(?1948/1949-2010) Scots-born writer, who took his name by deed poll in the 1970s; it is understood that he wrote under other pseudonyms before becoming MacIntyre, but they have not been revealed, nor has his birth name; according to his own repeated account, he was sent to Australia as a boy under the infamous UK child-migrant programme. On returning to Britain MacIntyre, who deliberately confabulated much of his early life, may have begun his career with UK rewrite work – though no complete novels have been verified – for paperback publishers of routine sf in the later 1960s. In this period he claimed to have written, but refused to identify or acknowledge, novels for BADGER BOOKS under a pseudonym or HOUSE NAME or both. He then moved to the US.
After contributing some material to the Welsh magazine Raven in the 1970s, MacIntyre began publishing work of sf interest with "For Cheddar or Worse" and the more substantial "Martian Walkabout" for ASIMOV'S in 1980, and published further short fiction – some of it intricately clever – for the rest of his career. A few of these stories were assembled with the titular sequence of verses (mostly first published in AMAZING and ASIMOV'S) as MacIntyre's Improbable Bestiary (coll 2001 pod). As a ghost-writer, he wrote parts of Jerzy KOSINSKI's Pinball (1984), giving a character in the book his own unusual middle name.
His first known novel was an unremarkable contribution to the fourth Tom Swift series (> TOM SWIFT), The DNA Disaster * (1991) as by Victor APPLETON; but the first book in his own name is the altogether more interesting The Woman Between the Worlds (1994), a RECURSIVE tale – involving, among others, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) and Arthur Conan DOYLE – set in late-nineteenth-century England. The ambience is less STEAMPUNK than Gaslight Romance (> The ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANTASY), given an ornate plot involving a PARALLEL WORLD run on lines derived from the work of H P LOVECRAFT, and an invisible woman (> INVISIBILITY) who escapes from that other world, and who fascinates the protagonist by asking him to give her a full-body tattoo, thus making her visible (> PERCEPTION). [JC]
see also: THOUGHT EXPERIMENT.
born Perthshire, Scotland: ?1948/1949