van SCYOC, Sydney J(oyce)

(1939-)

   US writer, active in the Unitarian Church, who began publishing sf with "Shatter the Wall" for Gal in 1962 and afterwards contributed stories regularly to the magazines, though she soon became best known for her novels, beginning with the impressive Saltflower (1971), in which aliens seed Earth to produce a new breed of "men". Assignment Nor'Dyren (1973) depicts a DYSTOPIAN Earth and a complexly rendered alien planet introuble. Starmother (1976) and Cloudcry (1977) are both set in a Galaxy dominated by humanity but on alien planets which offer fundamental challenges to the human senses of order and rightness, and which ultimately reward attempts to transcend, in a sometimes lukewarmly oceanic fashion, human hierarchies and failures of empathy. The Sunstone Scrolls sequence - Darkchild (1981), Bluesong (1983) and Starsilk (1984), all assembled as Daughters of the Sunstone (omni 1985) - also combine an alien setting, a variety of characters and species and an ultimate sharing of transcendence, here occasioned by the symbiosis-engendering starsilks. Drowntide (1987) could again be described as fusion sf, depicting the slowcoming to communion of a land-based race and an ocean-based race through the agency of a hybrid offspring. SJVS's predilection for one-word titles continued in Featherstroke (1989) but was rested in Deepwater Dreams (1991). Though her tales are sometimes damaged by narrative longueurs,SJVS's capacity to evoke a sense of the deep strangeness of the Universe - and her iterated attempts to craft tales that persuasively espouse marriages of species and venues - make her work sometimes compelling.

   JC

   Other work: Sunwaifs (1981).

   See also: PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS.