SPINRAD, Norman (Richard)

(1940-)

   US writer, born in New York - where he has set some impressive fiction - and now resident in France. He began publishing sf with "The Last of the Romany" for ASF in 1963, which he assembled with other earlywork in The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (coll 1970), the title story being among the most successful of the attempts made by divers authors to write a tale using the characters and Universe of Michael MOORCOCK's Jerry Cornelius series. The story was originally published in NW, to which NSwas a significant contributor during the 1960s, when both the US and UK NEW-WAVE movements, though with different emphases (the UK form tendingmore selfconsciously to assimilate MAINSTREAM modes like Surrealism), argued against traditional sf, which had failed to use the hard sciences to explore INNER SPACE, regarded as the proper territory of all genuinely serious writing. After publishing two commercial SPACE OPERAS - The Solarians (1966) and Agent of Chaos (1967) - NS subsequently kept faithwith that brief and the ethos which generated it.The Men in the Jungle (1967) - which subjects its tough, urban protagonist to a complex set ofRealpolitik adventures on a distant planet - demonstrates the vigour and occasionally slapdash bravado of what would become NS's typical style; but it was with his next book, BUG JACK BARRON (1969), that he made his greatest impact on the sheltered world of sf. This long novel was first serialized in a shorter form in NEW WORLDS (1967-8), where its violent texture and profanity rattled the excitable dovecotes of the UK "moral establishment", leading directly to the banning of the magazine by W.H. Smith, a newsagency chain so huge that its action was tantamount tocensorship. The equally risible parochialism of the sf world, when confronted by this not particularly shocking novel, was demonstrated by Sam J. LUNDWALL in his Science Fiction: What It's All About (1969; transexp 1971), where he described and dismissed the book as "practically a collection of obscenities". The novel itself, whose language does not fully conceal a certain sentimentality, deals with a NEAR FUTURE USA through tv figure Jack Barron and his involvement in a politically corrupt system: the resulting picture of the USA as a hyped, SEX-obsessed, apocalyptic world made the text seem less sf than FABULATION, where this sort of vision is common. The sledgehammer style matched, at points, the content.In NS's next novel, The Iron Dream (1972), the intention to offend was gratifyingly explicit. An ALTERNATE WORLD in which Hitler, thwarted as a politician, must make do with being an author of popular fiction is the frame for a long sf tale from his feverish pen, "Lord of the Swastika". This makes up most of the novel's text and gives NS the opportunity tomock - effectively if at times unrelentingly - some of the less attractive tendencies of right-wing sf, its fetish with gear, its fascist love of hierarchical display, its philistinism, its brutishness, its not entirely secret contempt for the people its HEROES defend. The "Afterword" by "Homer Whipple" just as hilariously guys the kind of critical writinggenerated by publish-or-perish academics. NS then released 2 further collections - No Direction Home (coll 1975) and The Star-Spangled Future (coll 1979), the latter an adroitly shaped compilation of his first 2collections - which concisely demonstrate the range of his response to the complexities of a rapidly changing Western world. From this point, that world dominated - as metaphor or in realistic depiction-his work. In A World Between (1979) the citizens of a UTOPIAN world deal with stridentthreats to their middle way from technophile fascists of the right and lesbian fascists of the left. The Mind Game (1980; vt The Process 1983), not sf, savagely treats a manipulative "church" whose dictates and cynicism are of a sort familiar to sf readers, and the later The Childen of Hamelin (1991), likewise not sf, deals with contemporary people trapped in a cult. The post- HOLOCAUST Songs from the Stars (1980) opposes a restrictive "black" technological rule with an uplift message from a soaring galactic civilization.NS's best 1980s novel was perhaps The Void Captain's Tale (1983) which, with its thematic partner Child of Fortune(1985), comprises what one might call an eroticized vision of the Galaxy. The SPACESHIP in the first tale is driven by Eros, in a very explicit sense; and the female protagonist of the second fertilizes-at least symbolically - all she touches in her elated Wanderjahr among the sparkling worlds. Little Heroes (1987) is set in a nightmarish urban near-future USA, divided into haves and ruthlessly manipulated have-nots; the plot turns on a combination of technology-fixing and co-optation that cuts close to the bone, though by this date NS's weary rage had begun to lose some of its purgative bite. However, the 4 novellas about the state of the USA assembled in Other Americas (coll 1988) show a recovery of NS's urban venom about the self-devouring progress of his native land into the millennium; Russian Spring (1991), set in a near-future world dominated by a USSR liberated by perestroika, again voluminously anatomizes the American Dream, though the effect of the book was muffled by the real-lifecollapse of the USSR in 1991; but Deus X (1993) adroitly mixed the cod theologizings of a troubled Pope with excursions into CYBERSPACE, where souls may - or may not - be deemed to dwell; and Vampire Junkies (1993 Tomorrow; 1994 chap) neatly contrasts the experiences of Vlad Dracul inthe 1990s with those of a hooker addicted to smack; Pictures at Eleven (1994) is associational.Two nonfiction collections - Staying Alive: AWriter's Guide (coll 1983) and Science Fiction in the Real World (coll 1990) - make even more explicit some of his bleak assumptions about the course of the world to which he so vehemently belongs.

   JC

   Other works: Passing through the Flame (1975), not sf; Riding the Torch (in Threads of Time [anth 1974]; 1978 dos).As Editor: The New Tomorrows (anth 1971); Modern Science Fiction (anth 1974).Nonfiction: Experiment Perilous: Three Essays on Science Fiction (coll 1976 chap) ed Andrew PORTER; The Reasons behind the SFWA Model Paperback Contract (1978 chap).

   See also: CLONES; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; CYBERPUNK; DEFINITIONS OF SF; DESTINIES; ECOLOGY; END OF THE WORLD; ENTROPY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FASTER THAN LIGHT; GAMES AND SPORTS; HITLER WINS; IMMORTALITY; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MEDICINE; MUSIC; MUTANTS; PARANOIA; PERCEPTION; POLITICS; POLLUTION; PSYCHOLOGY; SATIRE; SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA; SUN; SWORD AND SORCERY; TECHNOLOGY; WAR.