BULL, Emma

(1954-)

   US writer who began as an author of fantasies, her first being "Rending Dark" in Sword and Sorceress (anth 1984) ed Marion Zimmer BRADLEY, and her best known being her first novel, War for the Oaks (1987). Her second novel, Falcon (1989), is a remarkably well constructed sf tale whose protagonist moves from the PLANETARY-ROMANCE setting of the first half of the book into the hi-tech SPACE-OPERA environment that dominates the second, where he has become an ace starship pilot; eventually everything fits together in an extremely well ordered climax. The subtitle of her third novel, BONE DANCE: A FANTASY FOR TECHNOPHILES (1991), neatly demonstrates the difficulty - it is not uncommon for writers of the 1980s to pose the problem - of generic placement, though this particular book, which depicts a post- HOLOCAUST search for an ancient weapon, is sufficiently sf-like not to distress taxonomists. Finder: A Novel of the Borderlands * (1994) is, however, a fantasy novel tied to the Borderlands world, and The Princess and the Lord of Night (1994) is a pictorial fantasy for children. With her husband, the fantasy writer Will Shetterly (1955-), EB has published a collection of stories (one collaborative), Double Feature(coll 1994), and edited the Liavek sequence of SHARED-WORLD fantasy anthologies: Liavek * (anth 1985), The Players of Luck * (anth 1986), Wizard's Row * (anth 1987), Spells of Binding * (anth 1988) and Grand Festival * (anth 1990).

   JC

   See also: FASTER THAN LIGHT; PHILIP K. DICK AWARD.