McHUGH, Maureen F.

(1959-)

   US writer (her middle initial stands for nothing) who began publishing sf with "All in a Day's Work" for Twilight Zone Magazine in 1988, writing as by Michael Galloglach. Her first novel, CHINA MOUNTAINZHANG (1992), which has been criticized for loose plotting, works in fact as a complex and multi-faceted portrayal of a 22nd century world dominated by China, through the eyes of the eponymous gay half-Chinese protagonist, who drifts through the world with a kind heart, an accurate eye, and a constant apprehension of death, for homosexuality is a capital offense. The text includes excursions to Mars, and various episodes which only seemto be longueurs if China Mountain himself were about to change the world: which he is not. MFMcH's second novel, Half the Day is Night (1994), makes similarly acute observations of the ways human beings may cope with a straitened, desperately crowded future, fitting them on this occasion into a more tightly organized plot: a French-Vietnamese recently in Africa comes to a Caribbean undersea city to work as a bodyguard for a woman banker threatened by assassination. It is a world more complicated than he can understand-in both her novels, MFMcH serenely violates any presumption that the protagonists of a genre fiction must eventually understand and control what's happening to them-and for that reason it is a world readers may find alarmingly familiar.

   JC