NEWMAN, Kim (James)

(1959-)

   UK writer and broadcaster who remains as well known for his film criticism as for his fiction, though the latter has become increasingly dominant in his output. His film books - Nightmare Movies: Wide Screen Horror Since 1968 (1984 US; rev vt Nightmare Movies: A Critical History ofthe Horror Film, 1968-1988 1988 UK) and Wild West Movies (1990) - express a generically savvy, sophisticatedly wry vision of their subject matters, a vision also articulated in the weekly reviews he has conducted on tv since 1989. KN began publishing sf with "Dreamers" for Interzone in 1984, rapidly establishing a name for liquidly dense tales of the NEAR FUTURE - or ALTERNATE-WORLD versions of the earlier 20th century - which combine a more or less standard CYBERPUNK idiom with an acute sensitivity to the dream world of the movies, in particular the film noir tradition already mined by authors like William GIBSON; many of these tales appear in The Original Dr. Shade and Other Stories (coll 1994). KN's almost excessivesensitivity to the icons of Hollywood helps distinguish him from his sf models. His first novel, The Night Mayor (1989), potently intensifies the VIRTUAL REALITY claustrophobias of cyberpunk through a plot whose villain,the criminal Daine, has escaped into a MAGIC-REALIST, glowing, alternate-world mental construct peopled by personas from detective films of the 1940s, from which haven he must be flushed by the protagonists. The book clearly and deliberately harks back to Philip K. DICK's darker investigations of the nature of reality and to Roger ZELAZNY's THE DREAM MASTER (1966), though KN's rather impersonal polish may have kept his talefrom fully expressing the epistemological vertigo of some of its greater models; and certainly his use of tropes out of the dream-life of US film is, at times, soothingly nostalgic. His second novel, Bad Dreams (1990), replicates much of this material in terms of HORROR, again diminished in its visceral effect by a sense that the author has good-humouredly distanced himself from the products of his imagination. Jago (1991), a full-blown horror tale, once again features an antagonist capable of exercising coercive control over his opponents' inner worlds, in this case by transfiguring their dream self-images into reality, so that - for instance - a farmer anguished by drought and debt becomes a Green Man. Anno Dracula (1992) is set in a RECURSIVE alternate-world 19th-centuryEngland which has been transformed by the marriage of Vlad Tepes, Count Dracula, to Queen Victoria.The Quorum (1994) is again horror: four ambitious young men (there are roman a clef elements in their depiction) sell their souls to the devil, who manifests himself as a newspaper magnate.At the same time as writing novels that eat at the consensual world while suggesting that reality could still be addressed in something like comfort, KN also produced, as Jack Yeovil, a series of ties for GAMES WORKSHOP which leapt unashamedly into the explicitly easier environment ofthe GAME-WORLD. Drachenfels * (1989), Beasts in Velvet * (1991) and Genevieve Undead * (coll of linked stories 1993) are fantasies constructedfor the Warhammer enterprise; but the Demon Download sequence - written in the Dark Future series, and comprising "Route 666" * (in Route 666 (1990) ed David PRINGLE), Demon Download * (1990), Krokodil Tears * (1991), Comeback Tour (The Sky Belongs to the Stars) * (1991) and Route 666*(1994) - contains elements of genuine sf, ruthlessly blended into a NEAR FUTURE/alternate-world/fantasy/horror/punk mix. Both game-worlds and horror as a genre tend to view CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGHS as breakers of the dream, and it is not yet certain that KN is much inclined to engage himself - or Jack Yeovil, under which name has also appeared Orgy of the Blood Parasites (1994) - in the displacements necessary to compose fulland unadulterated sf.KN wrote many of the CINEMA and tv entries for the 2nd edition of this encyclopedia.

   JC

   Other works: Ghastly Beyond Belief: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of Quotations (anth 1986) edited with Neil GAIMAN; Horror: 100 Best Books (anth 1988) ed with Stephen Jones, critical essays.

   See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; COMPUTERS; GOTHIC SF; INTERZONE; NEW WORLDS; PSYCHOLOGY.