Techno-thriller author Tom Clancy (b.1947) died on October 1 at Johns Hopkins. Clancy joined SFWA on the basis of his first novel, The Hunt for Red October, in 1984. That book introduced the world to Clancy’s protagonist Jack Ryan, who would feature in some way in most of his novels.
Author A. C. Crispin (b.1950) died on September 6 after a year-long battle with cancer. Crispin began publishing in 1983 with the Star Trek novel Yesterday’s Son. She continued writing media tie-in novels, including for the television show V and the films Star Wars, Alien, and The Pirates of the Caribbean. In 1989, she published her first original novel, Starbridge, and co-wrote six sequels to it. In 2005, […]
Polymath and former SFWA President Frederik Pohl (b.1919) died on September 2 after entering the hospital in repiratory distress earlier in the day. Pohl joined science fiction fandom in the 1930s and quickly became an integral part of the New York science fiction scene. He was denied entry to the first Worldcon in 1939 as part of the “Exclusion Act.” By that time, he had begun to publish, with his poem “Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna,” appearing in 1937 and his first story, the collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth “Before the Universe” in 1940 (as S.D. Gottesman, one of several pseudonyms Pohl used, either singularly or in collaboration).
Richard Matheson (b.1926) died on June 23. His varied career as an author began with his first published short story, the instantly classic “Born of Man and Woman,” which was published in the Spring 1950 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Harold Parke Godwin (b.1929) died of natural causes on June 19, 2013. Better known as Parke Godwin, the name under which he wrote, Godwin was known as “Pete” by his friends. His novella “The Fire When It Comes” won the World Fantasy in 1982 and he was a World Fantasy Con Guest of Honor in 2011.
Scottish author Iain M. Banks (b.1954) died on June 9, a little over two months after announcing that he was suffering from late-stage gall bladder cancer.
SFWA Grand Master Jack Vance (b.1916 as John Holbrook Vance) died on May 26.
Vance wrote more than sixty novels, including the sequels to The Dying Earth, his five volume Demon Princes series, the Alastor series, the Cadwal Chronicles, The Lyonesse series, the Durdane series, and the Tschai series.
Former SFWA President andrew j. offutt (b.1934) died on April 30. Offutt began publishing in 1954 when his story “And Gone Tomorrow” was published in If. Although he had previously published novels under the house names J. X. Williams and John Cleve, his first science fiction novel published using his own name was Evil is Live Spelled Backwards in […]
Out-of-shape IT technician Roen wakes up with a passenger in his brain – an ancient alien life-form called Tao, whose race crash-landed on Earth before the first fish crawled out of the oceans. Like that’s going to end up well…
Kids raised in an alien zoo must travel across space to escape their overlords and save their dad.
Who is Mary Darling? In this subversive take on both Peter Pan and Sherlock Holmes, a daring mother is the populist hero the Victorian era never knew it needed.
Auston Habershaw is a science fiction and fantasy author, writing about the could-be and never-was, and also teaches composition and literature at MCPHS University in Boston, MA.
