SLONCZEWSKI, Joan (Lyn)

(1956-)

   US writer and professor of biology, specializing in genetics, who began publishing sf with her first novel, Still Forms on Foxfield (1980), a tale in which most of her subsequent concerns take initialshape. A human community of Quakers, having fled an apparently doomed Earth and establishing on the planet Foxfield a sane and ECOLOGY-obedientrelationship with the native species, is contacted centuries later by a technologically resurgent humanity and must now deal with the challenge to its ways. Significantly, the book deals not with rediscovery - an old and typically triumphalist sf theme - but with being discovered, a point of view reiterated in her second and best known novel, A Door into Ocean (1986), which won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD. The planet (in facta moon) is in this case water-covered and inhabited by WOMEN, who thwart a military invasion; the book teaches some sharp FEMINIST lessons en passant. The sequel, Daughter of Elysium (1993), broadens the terms of discourse - several contrasting societies are portrayed - at some cost to narrative vigour, though sharp subtle observations constantly, as before, prickle and amuse.The Wall around Eden (1989), set on a devastated post- HOLOCAUST Earth, provides its female protagonist with numbing challengesof comprehension (the supervising ALIENS are invisible and their insect-like culture may in fact have been decorticated - i.e., its central control systems may have been destroyed) and response, with no clear answers available in the waste. From the slightly sentimentalized burden of her first book, JS has moved rapidly into supple command of her ample concerns.

   JC

   See also: PASTORAL; UNDER THE SEA.