BONANNO, Margaret Wander

(1950-)

   US writer whose first books were volumes of poetry. After a mainstream novel,A Certain Slant of Light (1979), she made her mark on sf with a highly successful Star Trek tie, Dwellers in the Crucible * (1985). Two others followed - Strangers from the Sky * (1987) and Probe * (1992), which latter she claimed had been extensively rewritten, and disavowed - but MWB's main achievement lay in The Others, a PLANETARY-ROMANCE sequence comprising The Others (1990) ,Otherwhere (1991) and Otherwise (1993), in which the eponymous aliens, stranded on an Earthlike world, must attempt, through telepathy and intermittent bouts of interracial breeding, to survive the onslaughts of jealous, inferior humanlike natives. MWB has written two novels under the house name Rick North in the Young Astronauts sequence: \#4: Destination Mars * (1991) and \#6: Citizens of Mars * (1991).

   JC