CARR, Jayge

   Pseudonym of US writer Marj Krueger (1941-), a former nuclear physicist for NASA who began to publish sf with "Alienation" for ASF in 1976, and whose major work to date is probably her first novel, Leviathan's Deep (1979), in which star-travelling Terrans (much like 1950s Americans, particularly in their sexual politics) confront a female from a technologically primitive but culturally sophisticated humanoid race whose males are genuinely inferior. The ALIEN protagonist, in whose voice the tale is told, is depicted with flair, sympathy and a sense of her real differences from a human woman (WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION). The Rabelais sequence - Navigator's Sindrome (1983), The Treasure in the Heart of the Maze (1985) and Rabelaisian Reprise (1988), with a fourth volume, Knight of a Thousand Eyes, projected - begins with a mildly humorous adventure, with added moral bite, about the search for a female interstellar Navigator lost on the planet Rabelais, where the powerful play out decadent fantasies on quasi-slaves bound to them by "contractual obligation". The series continues in much the same vein. In the late 1980s, JC began to appear occasionally in best-of-the-year collections with such stories as "Chimera" (1989), a hard-edged tale of revenge and genetic manipulation set in a nightmarish future heavily influenced by CYBERPUNK. While she is not the most inventive of recent writers, JC's stories are solidly crafted, well characterized and readable.

   NT