for an invasion and assassination. Three additional
book-length adventures followed, the first two in
collaboration with Chris Morris. City at the Edge of
Time(1988), the best in the series, takes Tempus
to a distant city whose inhabitants have achieved a
form of immortality, but at a terrible cost. Tempus
Unbound(1989), the weakest of her novels despite
an interesting premise, transports Tempus from his
own world to our own contemporary America.
Storm Seed(1990) describes his final battle against
the forces of demonic evil.
Most of Morris’s remaining fantasy falls into
another shared world series, this one set literally in
hell. On each of these novels, Morris collaborated
with another writer, a pattern that repeated itself
in her later science fiction. The Trojan War is
fought again in Kings in Hell(1987, with C. J.
CHERRYH), the poet Homer conducts the reader on
a guided tour of the afterlife in The Little Helliad
(1988), and various characters from different times
and places interact in Explorers in Hell(1989, with
David Drake). In the mid-1990s Morris briefly
concentrated on mainstream thrillers before falling
silent. After a gap of many years, the Thieves’
World anthology series has been resumed, and it is
to be hoped Morris will revive what is probably the
most famous character to emerge from the earlier
volumes.
Morris, William(1834–1896)
William Morris was a British writer, poet, and de-
signer whose fantasy fiction was very influential on
J. R. R. TOLKIEN,E. R. EDDISON, and through
them on virtually every fantasy writer who fol-
lowed. His first prose fantasy was “The Hollow
Land” (1856), and the first novels to contain
marginal fantastic elements were the Viking ad-
venture story The Roots of the Mountains(1889)
and The House of the Wolflings(1889), which in-
volves conflict between Romans and Saxons. The
Glittering Plain(1891) is more recognizable as a
fantasy novel. A traveler visits an imaginary land
that claims to be a utopia and whose residents are
virtually immortal. The image of a perfect kingdom
is an illusion, however, and he is finally forced to
flee the secretively repressive government. The
novel is an interesting counterpoint to News from
Nowhere(1891), a utopian science fiction novel
Morris wrote at approximately the same time.
The Wood Beyond the World (1894) more
closely resembles modern fantasy. Once again we
are introduced to an imaginary world through the
eyes of a traveler who stumbles into a dangerous
array of personalities, dominated by a witch who
decides the outsider should replace her current
lover. Violence ensues before the protagonist es-
capes. His most successful fantasy novel was The
Well at World’s End(1896), so large that it ap-
peared in two volumes when published in paper-
back. The plot is an episodic quest taking a young
man through a variety of locations and adventures,
at the end of which he has had his youth restored
by magical waters and has found the love of his
life. The major innovation was the creation of an
entire civilization in a universe not our own and
the author’s considerable efforts to describe a real-
istic and plausible imaginary setting.
Morris’s subsequent fantasy novels, both pub-
lished posthumously, were less impressive, though
occasionally interesting. The Sundering Flood(1897)
deals with two lovers in a fantasy world illogically
separated by waters narrow enough to be easily
crossed. The Waters of the Wondrous Isles(1897)
contains another series of adventures in a medieval
style kingdom. Golden Wings and Other Stories
(1976) collects many of Morris’s short stories, not
all of which are fantasy. Although he is not gener-
ally popular with modern fantasy readers, his influ-
ence on the shape of the genre is beyond measure.Morrow, James(1947– )
Although James Morrow’s early novels are all tech-
nically science fiction, he was never interested in
technological details or general scientific fact, and
much of his work is predicated on the discovery of
some new principle that served his literary purpose
but that was often not scientifically plausible. He
finally turned to outright fantasy with the novel
Only Begotten Daughter(1990), the first of several
openly satiric works focused on Christianity. The
setting is the near future. Odd events at a sperm
bank appear initially to be some kind of mix up but
are eventually explained as divine intervention.
Julie Katz’s advent is explained as a virgin birth248 Morris, William