Bruce McAllister


Bruce McAllister is an American author of fantasy, science fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. He is known primarily for his short fiction. Over the years his short stories have been published in the major fantasy and science fiction magazines, theme anthologies, college readers, and "year's best" anthologies, including Best American Short Stories 2007, guest-edited by Stephen King.

Biography

McAllister was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1946. The son of a "peripatetic Navy family," his career-Navy-officer "Pearl-Harbor-survivor father and an underdog-championing anthropologist mother" raised Bruce and his younger brother, Jack, in Washington, D.C., Florida, California, and Italy. McAllister wrote, "The theme of the Outsider, the Other, the Alien in the larger sense, runs through almost all of my fiction. That came from being in a military family, from having a sense of being an outsider..."
He wrote to Dublin-based interviewer Bob Neilson, "When I was 4½ I shook hands with natty-dresser US President Harry Truman on a laid-back avenue in Key West, Florida. I had no idea who the guy was, but my momma raised me right. I wanted to be courteous, and he offered, so I shook his hand.... week after the hand-shake we dropped over to see Mrs. Hemingway, who lived in a little beach house with palms and banana trees and who, though we didn't know her, was hospitable."
He told Neilson that as a child he had a sea-shell collection of more than 2000 specimens. This interest appears in his fiction, notably in two 2010 stories, "Heart of Hearts" and "The Courtship of the Queen."
McAllister also told Neilson that "One of my ancestors was a guy named John Thomson. Immigrated from Scotland to Ireland, then the US in the 1700s. Wore his kilt till the day he died, outlived five wives, had fifteen children. Maybe the right stuff for a frontier, a New World, but I've always been horrified by the thought of having to live with someone like him. The domestic, family side of Braveheart?" The family story was that their lineage on his father's side went "back to Robert the Bruce, supposedly, and laterally to Ben Franklin, or so they said...along with a Captain McAllister of the Confederate Army." McAllister also thought that his mother "was probably part Native American."
Another influential childhood memory was this: "As far as our father's world went, we had, on the Navy base where we lived in San Diego, the bathyscaphe submersible in our back yard."
Literary archivist and agent Sarah Funke Butler describes an enterprise McAllister undertook when he was 16:
When Butler interviewed McAllister decades later, he remarked, "The conclusion I came to was that nobody had asked them. New Criticism was about the scholars and the text; writers were cut out of the equation. Scholars would talk about symbolism in writing, but no one had asked the writers."
McAllister attended middle school and art school in Italy. He received degrees in English and writing from Claremont McKenna College and the University of California, Irvine.
He taught literature and writing at the University of Redlands in southern California for twenty-four years. There, he helped establish and direct the Creative Writing Program, directed both the Professional Writing track of that program and its Communications Internship program, received various teaching and service awards, and was Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of Literature and Writing from 1990 to 1995. Later, he started the company McAllister Coaching, helping writers of books and screenplays with their manuscripts.
He lives in Orange, California with his wife, choreographer and Orange Coast College teacher, Amelie Hunter. He has three children from a previous marriage: Annie, Ben, and Liz.

Novels and collections

Reviews

Publishers Weekly wrote, "McAllister's first novel is a stunning tour de force... Masterful interior monologues that yield eerie, tingling tension make this terrifying novel one of the most memorable chronicles of the Vietnam war." Library Journal reviewer said, "The training and the mission are suffused with madness, and the physical horrors are matched with mental ones. Throughout the narrative are interspersed transcripts of interviews, memos, etc. The apocalyptic ending does strain the willing suspension of disbelief. Still, the story is fascinating, very well told, and likely to appeal to readers of Vietnam War fiction and nonfiction."
In a review of The Year's Best Science Fiction Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection, Ernest Lilley described the famous story "Kin": "a twelve-year-old boy is in the act... his 'partner' is an alien assassin he tries to hire to stop the government from killing his unborn sister. There are a lot of interesting bits in this story, and some nice nuance in the actions and ideas. As Gardner points out in his intro, McAllister may not be prolific in his output, but what he does offer us excellent work."
Bob Blough reviewed the short story "Blue Fire" for Tangent Online, the review magazine for short stories of science fiction and fantasy:
SF Site reviewed the story "Heart of Hearts," "another of Bruce McAllister's ongoing series of fantasies about a teenaged American boy in an Italian village." Rich Horton wrote, "It's a bittersweet story, beautifully written, sensitively characterized."
Blough also reviewed "Stamps" for Tangent: "one of the very few SF stories I can think of which uses stamp collecting as an integral part of the story. But if anyone can pull it off it is Bruce McAllister. 'Stamps' is told in a minor key and concerns itself with aliens coming to Earth during the Cuban missile crisis in order to avert nuclear war. The narrator is T'Phu'Bleem, one of ten Arcturians on the planet to save and eventually reveal themselves to the world. He begins collecting postage stamps to understand these earthlings: "These stamps were like a puzzle, one that could explain how human beings actually thought and felt... If he didn't try to figure that puzzle out for the sake of the human race and the Ten Galactic Principles, who would?" It is a pleasant story that lingers in the mind as an unusual way of describing first contact."
After reading "The Messenger," Rena Hawkins wrote, "Tim's father is dying and the question that tears at him the most is whether his wife, Tim's mother, actually loved him. To answer his father's question and hopefully bring him some peace, Tim travels back in time to meet his parents and see for himself. A short, poignant story about whether you can ever be sure where love is concerned."