SLEATOR, William (Warner III)

(1945-)

   US writer of books for older children. His first novel, Blackbriar (1972), is an occult fantasy. Titles of sf interest include: House of Stairs (1974), an attack on behavioural science and the experiments to which it might lead; Green Futures of Tycho (1981), set in a familiar version of the Solar System; Interstellar Pig (1984), which intermixes gaming (GAMES AND SPORTS) and ALIEN themes in the tale of a game whose pieces represent moves in a nonhuman conflict; The Boy who Reversed Himself (1986), about travel through the DIMENSIONS at some riskto the lad; The Duplicate (1988), in which a machine CLONES duplicates of a teenaged boy, all of them upset; and Strange Attractors (1990; vt Strange Attractions 1991 UK), a TIME-TRAVEL tale. WS's range is wide, andhis recalcitrant protagonists stick doggedly in the reader's memory, but he has a tendency sometimes to accept sf devices without much bothering to examine them, and this in turn thins the texture of reality of his tales.

   JC

   Other works: Among the Dolls (1975 chap), fantasy; Into the Dream (1979); Fingers (1983); Singularity (1985); The Spirit House (1991); Others See Us (1993).