MORRESSY, John

(1930-)

   US writer and professor of English at Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire. He began his sf career in 1971 - after 2 non-genre novels - with "Accuracy" for FSF, where most of his short fiction has since appeared. JM's early books were generally SPACE OPERA, through which medium he constructed a series of interesting ALIEN societies, and most of them shared a common galactic background: a somewhat disordered polity still dominated by humans, though with no imperial government. Within this scenario, his stories tended to the dark and extravagant end of the sf-epic spectrum, as in the Del Whitby trilogy - Starbrat (1972), Nail Down the Stars (1973; vt Stardrift 1975) and Under a Calculating Star(1975) - which intriguingly tells the same tale of interstellar intrigue and revolution from three partial points of view; none of the protagonists (orphans or impostors all) knows the whole story. Also set explicitly inthe same galactic scene were A Law for the Stars (1976 Canada) and Frostworld and Dreamfire (1977). The latter is a strongly constructed andoccasionally rousing epic of a metamorphic humanoid's search for a breeding-partner; the last of his race on his native planet, he must find her elsewhere or the race dies. Later sf works, like The Mansions of Space (1983), continue to inhabit the same loosely defined, dark-texturedmilieu, but JM's 1970s juveniles were not identifiably set there: The Windows of Forever (1975) is an effective TIME-TRAVEL tale, and The Humansof Ziax II (1974 chap) and The Drought on Ziax II (1978 chap) apply the concerns of ECOLOGY to a planet colonized by humans, though the natives of Ziax survive in the jungles. In the 1980s JM concentrated mainly on twofantasy sequences: the Iron Angel series - Ironbrand (1980), Graymantle (1981), Kingsbane (1982) and The Time of the Annihilator (1985) - and theKedrigern series, about a wizard - A Voice for Princess (1986), The Questing of Kedrigern (1987), Kedrigern in Wanderland (1988), Kedrigern and the Charming Couple (1990) and A Remembrance for Kedrigern (1990). This latter series, in strong contrast to JM's early work, is determinedlylight-hearted. His first novels are perhaps more likely to last.

   JC

   Other work: The Extraterritorial (1977 Canada).