sclerotic China of 1988's Tiananmen Square massacre as amodel for the construction of a rigid, terraformed colony world in the throes of a tragic confrontation with its own youth. MPK-M has become, quite suddenly, one of the authors to watch.

   JC

   Other works: Photon: Thieves of Light * (1987) as Michael Hudson, a tv adventure tie; Isaac Asimov's Robot City \#1: Odyssey * (1987), the first of the tied ROBOT sequence.

   See also: COMMUNICATIONS.