ROBERTS, Jane

   Working name of US writer Jane Roberts Butts (1929-1984), perhaps best remembered for such speculative works as Dialogues of the Soul \& Mortal Self in Time (1975), which took the form of a series of connected poems.She began publishing sf with "The Red Wagon" for FSF in 1956. Her sf novel The Rebellers (1963 dos) provides a melodramatic mix of OVERPOPULATION and ECOLOGY themes as successive waves of plague answer humanity's problems by nearly eliminating the race for good. More typical of her later concerns is The Education of Oversoul Seven (1973), a transcendental parable about the meaning of reality and time and space, whose student protagonist inhabits the bodies and souls of 4 humans from different periods, ranging from 35,000BC to AD2300, and who discovers en passant the profound simultaneity of all realities; its sequels are The Further Education of Oversoul Seven (1979) and Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time (1984).Emir's Education in the Proper Use of Magical Powers (1979) is a juvenile. JR published many further titles of mystical speculation.

   JC