Strieber, Whitley
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1945- ) US author, much better known for horror novels – like The Wolfen (1978) (see Horror in SF; Werewolves) and the Hunger sequence beginning with The Hunger (1981) (see Vampires) – than for his sf, though he has continued to produce the latter intermittently throughout his career, with an emphasis on the Near Future seen through a perspective that sometimes attempts to justify Paranoia about government conspiracies against the American people. Warday: And the Journey Onward (1984) with James W Kunetka, a very late example of the Cold War tale, describes from the retrospect of Post-Holocaust 1993 the consequences of a truncated World War Three between America and the USSR in 1988, during the course of which New York is destroyed but California preserved. The text is constructed as the joint, document-filled record of an investigative journey through balkanized America undertaken by the versions of Kunetka and Strieber alive in 1993; their observations of the surviving world are dispassionate and their analysis of the causes of the outbreak – partly obtained through interviews with executive participants – emphasizes human frailty. This dispassion is notable. The 2018 iteration of the Wikipedia entry on this novel, for instance, significantly distorts its explanatory frame to favour America and by implication to deprecate an opportunistically "neutral" Europe.
Wolf of Shadows (1985) is a Young Adult tale set in a post-holocaust Nuclear Winter. Nature's End (1986), again with Kunetka, is set in a Near-Future world devastated by Overpopulation, with a focus on Los Angeles (see California; Ecology). Communion: A True Story (1987), filmed as Communion (1989), and Transformation: The Breakthrough (1988) are represented as nonfictional accounts of Strieber's encounters with visiting Alien intelligences (see UFOs), but are listed here as fiction. Also centred on ufology is his sf novel Majestic (1989; rev 1990), whose subject is the so-called Roswell Incident of 1947 when, those who call it an "incident" claim, a UFO crashed in the New Mexico desert and the US Government created the Majestic 12 group (see Majestic), whose role was to create and maintain an extraordinary cover-up that, according to this version of reality, persists to this day. Putatively based on meticulously researched background detail, the novel incorporates – in the first edition without acknowledgement or permission – a summary derived from David Langford's spoof novel, An Account of a Meeting with Denizens of Another World, 1871 (1979) as by William Robert Loosley, edited by Langford (see Pseudoscience).
Later novels include The Grays (2006), in which Aliens control a small town, whose inhabitants they subject to experiments in Genetic Engineering; 2012: The War for Souls (2007), in which aliens threaten to bring about the End of the World on the title date; The Omega Point (2010), set slightly further into the Near Future, in a 2020 world so direly afflicted by the effects of a supernova (see Disaster) that the rich no longer safe in their Underground Keeps; and Hybrids (2011), in which Homo sapiens is threatened by aliens who have secretly interbred with us. It is not to deprecate these tales to indicate that they are sf of a very peculiar variety, consisting of sf tales whose fictionality is a mask over the truth: for the overt burden of Strieber's fiction is that it is literally true. [JC]
Louis Whitley Strieber
born San Antonio, Texas: 13 June 1945
works (selected)
series
Hunger
- The Hunger (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1981) [Hunger: hb/Paul Bacon]
- The Last Vampire (New York: Pocket Books, 2001) [Hunger: hb/Tom Hallman]
- Lilith's Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (New York: Atria Books, 2002) [Hunger: hb/Gerber Studio]
Flynn Carroll
- Alien Hunter (New York: Tor, 2013) [Flynn Carroll: hb/]
- Alien Hunter: Underworld (New York: Tor, 2014) [Flynn Carroll: hb/]
- Alien Hunter: The White House (New York: Tor, 2016) [Flynn Carroll: hb/]
individual titles
- The Wolfen (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1978) [hb/Judith Kazdym Leeds]
- Black Magic (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1982) [hb/]
- The Night Church (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983) [hb/Hiroko]
- Warday: And the Journey Onward (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984) with James W Kunetka [hb/Robert Reed]
- Wolf of Shadows (New York: Alfred A Knopf/San Francisco, California: Sierra Club Books, 1985) [hb/Marc Rosenthal]
- Nature's End (New York: Warner Books, 1986) with James Kunetka [hb/]
- Communion: A True Story (New York: William Morrow and Company/Beech Tree Books, 1987) [hb/Ted Jacobs]
- Transformation: The Breakthrough (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1988) [hb/Ted Jacobs]
- Majestic (New York: G P Putnam's Sons, 1989) [hb/Ted Seth Jacobs]
- The Wild (New York: Tor, 1991) [pb/TK]
- Unholy Fire (London: Macdonald, 1992) [hb/]
- The Forbidden Zone (New York: E P Dutton, 1993) [hb/Rob Wood]
- The Day After Tomorrow (New York: Pocket Star Books, 1994) [pb/]
- The Grays (New York: Tor, 2006) [hb/]
- 2012: The War for Souls (New York: Tor, 2007) [hb/]
- The Omega Point (New York: Tor, 2010) [hb/]
- Hybrids (New York: Tor, 2011) [hb/Getty Images]
- Melody Burning (New York: Tor, 2011) [hb/Getty Images]
- The Christmas Spirits: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens Retold for Modern Times (London: Coronet, 2012) [Charles Dickens: hb/]
collections
- Evenings with Demons: Stories from 30 Years (Borderlands Press, 1997) [coll: hb/]
works as editor
- Whitley Strieber's Aliens (New York: Pocket Books, 1999) [anth: pb/John Stephens]
links
previous versions of this entry