CINNABAR

Eight loosely linked stories of Cinnabar, Bryant's ""city at the center of time,"" where bio-engineered mortals, immortals, cyborgs, and interspecies hybrids play out cool, often forlorn charades of ambition, loss, and search against the jurisdiction of an all-supervising computer in the first stages of psychosis. When Bryant lets his people take over--Tourmaline the intelligent and generous ""sex star,"" ever-toying Timnath Obregon the inventor, sleek hybrid Jade Blue the ""catmother""--he is pleasant and sympathetic. When he is working in complex literary allusions and deep shores-of-space-and-time demonstrations of the metaphorical richness of it all, he is rather forgettable.