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(1940- ) Australian author resident in the USA from the mid 1990s, best known, under her pseudonym Clair McNab, for the Carol Ashton policiers, the Denise Cleever intelligence thrillers, and for the Kylie Kendall private eye tales set in Los Angeles. Her Young Adult sf, under her own name, is less familiar. The Virtual Realities Trilogy – comprising Virtual Realities (1992), Cybersaur (1993) and Worldwarp (1994), all three assembled as The Virtual Realities Trilogy (omni 1997) establishes an unremarkable Near Future world in which the information overload associated with the introduction of new technologies, such as Virtual Reality worlds and suddenly increased powers to breed "perfect" children (see Genetic Engineering), causes a kind of "ethical blackout", upon which she focuses. Similar problems of choice also shape a later singleton, Originator (1997). Saving Aunt Alice (2003) intriguingly substitutes for the protagonist's mother a kind of changeling Android from the future whose terrifying (but comic) incompetence threatens to make the change involuntarily permanent. She has also published some sf for younger readers. [JC]
born Melbourne, Victoria: 1940
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Virtual Realities Trilogy
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Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleight.
Accessed 00:07 am on 2 May 2024.
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