Although Lawrence Watt-Evans debuted as a science fiction writer in 1975, his first four novels
and most of his subsequent work have all been
fantasies or horror. His first science fiction novel
was The Chromosomal Code (1984), a story set on
an Earth that has been conquered by an alliance
of various alien races who apparently have experimented with the genetic makeup of their human
subjects, who are now nearly extinct. The protagonist is determined to avenge his race. Although
the book is something of a potboiler, the author’s
enthusiasm for his subject matter was evident and
his characters were quite well conceived. Shining
Steel (1986) was much better, a lost colony story in
which the planet in question was settled by fundamentalists who have successfully expunged various “sins” from their society, only to have them
reintroduced when Earth resumes contact. The
colony had already split up into numerous rival
factions, a situation first exacerbated by the outside contamination and then raised to a fever
pitch by a charismatic zealot determined to
cleanse the world.
Denner’s Wreck (1988) also involves a lost
colony that is rediscovered by Earth and subjected
to considerable strain when the newcomers prove
to be more interested in exploiting the situation
than in helping the stranded settlers. The newcomers in fact pretend to be gods. Nightside City
(1989) is the best of Watt-Evans’s first four science
fiction novels. It is set on a planet whose very slow
rotation was incorrectly interpreted as stability
during the initial colonization. Now a very slow advance of sunlight approaches a city that has lived
perpetually in the dark, and people are fleeing before what they believe will be the destruction of
everything they have built occurs. Someone, however, is buying abandoned property, and a plucky
female detective decides to find out why.
Watt-Evans is an occasional short story writer;
most of his work in this form is pleasantly entertaining though rarely outstanding. The exception
is “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers”
(1987), which won a Hugo Award. Much of his
work at this length is humorous or satiric. The best
of his science fiction shorts are contained in
Crosstime Traffic (1992) and Celestial Debris
(2002). Under the name Nathan Archer, WattEvans has written several above-average media tiein novels.