McQUINN, Donald E.

(1930-)

   US writer whose first sf novel (his fifth overall), Warrior (1990), packs into its setting - a USA 500 years after the nation's nuclear destruction - almost every CLICHE available to writers of barbarian-warrior novels: a variety of agon-based tribal societies; a woman-run church; a batch of 21st-century warriors freshly resurrected from CRYONIC slumber and ready for a fight; an evil monarch bent on establishing an Empire; and a protagonist who must wander from one enclave to another, gradually accumulating a passel of friends and adherents as he goes. But the book itself, despite its (well handled) military moments, is in effect a PLANETARY ROMANCE, and in its 500 pages slowly and lovingly establishes an extremely complex portrait of a huge, densely populated, intensely variegated land. Several women characters have featured roles (though most of them are oppressed); the sequels, Wanderer (1993) andWitch (1994), do not, perhaps, quite maintain that sense of the multifarious, but it does continue to seem that DEM might be one of the novelists to watch in the 1990s.

   JC