Author Biography and Bibliography

Son of a gentle Cold War warrior father and underdog-championing anthropologist mother, Bruce McAllister reports that he had a strange but marvelous childhood and is very grateful for both the strangeness and the marvel.

Named for an uncle who was shot by a sniper on the island of Guam in WWII, at age eleven he slept on Whiteriver Apache holy grounds where the charismatic shaman Silas John Edwards—framed by white reservation barons for the murder of his wife but defended successfully by Early Stanley Gardner of Perry Mason fame—danced and sang his fusion of Christianity and eagle medicine.

At age twelve McAllister had a sea-shell collection of 3,000 specimens all neatly and obsessively labeled and, to house this collection, a little desk in the office of the Navy divers who would descend in the Bathyscaph Trieste to the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean a year later. At fourteen he got know well the witches that lived in the olive groves of a tiny communist fishing village in Italy and found them full of love. At eighteen he was part of a high school sleep-deprivation experiment that became, after the Beatles and John F. Kennedy's assassination, the most written-about (if fluffy) story in the world … and that the Navy surreptitiously used as research on eighteen-year-olds as the Vietnam War was beginning. Given how dreamlike life had always been, he began writing and publishing f&sf as a teenager, never sure what was invented and what was not.

Since then life has been just as strange and marvelous, but probably less charming as "story." He did, however, lose the nineties to the pharmaceutical experiments of a local doctor; and has his wife, choreographer Amelie Hunter, and his children, Annie, Ben, and Liz, to thank forever for keeping him alive—so that he can again write stories and live the dream that is life.







Photo by Amelie Hunter