ORE, Rebecca

   Pseudonym of US writer Rebecca B. Brown (1948-), who began publishing sf with "Projectile Weapons and Wild Alien Water" for AMZ in 1986 and is best known for Becoming Alien (1988) and its sequels, Being Alien (1989) and Human to Human (1990), a sequence which - with a deceptive air ofleisureliness - takes a young rural Virginian named Tom from the provincial backwaters of xenophobic Earth to another planet where, as the solitary human among a multitude of other races, he is trained to join, on behalf of Earth, the Federation of Space Traveling Systems. A very wide range of ALIENS is introduced in a concise but seemingly disorganized cataloguing style which has reminded critics of Stanley G. WEINBAUM's "A Martian Odyssey" (1934); but, as the sequence progresses, the momentum ofthe tale builds, and RO's apparently scattershot concisions turn out to have been carefully meditated. The end sense, as Tom grows into knowledge of himself and of his prejudice-stricken fellow humans, is one of complexities experienced. More immediately impressive, perhaps, is a singleton, The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid (1991), in which a CIA specialist in DNA-recombinant engineering (GENETIC ENGINEERING) creates a CLONE - or chimera - of Billy the Kid whose "memories" of the 19th centuryhave been programmed into his blank brain, and whose perceptions are controlled by a "nineteenth-century visual matrix" that causes him to read 21st-century sights in terms of Billy's own experiences. The story of thischimera's slow and anguished climb into self-awareness, and of his escape to a rural Appalachian theme-parked reservation, is swift and urgently dense in the telling, fragilely hopeful in its implications. As of 1991, RO herself lived in Appalachia, and the ironies attendent upon inhabitinga contrived sanctuary enrich an already rich text. Her stories, which are strong and varied, appear in Alien Bootlegger (coll 1993); Slow Funeral (1994) is a contemporary fantasy which evocatively crosshatchessupernatural material into the American scene.

   JC