Oberndorf, Charles
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1959- ) US author who began publishing work of interest with his first sale, "Mannequins" in Full Spectrum (anth 1988) edited by Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy. His first novel, Sheltered Lives (1992), sets the fully realized lives of his protagonists – a male prostitute and his client, who may be a terrorist – in a mid-American, Dystopian, Near Future world where vast Keeps house vast populations under constant surveillance by an AI with a sense of humour; an AIDS-like Pandemic, that has distorted Sex and justified repression in general, is not cured. Set in a not dissimilar projected America under repressive social control, Testing (1993) describes the exposure of students to Virtual Reality "dreamchairs" where their worthiness as citizens is assessed. Foragers (1996), set more expansively in a Space Opera environment: an anthropologist is assigned to study an Alien race at which humanity is at war, and may have found a solution to the conflict in his subjects' need for solitude. [JC]
Charles G Oberndorf
born Cleveland, Ohio: 31 December 1959
works
- Sheltered Lives (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1992) [pb/Charles Chichoni]
- Testing (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1993) [novella: pb/Bruce Jensen]
- Foragers (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1996) [pb/Don Landwerhle and Steven Hunt]
links
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