ROESSNER, Michaela

   Working name of US writer Michaela-Marie Roessner-Herman (1950-), whose first novel, the widely admired Walkabout Woman (1988), is a fantasy, though she received, all the same, the JOHN W. CAMPBELL award for that year; her second novel, Vanishing Point (1993) is, however, sf. Set in California 30 years after the mysterious disappearance of 90% of the humanrace, and climaxing in the edifice-like Winchester Mystery House in San Jose (a real building), the story concerns the efforts of the protagonistand others to plumb the depths of the mystery; but if there is a single explanation it is not-after a fashion typical of the sf writers who have come to maturity in the 1990s-vouchsafed the searchers, though the rhetoric of virtual particle physics is invoked, and hitches in the universe-wide unfolding of cosmological destiny are suggested, along with a sense that ALTERNATE WORLDS might be far more distressingly complex than normally depicted in sf.

   JC