SINCLAIR, Iain (MacGregor)

(1943-)

   UK poet and novelist whose Lud Heat: A Book of the Dead Hamlets (1975) is a narrative prose-poem which fabricates a numerological myth of the geography of London; it provided a direct inspiration for Peter ACKROYD's Hawksmoor (1985). A novel, Downriver (Or, the Vessels of Wrath):A Narrative in Twelve Tales (1991), develops similar material in a FABULATION which combines detective modes and NEAR FUTURE sf visions of the complex destiny of London. Radon Daughters: A Voyage, Between Art and Terror, from the Mound of Whitechapel to the Limestone Pavements of the Burren (1994) covers similar territory in an ornately constructed fantasia based on a perhaps non-existent sequel to William Hope HODGSON's The House on the Borderland (1908), but also includes an elaborately ironic description of an sf convention.

   JC