TUTTLE, Lisa

(1952-)

   US-born writer, in the UK from late 1980, married to Christopher PRIEST 1981-7. An early member of the CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP, she very rapidly established her name as a writer in short forms, beginning with her first story, "Stranger in the House", for Robin Scott WILSON's Clarion II (anth 1972), and winning the 1974 JOHN W.CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer. Her stories very frequently make quietly devastating use of genre devices - often those associated with HORROR - to convey FEMINIST lessons about the relationships between menand women (WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION), though she tends to allow the political implications of these lessons to reside, tacitly, within her texts. Some of her better stories have been assembled in A Nest of Nightmares (coll 1986), A Spaceship Built of Stone and Other Stories (coll 1987) and Memories of the Body: Tales of Desire and Transformation(coll 1992). Her first novel, Windhaven (1975 ASF; exp 1981 US) with George R.R. MARTIN, depicts life on a lost colony planet whose feudal culture is focused on the use of artificial (but functional) wings. Most of her subsequent books - like Familiar Spirit (1983 US), Gabriel (1987) and Lost Futures (1992), whose heroine is thrust into several ALTERNATE WORLDS - are fantasies with strong elements of horror, idiomatically andcleanly told, in a level and foreboding voice, and tending to depict worlds which, in visual terms, seem both sinister and washed. More and more, though commercial sagacity seems sometimes to have guided her tongue, she has given a sense of having revelations in store. She refused a 1981 NEBULA for "The Bone Flute".

   JC

   Other works: Catwitch (1983), a juvenile fantasy; Angela's Rainbow (1983), associational; Skin of the Soul: New Horror Stories by Women (anth 1990).Nonfiction: Children'sLiterary Houses (1984) with Rosalind Ashe; Encyclopedia of Feminism (1986).

   See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; ESCHATOLOGY; GOTHIC SF.