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Jeffers, Alex

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

(1957-    ) Working name of US author Donnan Call Jeffers, Jr, who published his first three stories under that name. He has also published sf under the name Adam Morrow. He is the grandson of American poet Robinson Jeffers, whose work appears as epigraph to his second collection, and whose austere unsentimentality can be glimpsed in some of his fiction.

Jeffers first began publishing sf with "Mask" in New Dimensions 6 (anth 1976) edited by Robert Silverberg, to whose various Original Anthology series he sold another seven stories. Those in You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home: Wonder Stories (coll 2012) and Not Here. Not Now. stories and novellas (coll 2018) are divided, roughly evenly, between sf, fantasy, and contemporary fiction, and have appeared in such genre publications such The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Icarus and GigaNotoSaurus, as well as various original anthologies and magazines of gay erotica.

Jeffers's short novel The New People (2011 dos) is a much-revised version of a novel announced in Locus in 1984 as «A World of Small Compass» and sold to Terry Carr's line of Ace Specials, but never published as such. Conceived as an inversion to that sf tradition running from Poul Anderson's Virgin Planet (1959) to Joanna Russ's "When It Changed" (in Again, Dangerous Visions, anth 1972, ed Harlan Ellison) of a planet whose population, as the result of a Disaster some generations in the past, is entirely female, Jeffers's world of Rahab is entirely male. As in Russ, the population is able to reproduce itself by Genetic Engineering, although Jeffers's version does not shrink from the hard-nosed implication that most of them, being predisposed to heterosexuality, experience a less satisfying sexual existence than they know would be possible otherwise. Jeffers has published two other stories set in that milieu, and an eventual full-length novel is projected.

Jeffers's other novels have often incorporated elements of the fantastic. Deprivation; or, Benedetto furioso: an oneiromancy (2013), like Theodore Sturgeon's "To Here and the Easel" (in Star Short Novels, anth 1954, ed Frederik Pohl) and Russell Hoban's Angelica Lost and Found (2010), incorporates elements of Orlando Furioso (1516; exp 1532; trans 1591) by Ludovico Ariosto (see Italy) into a contemporary narrative that is not explicitly fantastic. The Padişah's Son and the Fox (2013) offers a frame story centering around an enchanted fox [for Talking Animals, and Portal and Faerie below, see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. That Door Is a Mischief (var mags; fixup 2014) is a contemporary fantasy featuring a Portal to the world of Faerie. [GF]

Donnan Call Jeffers, Jr

born Monterey, California: 14 July 1957

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