McALLISTER, Bruce (Hugh)

(1946-)

   US writer, editor and academic, director since 1974 of the creative-writing programme at the University of Redlands, California, and Professor of English from 1983. He has written at least 40 stories sincestarting to publish sf in 1963 with "The Faces Outside" (for If), which is also the title story of a long-projected collection of his best work. "The Boy" (1976) - a peculiarly revolting, skilful tale of the entropic life ofa reconstructed Peter Pan and Wendy on a less than utopian ISLAND - is an exercise about, and to some extent in, literary sadism, which at the same time gives exemplary form to his ongoing obsessions with psychic and physical entrapment and with the alienation of human beings in worlds they have not made. His first novel, Humanity Prime (1971), which takes some material from "The Faces Outside" and was used as his thesis for an MFA degree in creative writing, ingeniously depicts the complex underwater environment of the planet Prime, where humans have, after 3000 years, become deeply adapted to their aquatic life; they cope with both the demented CYBORG starship which brought them there and an incursion of reptile-like aliens. His second novel, the elegant and incandescent Dream Baby (1989), is set in Vietnam during the darkest years of US involvementthere, and recounts the long excruciation of a nurse whose paranormal power (she has precognitive dreams about the deaths of soldiers: the title is an imperative) leads her, under the control of a secret military unit, into the heart of the darkness.BM edited SF Directions (anth 1972), the special sf issue of the New Zealand journal Edge (Autumn/Winter 1973), which comprised a sizeable anthology of original stories, and the fine Their Immortal Hearts (anth 1980), to which he contributed the titlenovella. Because his first novel was published in a dying series (it was a late Ace Special), because his second novel speaks unrelentingly of painful matters, and because his shorter work remains scattered, BM continues to be relatively obscure long past the point at which he should have attained considerable prominence.

   JC

   About the author: The Work of Bruce McAllister: An Annotated Bibliography \& Guide (1985 chap; rev 1986) by David Ray Bourquin.

   See also: IMMORTALITY; WAR.