THOMAS, D(onald) M(ichael)

(1935-)

   UK poet and novelist who made use of sf themes most explicitly in early POETRY like "The Head Rape" for NW in 1968. His The Devil and the Floral Dance (1978) is a juvenile fantasy. His first adult novels weredensely conceived Freud-inspired FABULATIONS. The Flute-Player (1979), a fable that depicts the intertwining of art and love, is set in an imaginary state much like Russia (to which DMT often returns in his fiction, poetry and translations). Birthstone (1980; rev 1982) features a protagonist whose several personalities have autonomous lives, and whose fantasies leak into the world, transforming it. The most successful of these tales is The White Hotel (1981), in which a graphic and surreal association in the protagonist's mind between sex and images of mass violence proves - long after a 1920s analysis by Freud himself - prophetic of the Final Solution; the book then becomes an extremely dark afterlife fantasy. The later Ararat sequence - Ararat (1983), Swallow (1984), Sphinx (1986) and Summit (1987) - adds futurity, politics and garish SATIRE tothe generic mix; and seems, at times, to be sf.

   JC