ROSENBLUM, Mary

(1952-)

   US medical researcher and writer who began publishing sf with "For a Price" for IASFM in 1990, and whose first 3 novels explore various reaches of the contemporary sf landscape, though her favoured venue remains the American West. The Drylands (1993), which is derived from several stories but does not duplicate earlier material, posits a NEAR FUTURE America quite strictly continuous with the present day: water inthe North-West states has become a burning issue; agribusinesses have further impoverished rural areas; it is only with the introduction of a protagonist with PSI POWERS that MR slips into conventional genre tactics. Chimera (1993) somewhat less engagingly deals with the subject of VIRTUALREALITY, via a not-unusual mystery couched in noir terms and a Net Conspiracy; her depiction of the actual inscapes of Virtual Reality are, on the other hand, powerfully evocative. The Stone Garden (1994) features a sculptor who encodes aesthetically moving emotional patterns into mysterious stones found in the asteroid belt; but the book itself once again depends on some precarious mystery-story plotting. MR's strengths are in the vigorous realism of her rendering of human relationships as they evolve under the stresses of the new worlds to come.

   JC