Since his first publication in 1977, Lewis Shiner has written a widely ranging spectrum of short stories: mysteries, fantasies, and horror as well as SF. But the 1984 appearance of his first novel, Frontera , demonstrated his important role in Movement fiction. Frontera combined classic hard-SF structure with a harrowing portrait of postindustrial society in the early twenty first century. The book's gritty realism and deflating treatment of SF icons aroused much comment.