MOONEY, Ted

   Working name of US writer Edward Mooney (1951-), whose remarkable first novel, published in the MAINSTREAM, is sf: Easy Travel to Other Planets (1981). Set on a NEAR FUTURE Earth against a backdrop of globalinformation sickness, war in the Antarctic and a new emotion nobody has ever felt before, it tells a love story - with visionary ramifications - concerning a woman marine biologist and the dolphin on whom she conducts experiments in LINGUISTICS. It has been seen as a proto- CYBERPUNK work, but its cool, pellucid, dissecting style - perhaps influenced by J.G. BALLARD - is far removed from the hectic insistence that has characterizedmuch of that school. TM's second sf book was the ALTERNATE-WORLD novel Traffic and Laughter (1990), set in the near future of an Earth where WWIIwas inconclusive and nuclear power never developed.

   PN