BOYCE, Chris

   Working name of (Joseph) Christopher Boyce (1943-), Scottish writer and newspaper research librarian who published his first sf, "Autodestruct", in STORYTELLER \#3 in 1964. In the mid-1960s he contributed to SF Impulse, but his most important work to date is the sf novel Catchworld (1975), joint winner (with Charles LOGAN's Shipwreck) of the GOLLANCZ/Sunday Times SF Novel Award. Catchworld is an ornate, sometimes overcomplicated tale combining sophisticated brain-computer interfaces (COMPUTERS; CYBORGS) and SPACE OPERA; the transcendental bravura of the book's climax is memorable. In Brainfix (1980), a cautionary tale about social disorder in the UK, CB had the misfortune of predicting a rise in unemployment to an unheard-of three million in a fiction published just months before, in the harsh reality of the first Thatcher recession, it actually reached four million.

   JC

   Other work: Extraterrestrial Encounter (1979), a speculative inquiry into XENOBIOLOGY and the search for extraterrestrial INTELLIGENCE (SETI).

   See also: CYBERNETICS; GODS AND DEMONS.