McMULLEN, Sean (Christopher)

(1948-)

   Australian writer whose first professional sf sale was "The Pharaoh's Airship" for Omega Science Digest in 1986. The best of his craftsmanlike stories appear in Call to the Edge (coll 1992), a notable example being "The Colours of the Masters" (1988), in which a 19th-century device, the clockwork "pianospectrum", is discovered to have recorded the playing of Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt.Voices in the Light (fixup 1994), which begins the Greatwinter sequence, is an exceedingly complex post- HOLOCAUST tale set in a densely imagined Australia broken into manyindividual states which are linked by heliograph. The main story involves the gradual perfection of a kind of COMPUTER whose components are human calculators, along with an equally gradual movement towards the comprehension of the "Call" - the title story of SM's collection is worked into this novel - which periodically entraps humans and large animals into a fatal trek southwards to the ravening sea. The holocaust had been man-made, and had generated the first Greatwinter; a new freezing-down is threatened. The series is projected to continue with Mirrorsun Rising (1995) and The Miocene Arrow.

   PN/JC

   See also: MUSIC.