It might also be suggested that Morris found fantasy all too easy to write that she flourished when she felt required to exploit the argument structure of sf. In these works, which occupy much of Morris's bibliography, the sharp cognitive focus has softened, and the use of female protagonists whose sexual natures are controversially foregrounded has also become somewhat routinized. In the Heroes in Hell Shared World enterprise, which Morris co-created with C J Cherryh – beginning with Heroes in Hell (anth 1986) with Cherryh and ending with Prophets in Hell (anth 1989) – the result is something like chaos. In the Tempus fantasies, based on the Thieves' World Shared-World enterprise – starting with Beyond Sanctuary ( 1985) and ending with Storm Seed ( 1990) with Chris Morris – the traversals of historical material become even more hectic. The main sf instrument deployed in these books – starships run by AIs which establish symbiotic relationships with humans – prefigures Morris's growing interest in the combat side of history, and with Military SF in general and the sequence itself becomes nightmarishly complicated in its traversal of implied analogies from the past. Already, a sense of historical analogies pervades the texts, and in the Dream Dancer/Kerrion Empire trilogy – Dream Dancer ( 1980), Cruiser Dreams ( 1981) and Earth Dreams ( 1982) – this becomes explicit wafted away from Earth, the young protagonist of the series climbs into the upper echelons of a culture whose assumptions about behaviour reflect the world of Hellenistic Greece. Silistra intriguingly presents a society complexly conceived in terms of patterns (some literal) of cultural and biological bondage. Toughly told and intellectually extremist, the sequence (it now seems prematurely) proclaimed an ambition on her part to write at the highest possible level it cannot be said that she quite fulfilled this ambition before ceasing to publish seriously in the early 1990s.

She herself began writing with the ambitious Silistra sequence, comprising High Couch of Silistra ( 1977 rev vt Returning Creation 1984), The Golden Sword ( 1977), Wind from the Abyss ( 1978) and The Carnelian Throne ( 1979).

(1946- ) US defense specialist and author who gained some note as bass player 1972-1975 in the band named after her husband, Chris Morris he subsequently collaborated with Morris on several sf novels, always as Chris Morris.

Tempus Unbound by Janet E. Morris