REAMY, Tom

   Working name of US writer, movie projectionist and graphic designer Thomas Earl Reamy (1935-1977). He began publishing with "Twilla" for FSF in 1974 and, by late 1977 when he died of a heart attack, had become a writer of potential stature in the field, having just won the 1976 JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer (though in fact most of his work mustbe thought of as fantasy). The tales assembled in San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories (coll 1979) - the title novelette won a 1976 NEBULA - were notable for the threatening sweetness of their probing of unconscious material, often sexual, though they often ended at a point of healing uplift, occasionally sentimentalized. In his novel Blind Voices (1978), which shared a common background with "Twilla" and "San Diego Lightfoot Sue", a small Kansas town around 1930 is visited by a travelling circusfull of freaks and creatures of legend. The homage to Charles G. FINNEY, Theodore STURGEON and Ray BRADBURY is clearly deliberate; a finalexplanation of the circus creatures in terms of GENETIC ENGINEERING provides no more than an sf pretext, the book reading as elegiac fantasy.

   JC

   Other work: "Sting" in Six Science Fiction Plays (anth 1976) ed Roger ELWOOD.

   See also: The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION; PSI POWERS.