WILHELM, Kate

   Working name of US writer Katie Gertrude Meridith Wilhelm Knight (1928-), married to Damon KNIGHT; beyond her writing, she has long been influential, along with her husband, through his founding of the MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' CONFERENCE in 1958 and its offshoot, in which shewas directly involved, the CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP; she edited one of the anthologies of stories from the latter, Clarion SF (anth 1977).But KW early became best known for her writing, and by the 1980s wasa ranking figure in the field, though her first work would eventually be seen as atypical. She started publishing sf in 1956 with "The Pint-Size Genie" for Fantastic, and continued for some time with the relativelystraightforward genre stories of the sort to be found in her first book, The Mile-Long Spaceship (coll 1963; vt Andover and the Android 1966 UK);it was not until the late 1960s that she began to release the mature stories which have made her career an object lesson in the costs and benefits of the market, for it seemed clear from about 1970 that she was most happy as a writer at the commercially unpopular novella length, and least happy as a novelist. Her response was to publish short stories and novellas, frequently brought together in book form as "speculative fiction", while at the same time producing intermittently capable and variously ambitious full-length tales. The shorter fictions were assembled in: The Downstairs Room, and Other Speculative Fiction (coll 1968), which includes the NEBULA-winning "The Planners" (1968); Abyss: Two Novellas (coll 1971); The Infinity Box: A Collection of Speculative Fiction (coll1975), the title story of which - also republished as THE INFINITY BOX (1971 Orbit 9 ed Damon Knight; 1989 chap dos) - is a darkly complex depiction of a NEAR FUTURE USA as refracted through the slow destruction of the conscience of a man gifted with a PSI POWER; Somerset Dreams (coll 1978); Listen, Listen (coll 1981); Children of the Wind: Five Novellas(coll 1989), which includes the NEBULA-winning The Girl who Fell into the Sky (1986 IASFM; 1991 chap); State of Grace (coll 1991 chap) and And the Angels Sing (coll 1992), which includes "Forever Yours, Anna" (1987), also a Nebula-winner. The strongest of these stories are exercises in capturing the significant texture of the new in the context of individual lives; time and again, a tale begins within the shaky domesticity of the family and moves suddenly to an sf or fantasy perspective from which, chillingly, the fragility of our social worlds can be discerned. At this point, at the point of maximum realization, her best stories generally stop.With novels it has tended to be otherwise. After More Bitter than Death (1963), a mystery, her first sf novel was The Clone (1965) with Theodore L. THOMAS, one of the rare sf books to use CLONE in the strict biological sense, in describing a formidable, voracious and ever-growing blob, and a competent demonstration of her workmanlike capacity to cope with genre content. The Killer Thing (1967; rev vt The Killing Thing 1967 UK), set almost uniquelyfor KW on another planet, also shows some facility in telling conventional sf tales. But The Nevermore Affair (1966) and Let the Fire Fall (1969; cut and rev 1972 UK), which attempt to investigate character within novel-length plots, fail in the first through overexplication and in the second through an uneasiness of diction, so that the near-future religious revival at its heart is depicted with a diffuse sarcastic loquacity. This sense of drift - this sense that her novels wilfully continue past the point at which her interest in maximum realization has begun to flag - is avoided in some instances. For example, WHERE LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG (fixup 1976) - which won HUGO and Jupiter AWARDS for Best Novel -successfully translates her interest in clones (this time in the sf sense of "people-copies") to a post- HOLOCAUST venue in the Appalachians where an isolated community of clones has been formed to weather the interregnum until civilization can spread again, but develops in its own, perilously narrow fashion; significantly, the book is made up of 3 novella-length sequences, each superb. The Clewiston Test (1976) balances the effects on the eponymous developer of a dubious drugs project against those on her of an unhappy marriage; for the world of experimental BIOLOGY - in which KW has always been interested - cannot be divorced from the lives it affects, a truism rarely brought to bear with such sharpness. Fault Lines (1977), not sf, uses a displaced and edgy diction to present a woman's broken remembrances, the fault lines of the title representing her own life, her future, her unhappy marriages, the earthquake that traps her, and a powerful sense that civilization itself is cracking at the seams. But these novels stand out.More normally KW's novels - like A Sense of Shadow (1981), Welcome, Chaos (1981 Redbook as "The Winter Beach"; exp 1983) andHuysman's Pets (1986) - tend to dissipate powerful beginnings in generic toings and froings. Her Leidl and Meiklejohn sequence of sf/horror/fantasy detective tales - The Hamlet Trap (1987), The Dark Door (1988), Smart House (1989), Sweet, Sweet Poison (1990) and Seven Kinds of Death (1992) -seem in their compulsive genre-switching almost to parody this proclivity; but Crazy Time (1988), a late singleton, more successfully embraces the insecurity of the novel form as KW conceives it, and the ricochets of the plot aptly mirror the discourse it embodies upon the nature of institutionalized definitions of sanity and insanity. Most successfully of all, DEATH QUALIFIED: A MYSTERY OF CHAOS (1991) - whose sequel, The Best Defense (1994) is associational - combines detection and sf in a long,sustained, morally complex tale whose central story-telling hook - solving a murder in order to free the innocent protagonist of suspicion - leads smoothly into an sf denouement involving Chaos theory, new perceptions and a hint of SUPERMAN. It is the longest of her novels, yet the one which most resembles her successful short fiction.

   JC

   Other works: The Year of the Cloud (1970) with Theodore L. Thomas; Margaret and I (1971); City of Cain (1974), a near-future psi thriller with many sf trappings; JuniperTime (1979); Better than One (coll 1980) with Damon Knight, each contributing separate items; Oh, Susannah! (1982); Cambio Bay (1990); Naming the Flowers (1992 chap); Justice for Some (1993), associational.AsEditor: Nebula Award Stories Nine (anth 1974).

   See also: ECOLOGY; IMMORTALITY; INTELLIGENCE; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; MEDICINE; MONSTERS; POLLUTION; ROBERT HALE LIMITED; SCIENTISTS; WOMEN SF WRITERS.