BERLYN, Michael (Steven)

(1949-)

   US writer and computer-game designer whose first novel, the sf adventure Crystal Phoenix (1980), received some adverse comment for the amount of female torture it contains. The Integrated Man (1980) projects a DYSTOPIAN future for urbanized humanity, with a plot based on the shunting of human consciousness into COMPUTER chips, reminiscent in this of John T. SLADEK's The Muller-Fokker Effect (1970). Blight (1981), as by Mark Sonders, is an sf/horror novel featuring mutated killer moths. During most of the 1980s, MB restricted himself to the creation of interactive fictions for computers (GAME-WORLDS), including "Oo-Topos" (1982), "Cyborg" (1982), "Suspended" (1983), "Infidel" (1984), "Cutthroats" (1984), two titles in collaboration with his wife, Muffy McClung Berlyn-"Tass Times in Tonetown" (1986) and "Dr Dumont's Wild P.A.R.T.I." (1988) - and "Altered Destiny" (1990). He then returned to book sf with The Eternal Enemy (1990), a tale whose dystopian undercurrents are reminiscent of his second novel. Here an ALIEN race, almost magically facile in its use of GENETIC-ENGINEERING techniques to change its members at will, takes a moribund human and transforms him into a being who can breed with them, and perhaps also carry over humanity's inbred capacities as a killing-machine so that the aliens can defend themselves against an insatiable enemy. As with many serious-minded sf writers, MB has some tendency to hamper his effects through the use of generic plotting not well designed to bear the burden of contemplation; but muscle may be felt in his work, and greater focus hoped for.

   JC

   See also: ESCHATOLOGY; REINCARNATION.