CARVER, Jeffrey A(llan)

(1949-)

   US writer who began publishing sf with ". . . Of No Return" for Fiction Magazine in 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976 Canada), showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest routines, new starflight technologies, various planets and transcendental ALIENS in a tale whose final effect is incoherent, though promising; nor is Panglor (1980) significantly better behaved. But The Infinity Link (1984) is a large and ambitious recasting of his abiding material-space epic venues, striving human protagonists in transcendental communion with aliens or AIs - into the tale of a human woman telepathically linked with a passing interstellar race. The Rapture Effect (1987) brought the ARTS into the mix, suggesting in the end that a secret war between a human-built AI and its distant alien counterpart might be resolved, finally, through the mediation of some ambitious human artists. And in the Starstream sequence - From a Changeling Star (1989) and Down the Stream of Stars (1990) - JAC created at last a galactic environment of sufficient richness to contain a still somewhat overexuberant imagination. In the first volume, a "starstream" has opened up between Earth space and the centre of the Galaxy, allowing for intercourse and settlement; the plot, which is extremely complicated, involves its protagonist in a quest inwards to regions where stars are numerous, by the end of which, killed and rekilled and reborn, he is saved by the overseeing AI which narrates the second volume. NANOTECHNOLOGIES are described; poetries and epiphanies and space wars proliferate. Dragons in the Stars (1992), and its sequel Dragon Rigger (1993), return to the Star Rigger universe; and a new series, the Chaos Chronicles begins with Neptune Crossing (1994), in which another AI enlists a lone human to save Earth from a comet whose course is only predictable through the AI's use of Chaos Theory. JAC seems to be thoroughly enjoying his worlds.

   JC

   Other work: Roger Zelazny's Alien Speedway \#1: Clypsis (1987).

   See also: MUSIC.