VIDAL, Gore

(1925-)

   US writer, resident for some years in Italy, best known for such satirical works outside the sf field as Myra Breckinridge (1968) and its sequel Myron (1974) and for several vols of essays, from Rocking the Boat (coll 1962) to Armageddon? (coll 1987), whose contents are frequentlyapocalyptic. Messiah (1954; rev 1965), the sf novel which closed his first, precocious phase of novel-writing, is a dark SATIRE on RELIGION in which a new MESSIAH teaches a defeatedly secular USA how to worship death. A play, Visit to a Small Planet (1956; 1960), filmed in 1960, againsatirizes contemporary Western civilization in the story of an ALIEN child, capable of changing the past, who comes close to wrecking our corrupt society before its guardians arrive to take it back. Kalki (1978), a further satirical assault upon one of GV's most persistent betes noires, organized religion, depicts the devastating consequences of its protagonist's belief that he embodies the returned essence of the world-destroying Hindu deity Kalki - devastating because he turns out, in a sense, to be right; the assault on religion is if anything intensified in Live From Golgotha (1992), in which tv crews, taking advantage of a new technology, compete to film the crucifixion. Duluth (1983) is a FABULATION which uses any device available - including sf instruments - to sustain a deeply savage view of US life. GV has been for nearly 50 years a pessimistic, sharp-tongued, knowledgeable critic of his native land; his sf must be read as an attempt to dramatize the long jeremiad.

   JC

   Other work: A Search for the King: A Twelth Century Legend (1950

   See also: UFOS.