''US writer whose first five novels are stylish and potent exercises in a post-cyberpunk urban idiom, and comprise the first instalments in a loose ongoing series about the near future state of the USA. The sequence, so far, reminiscent at points of the baroque New York detective fictions of Jerry Oster, and projected to stop after five volumes, consists of ''Ambient'' (1987), ''Terraplane'' (1988), and ''Heathern'' (1990 UK), which returns to New York and to Thatcher Dryden, who on this occasion must try (he fails) to make sense of a messiah figure whose fate in this venue is dourly predictable and whose humaneness seems, in this context, otherworldy'' (John Clute/Encyclopedia of SF).