BRYANT, Edward (Winslow Jr)

(1945-)

   US writer, almost exclusively of short stories, beginning with "They Come Only in Dreams" for Adam in 1970, since when he has made his living as a freelance writer. EB was raised in Wyoming (and graduated with an MA in English from the University of Wyoming in 1968), a circumstance to which he pays his respects in Wyoming Sun (coll 1980), which assembles fictions affected by that visually superb region. His early career was assisted by Harlan ELLISON, whom he met at the CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP in 1968 and 1969. His first book, Among the Dead and Other Events Leading up to the Apocalypse (coll 1973; rev 1974), made a considerable stir for the wide variety of stories included and the technical facility they display. His conversational, apparently casual style sometimes conceals the tight construction and density of his best work, like "Shark" (1973), a complexly told love story whose darker implications are brought to focus in the girl's decision to have her brain transplanted into a shark's body, ostensibly as part of a research project; in the story, symbol and surface reality mesh impeccably. The setting for many of the stories in this collection is a California transmuted by sf devices and milieux into an image, sometimes scarifying, sometimes joyful, of the culmination of the American Dream, an image further developed and intensified in Cinnabar (coll of linked stories 1976), whose eponymous city of the FAR FUTURE is a dreamlike re-enactment of an essentialized DYING-EARTH California. The earlier stories of the sequence intricately develop a strangely moving vision of the rococo, many-shaped life by which mankind is ultimately destined to explicate itself (see also LEISURE), though the end of the book presents stories with a somewhat reductive plottiness. Later stories - collected in Particle Theory (coll 1981), Trilobyte (coll 1987 chap) and Neon Twilight (coll 1990) - continue slyly to urge sf into fable, horror and myth. EB suggests that the face the genre should expect to see in the mirror is the Minotaur's.With Ellison, EB began a GENERATION-STARSHIP series with Phoenix without Ashes (1975), which works into novel form the pilot for the abortive Ellison tv series The Starlost; the book is short and perfunctory. Future volumes, long projected, have not appeared. EB has also published stories as Lawrence Talbot. He is the editor of an anthology of original stories and some poems, 2076: The American Tricentennial (anth 1977; rev 1977).

   JC

   Other works: The Man of the Future (1990 chap); The Cutter (1988 Silver Scream; 1991 chap); Fetish (1991), horror; The Thermals of August (1981 FSF; 1992 chap); Darker Passions (coll 1993 chap).

   See also: The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MESSIAHS; NEBULA; PERCEPTION; WILD CARDS.