Working name of US writer Michaela-Marie Roessner-Herman (1950-    ), whose first novel, the widely admired Walkabout Woman (1988), is a fantasy, though she received, all the same, the John W Campbell Award for that year; her second novel, Vanishing Point (1993) is, however, sf. Set in California thirty years after the mysterious disappearance of 90% of the human race, and climaxing in the Keep-like Winchester Mystery House in San José (a real building), the story concerns the efforts of the protagonist and others to plumb the depths of the mystery; but if there is a single explanation it is not – after a fashion typical of the sf writers who came to maturity in the 1990s – vouchsafed the searchers, though the rhetoric of virtual particle Physics is invoked, and hitches in the universe-wide unfolding of Cosmological destiny are suggested, along with a sense that Parallel Worlds might be far more distressingly complex than normally depicted in sf. The Stars Dispose sequence beginning with The Stars Dispose (1997) is fantasy set in Renaissance Florence. [JC]

Michaela-Marie Roessner-Herman

born San Francisco, California: 27 January 1950

died

works

series

Stars Dispose

• The Stars Dispose (New York: Tor, 1997) [Stars Dispose: hb/Richard Bober]
• The Stars Compel (New York: Tor, 1999) [Stars Dispose: hb/Tristan Elwell]

individual titles

• Walkabout Woman (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1988) [pb/Mark Harrison]
• Vanishing Point (New York: Tor, 1993) [hb/Bruce Jensen]

links

Previous versions of this entry

• 01/01/2005
• 20/12/2011
• 29/04/2012
• 02/05/2012
• 21/08/2012