BERGER, Thomas (Louis)

(1924-)

   US writer best known for his work outside the sf field like the Western epic Little Big Man (1964), which combines farce and FABULATION, and was notably filmed in 1970. Regiment of Women (1973), which is sf, presents a world about a century hence where the roles of men and women have been completely reversed, direly for the men; the book is a blackly comic and chastening argument from premise, and in this prefigures most of TB's recent work, either outside the field, like the terrifying Neighbors (1980), or chillingly within, like Nowhere (1986), a yawningly vacuous Erewhonian spoof, Being Invisible (1987) and Changing the Past (1989), in which the laws of human nature, operating like theorems, show that all lives, even those we would aspire to could we ourselves enter a changed past, are lived in bondage to the march of inalterable law.

   JC

   Other works: Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel (1978), a fine fantasy.

   See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; INVISIBILITY; SOCIOLOGY; TIME TRAVEL.