Author Archives: Jeffrey A. Carver

My second novel, Star Rigger’s Way, has been out of print in paper for many long years. We aims to change that. In fact, we just did. It is now available in a handsome trade paperback from Starstream Publications.

Star Rigger’s Way was the first book of mine to gain much attention (read: sales). Based on a short story, “Alien Persuasion,” which was published in Galaxy Magazine, Star Rigger’s Way was the first book-length exploration of the art and science of starship rigging. That’s a little odd, since my debut book, Seas of Ernathe, was set in the Star Rigger Universe, but at a later time when the art of rigging had been lost; that story was all about rediscovery. Star Rigger’s Way, on the other hand, plunges us right into the experience—with a young pilot, Gev Carlyle, trying to work with a large, catlike alien, Cephean the cynthian, to get them both to safety through a dangerous passage.

Here’s an interior illo by Freff from the story in Galaxy, showing Cephean with his fernlike minions, the riffmar.

The novel is a coming-of-age story for Carlyle, and an alien contact story for the human and cynthian. We see some sights in the galaxy, talk to some drunken riggers in a bar (where we learn there are dragons in space)—and tangle with some interstellar pirates, inadvertently setting up a later novel, Eternity’s End. There’s a bit of romance, as well.

This was the first book of mine to be published, not just in paperback, but as a main selection of the Science Fiction Book Club. Which meant a low-cost hardcover, sent out to SFBC members who either ordered it or forgot to return the little form saying, don’t send it. Either way, it gained me some notice early in my career.

By the way, I plan to make complete, autographed sets of the Star Rigger Books available for holiday shopping. Just as soon as I finish the new edition of Dragon Rigger, which is real close now.

This new edition of Star Rigger’s Way is available at Amazon (affiliate link), and soon through other stores, as well.

I’ve got a new treebook to offer the world: Seas of Ernathe, my first novel and the beginning and the end of the Star Rigger universe to date. The beginning, because it’s the first novel I wrote in that world (or any other world), and the end because it’s set farthest in the future in the chronology of starship rigging. That might seem a little odd, but so it goes with story writing. I actually created star rigging in a short story, “Alien Persuasion,” which later became the starting point of my second novel, Star Rigger’s Way, published in Galaxy in 1974, I think it was. That came before I’d even considered attempting a novel.

Seas of Ernathe came about because of an odd opportunity for a new writer—I wrote it because of a rejection letter for a completely unrelated story. I’d been submitting short stories to a number of markets for years, including to the late Terry Carr, editor of a prestigious anthology series called Universe. He’d been responding with encouraging rejection notes. In this case, he sent back a story called “Love Rogo” (later published in the triad Future Love, edited by Roger Elwood). In his note, he said the story wasn’t right for the book he was doing, though he liked it, and would I be interested in possibly writing a novel—with an advance up front, if I could send him a sufficiently interesting outline and three sample chapters?

Would I? I dropped into my chair in front of my Olympia portable typewriter and started pounding… well, not so much the keys as my forehead. Novel. Novel. What could I write a novel about? I had recently sold “Alien Persuasion” to Galaxy, and starship rigging was in my head. Well… well… what if… well… what if they lost the ability to rig ships? Who knows how or why? It would have to be much farther in the future, maybe because of some breakdown in galactic civilization. I didn’t know. But I just started, eventually, to type. And what I typed was Seas of Ernathe. (That’s a silent “e” on the end, by the way. It’s pronounced Ernath.) And this story told us, not how they lost the art of rigging, but how they made a start at getting it back.

Well, now you can read it! On paper! And not in the cheesy-looking Laser Books edition, which was its first publication. In fact, it now has gorgeous cover art by Chris Howard, who also did my Starstream edition covers for The Infinite Sea, The Reefs of Time, and Crucible of Time. Okay, it’s the same art that’s been on the ebook for a while, and in fact provides the backdrop for my website. But it’s gorgeous, nonetheless, and you can hold it in your hands. The type layout is by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff.

Right now, it’s available at Amazon. Soon it will be available elsewhere, as well.

My goal is to get all of the Star Rigger books back into treebook print in time to make a complete Star Rigger set available for holiday gift giving. Wish me luck!