ROHAN, Michael Scott

(1951-)

   UK (Scottish) Oxford-educated law graduate and author, whose nonfiction books include an introduction to home computing and a study of the Viking era; he also reviews for Opera Now. He began publishing sf with stories like "The Insect Tapes" in Aries 1 (anth 1979) ed John Grant (Paul BARNETT). His first novel was Run to the Stars (dated 1982 but 1983),signed Mike Scott Rohan, a promising Scots-in-space thriller featuring relativistic WEAPONS and an alien message, with nasty Earth bureaucrats ready to attack their own space colony. Then, like several UK writers of the period, he began genre crossing; most of his fiction since has been FANTASY - the genre in which he seems most at home - beginning with TheIce King (1986; vt Burial Rites 1987 US) with Allan SCOTT under the joint pseudonym Michael Scot, a supernatural thriller involving Norse mythology. There followed the more notable The Winter of the World trilogy - TheAnvil of Ice (1986), The Forge in the Forest (1987) and The Hammer of the Sun (1988) - set in an invented frozen world imagined in some depth; though the writing is sometimes floridly rhetorical. A young smith sets himself against the entropic Powers; quests follow; spring comes, but at a cost. MSR then made a partial return to a kind of sf, in the jaunty, romantic SCIENCE FANTASY Spiral trilogy, comprising Chase the Morning (1990),The Gates of Noon(1992) and Cloud Castles(1994), where real andmagical ALTERNATE WORLDS(the coreand the spiral) intersect, and a computer program can become a spell. The series is intelligent, well thought-out, and surprisingly full of observations about near-future POLITICS. A second collaboration with Scott, A Spell of Empire: The Horns of Tartarus (1992), was published under their real names. But perhaps his finest work to date is the solo historical fantasy The Lord of Middle Air (1994), set partly in thirteenth-century Scotland (the Border area) and partly in a very convincing faery land, in which a young Scots chieftain encounters and has his life changed by the (real-life) magician Michael Scot. (MSR claims Michael Scot as an ancestor.) MSR has consistently grown in stature as awriter throughout his career.

   PN