Weiner, Andrew 1949–

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WEINER, Andrew 1949–

PERSONAL: Born June 17, 1949, in London, England; son of Joseph Weiner (a cabinet maker) and Rachel Papier (a secretary); married Barbara Moses (a career management consultant, president of a human resources consulting firm, and author), 1973; children: Nathaniel. Education: University of Sussex, B.A., 1970; London School of Economics, M.Sc., 1973. Hobbies and other interests: Collecting Bob Dylan bootlegs.

ADDRESSES: Home—26 Summerhill Gardens, Toronto, Ontario M47 1B4, Canada. Agent—Joshia Blimes, JABbwerocky Literary Agency, P. O. Box 4558, Sunnyside, NY 11104-0558.

CAREER: Ogilvy & Mather, London, England, copywriter, 1970–72; Dawson College, Montreal, Canada, lecturer in psychology, 1975–77; freelance writer, 1977–.

MEMBER: Science Fiction Writers of America, Writer's Union of Canada.

WRITINGS:

SCIENCE FICTION

Station Gehenna (novel), Congdon & Weed (New York, NY), 1987.

Distant Signals and Other Stories, Porcépic Press (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1989.

Envahisseurs!, Bifrost/Etoiles Vives (Le Pressis-Brion, France), 1998.

This Is the Year Zero, Pottersfield Press (Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia, Canada), 1998.

Also contributor of short stories to anthologies, including Again, Dangerous Visions: 46 Original Stories, edited by Harlan Ellison, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1972; The Norton Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Atterbery, Norton (New York, NY), 1993; Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers and Other Stories from Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, edited by Sheila Williams and Charles Ardai, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1990; In Dreams, edited by Paul J. McCauley and Kim Newman, Gollancz (London, England), 1992; Ark of Ice: Canadian Futurefiction, edited by Lesley Choyce, Pottersfield Press (East Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, Canada), 1992; Northern Frights 5, edited by Don Hutchison, Mosaic (Oakville, Ontario, Canada), 1999; and yearly anthologies published by Tesseract Books, 1992, 1997, and 1998. Author of the novelette Eternity, Baby, published in Tesseracts 4. Contributor of numerous short stories to periodicals, including Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, Interzone, Amazing Stories, Twilight Zone, Prairie Fire, Quarry, Chrysalis, Tesseracts, Proteus, and Full Spectrum.

Weiner's short stories have been translated into French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Czech, and German.

NONFICTION

(With Amit Zalman and E. Ann Sutherland) Stay Slim for Good, Walker (New York, NY), 1976.

(With Amit Zalman and E. Ann Sutherland) Stop Smoking for Good, Walker (New York, NY), 1976.

(With Amit Zalman and E. Ann Sutherland) Guide to Intelligent Drinking, Walker (New York, NY), 1977.

(With Amit Zalman and E. Ann Sutherland) Phobia Free: How to Fight Your Fears, Stein & Day (New York, NY), 1977.

Effective Time Management, Hume (Willowdale, Ontario, Canada), 1983.

P.A.T., the First Fifty Years: Building the Human Resource Management Function, Personnel Association of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1986.

The Financial Post Moneywise Magazine Dictionary of Personal Finance, Random House (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1987.

Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Reader's Digest, New Musical Express, Financial Post Magazine, Canadian Business, Maclean's, New York Review of Science Fiction, and Toronto Life.

ADAPTATIONS: The short stories "Distant Signals" and "Going Native" were adapted for the television series Tales from the Darkside, produced by Laurel-TV; "The News from D Street" was filmed for the television series Welcome to Paradox.

SIDELIGHTS: Andrew Weiner is best known by fans of the genre for his science fiction short stories, although it is his novel Station Gehenna that brought his name into greater prominence. His stories are sometimes labeled "soft science fiction" because they are not so much concerned with space travel and other gimmicks of the genre as they are with themes concerning society. "I rarely write about outer space (the whole idea gives me vertigo) or the far future," the author is quoted as saying in Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers. "I do, however, make heavy use of aliens, usually a metaphor for exploring the human mind."

Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Mici Gold remarked, "Weiner does not usually set his tales in outer space or in the far future; instead, he prefers modern settings and events that are apocalyptic or transformative…. His characters, human or alien, often wrestle with madness, uncertain identities, and ambiguous events. The music industry, finance, and the arts are frequent subjects, drawn from his years of freelancing, but in Weiner's hands these and other mundane topics become truly speculative. His writing characteristically hovers between mainstream and science fiction or science fantasy."

In keeping with his education in social psychology, Weiner's stories reflect his interest in character over the trappings of hard science fiction. His novelette Eternity, Baby, for example, is about a teenage musician who creates an image in his mind of the girl he loves that becomes as real as human flesh to him. Here, Weiner blends science fiction, magic realism, and psychological suspense. The story "Klein's Machine," found in the collection Distant Signals and Other Stories, presents a twenty-three-year-old amnesia victim who is placed in a mental ward after claiming to have traveled through time. This plot line allows Weiner, "by means of the psychiatrist's report, to make deprecating remarks about science fiction as literature and about its readers," to quote Gold. Such postmodernist touches are a hallmark of Weiner's work.

Critics have found that Weiner also likes to add elements of film noir to his stories, such as in "The News from D Street," a science fiction story, published in Distant Signals, with noir elements. Weiner's novel Station Gehenna is a mystery story set in an alien landscape. When psychologist Victor Lewin investigates the suicide of an employee of a company working to terraform an alien planet, he meets resistance that leads him to suspect a cover-up and the possibility of alien life. The novel puts less emphasis on characterization than on a presentation of philosophical ideas, such as the urge to conquer or "tame" the universe and survival in an overwhelmingly hostile environment.

This Is the Year Zero collects thirteen experimental science fiction stories that once again "reiterate Weiner's belief that humans can never understand aliens, their purposes, or their motives," according to Gold. The aims and goals of art and artists figure in the plots of at least two stories, "The New Freqencies," about mind-bending rock music, and "The Disappearance Artist," about a second-rate poet who becomes famous after learning how to disappear—literally. In Gold's words, the stories prove that Weiner "is widely read and well versed in the genre, and furthermore, that he brings his background in psychology to understanding the archetypes and themes of the literature." Gold added: "What Andrew Weiner looks for in a story is strangeness, but strangeness containing an 'element of psychological truth'—which is exactly how someone might describe Weiner's own writing."

"I think that what I write is less 'science fiction' than a more or less skillful imitation of the 'real' thing," Weiner stated in Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers. "I am personally unable to take aliens, distant planets, faster-than-light spaceships, mental powers, etc., seriously, although they can serve as convenient props."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 251: Canadian Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001, pp. 309-314.

St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, 4th edition, St. James (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Van Belkom, Edo, Northern Dreamers: Interviews with Famous Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Writers, Quarry Press (Kingston, Ontario, Canada), 1998, pp. 225-233.

Watson, Noelle, and Paul E. Schellinger, editors, Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers, St. James (Detroit, MI), 1991.