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(1960- ) US author and high school English teacher who began to publish sf with "Rhinestone Manifesto" in Interzone #13, Autumn 1985. His first book, Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book (coll 1987), winner of the Fiction Collective Award, declared his capacity for formal inventiveness and his technical affinities for the literary avant garde. A native Texan, Webb was educated at the University of Texas at Austin, and has published three mystery novels (with, unsurprisingly, strong fantastical elements) as well as several books on contemporary occultism. Since 2002 he has also taught Science Fiction Writing for the UCLA Extension program. His sf criticism has appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction and elsewhere.
Webb is at his best at short story length, and has published sf, fantasy, and horror in all the major SF Magazines (save Analog), in many notable Anthologies, and in a variety of smaller magazines and journals (more than 400 stories to date). One of his most celebrated stories is "Jesse Revenged" (December 1986 Asimov's), which entangles two sets of brothers: the outlaws Frank and Jesse James, and the Bostonians William and Henry James. As Henry James stalks Robert Ford, who has been hiding under the pseudonym Aubrey Sorrentino, something more than postmodern play unfolds (see Postmodernism and SF). "The Yellow Flower" and related stories, in When They Came (coll 2006), trace the dire effects of a mysterious self-help book; the invasion of griffins in the title story of the collection asserts, as does much of Webb's work, that the world is not as we might think.
He is not the Don Webb who edits Bewildering Stories, an Online Magazine in which he has however appeared. [HW]
see also: H P Lovecraft; Magic.
born Amarillo, Texas: 30 April 1960
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Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 15:42 pm on 8 November 2024.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/webb_don>