VOLLMANN, William T(anner)

(1959-)

   US writer whose debut novel, You Bright and Risen Angels: A Cartoon (1987 UK), is an immense FABULATION whose interweavings of PARANOIA and CYBERPUNK tended to remind critics of the work of Thomas PYNCHON. The war between the villain, who is attempting to control the world through an information web, and the "bugs" caught in his system, who attempt to remain subversively free, is also, in Postmodernistic fashion, a war of words between contrasting methods of defining and controlling "reality". The ongoing sequence entitled Seven Dreams: A Book of NorthAmerican Landscapes- of which The Ice-Shirt (1990 UK) is the 1st instalment, Fathers and Crows (1992) is the 2nd, and The Rifles (1994) is the 6th - attempts to construct out of language and myth and history a new version of the USA. The stories assembled in The Rainbow Stories (coll of linked stories 1989 UK), though they depict extreme states of being, almost entirely eschew fantasy.

   JC