US author who began publishing sf with "Dinner at Helen's" in Strange Bed Fellows (anth 1972) edited by Thomas N Scortia. His first sf novel, Sunrise West (October-December 1974 Vertex; exp 1981), features an attempt by multispecies commune-dwellers (some of them hippies) to survive in a Post-Holocaust USA, an enterprise which generates a Dystopia. Elysium (1982), set thousands of years later, expounds a moderately Libertarian view of the perils of allowing Ecology-minded liberals too long a hegemony. A few decades after its publication, with the hegemony it laments increasingly unlikely to be established, the book may be misunderstood: but Carlson, in fact, more resembles a warm-hearted Edward Abbey than he does any of the more radical conservatives of the new century.
