HALDEMAN, Jack C(arroll) II

(1941-)

   US writer who began publishing sf with "Garden of Eden" for Fantastic in 1971. His 50 or so stories have tended to avoid the more serious SPACE-OPERA themes, sticking generally to GAMES-AND-SPORTS tales about ROBOT football players, precognitive STARS, and the like. His first novel, Vector Analysis (1978), sets problems in space and sees them solved. His second, Perry's Planet * (1980), is a Star Trek tie, and his third, with his wife Vol Haldeman and Andrew J. OFFUTT, all signing as John CLEVE, is Spaceways \#11: The Iceworld Connection (1983). There is NoDarkness (fixup 1983) with his brother Joe HALDEMAN, amusedly pits a hick from the hinterlands of a colony planet against some interstellar difficulties, leading picaresquely to the saving of the Universe. Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of the Zombie Vampires * (1991) with Harry HARRISON is slapstick. But not all JCH's work has been determinedly light;some of his earlier stories - like "Songs of Dying Swans" (1976), about the death of some genetically altered humans - show genuine aesthetic skills, a sense of bluff cunning which came more and more to the fore in the 1980s. He remains perhaps most at ease in collaborations; his contributions to Slow Dancing Through Time (coll 1990), an assembly of stories written by various authors in collaboration with Gardner DOZOIS, are among his best work. Echoes of Thunder (1991 chap dos) with Jack DANN is also of interest.

   JC

   See also: MATHEMATICS.