BARTON, William R(enald III)

(1950-)

   US writer whose sf novel, Hunting on Kunderer (1973), confronts humans with ALIEN natives on a dangerous new planet, and whose A Plague of All Cowards (1976) was also an sf adventure. Of much greater interest was Iris (1990) with Michael CAPOBIANCO, in which a group of artists, en route to Triton, encounters the eponymous GAS GIANT, which has drifted, with moons, into the Solar System. Alien artefacts are found and epiphanies are experienced; but the novel is primarily striking for the intense directness of the prose and for the capacity of the authors to address in that prose both matters of science (which might be expected in a HARD-SF novel) and matters of character, for the cast is deeply memorable. Fellow Traveler (1991), also with Capobianco, is perhaps more straightforward, but again shows a remarkable grasp of the human shape of experience, in this case a NEAR FUTURE Soviet attempt to harness an asteroid for industrial purposes. Given the current state of the US space program, this novel is one of the very few of those caught out by the political transformation of the USSR to make one feel that there have been losses as well as gains. Dark Sky Legion: An Ahrimanic Novel (1992) is an ambitious, Galaxy-spanning, metaphysical, highly readable SPACE OPERA which provides some engrossing speculations about a universe in which FASTER-THAN-LIGHT travel is impossible and over which a conservative human hegemony exercises control, ruthlessly braking the tendency of isolated colonies to vary too far from the declared norm; there are echoes of Wolfbane (1959) by C.M. KORNBLUTH and Frederic POHL. WB treats this use of power with due though occasionally rather moody ambiguity. Yellow Matter (1993 chap) is a savage little sf fable of exogamy.

   JC