Carmichael, Claire
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(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]
Claire Carmichael
born Melbourne, Victoria: 1940
works
series
Virtual Realities Trilogy
- Virtual Realities (Sydney, New South Wales: Random House, 1992) [Virtual Realities Trilogy: pb/Yvonne Sutherland]
- Cybersaur (Sydney, New South Wales: Random House, 1993) [Virtual Realities Trilogy: pb/Yvonne Sutherland]
- Worldwarp (Sydney, New South Wales: Random House, 1994) [Virtual Realities Trilogy: pb/Yvonne Sutherland]
- The Virtual Realities Trilogy (Sydney, New South Wales: Random House, 1997) [omni of the above three: Virtual Realities Trilogy: pb/Alister Lockhart and Simon Ward]
Fabricants
- Originator (Sydney, New South Wales: Random House, 1997) [Fabricants: pb/Reece Scannell]
- Fabricant (Sydney, New South Wales: Random House, 1999) [Fabricants: pb/Reece Scannell]
- Incognito (Sydney, New South Wales: Random House, 2000) [Fabricants: pb/Reece Scannell]
individual titles
- The Mystery of the Haunted Dog (Sydney, New South Wales: Random House, 1991) [chap: hb/Craig Smith]
- The Mystery of the Alien Spacecraft (Sydney, New South Wales: Random House, 1994) [chap: hb/Craig Smith]
- Dr Death (Sydney, New South Wales: Random House, 1997) [pb/Alister Lockhart]
- Saving Aunt Alice (Sydney, New South Wales: Random House, 2003) [pb/Stephen Michael King]
- Freezing Eye (Sydney, New South Wales: Hachette Livre Australia/Hodder Childrens, 2003) [pb/]
works as editor
- Deadly Friends (Sydney, New South Wales: Random House, 1997) with Margaret Clark and Christine Harris [anth: pb/Alister Lockhart]
links
previous versions of this entry