May 19, 2024. Reparations. In partial compensation for the forced labor and lost wealth of slavery, African-Americans over the age of 18 are permitted to smoke anywhere they want. Except New York City.
May 21, 2044. Squatter’s Rights. In a close roll call vote overriding a Security Council veto, the UN recognizes Detroit as an Urban Free State. Formerly part of the USA, the city was seized by an army of sin-docs in 2037.
May 9-11, 2107. Ceticide. 3912 blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus), the entire global population of the planet’s largest animal, beach themselves and die on Long Island’s south shore in an apparent mass suicide.
Return to In This Issue listing.
OBITUARIES
Film critic, author, and fan ROGER EBERT, 70, died April 4, 2013 of complications from cancer.
Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. He was the film reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 to 2013, and co-hosted TV programs At the Movies with Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert and Siskel and Ebert and The Movies, as well as appearing on Sneak Previews, Ebert & Roeper at the Movies, and Ebert Presents: At the Movies.
He published two SF stories: ‘‘After the Last Mass’’ in Fantastic (1972) and ‘‘In Dying Venice’’ in Amazing (1972). As a teenager he was an active SF fan, contributing letters of comment to various magazines and writing poems for Pat & Dick Lupoff’s Xero in the early ’60s. In his introduction for The Best of Xero (2004), ‘‘How Propeller-Heads, BNFs, Sercon Geeks, Newbies, Recovering GAFIAtors, and Kids in Basements Invented the World Wide Web, All Except for the Delivery System’’, he describes his discovery of SF when he was 11 or 12 and his subsequent love of the genre, especially the magazines. He wrote, ‘‘Today I can see my name on a full-page ad for a movie with disinterest, but what Harry Warner, Jr. or Buck Coulson had to say about me – well, that was important.’’ He was friendly with fans, authors, and editors, including Wilson ‘‘Bob’’ Tucker and Ed Gorman, and briefly published his own fanzine, Stymie.
Roger Ebert (1970)
Roger Joseph Ebert was born June 18, 1942 in Urbana IL. He wrote for his local paper, the News Gazette, starting at age 15, and edited his high school paper. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was the editor-in-chief of the Daily Illini. He graduated in 1964 and in 1966 joined the Chicago Sun-Times. After six months at the paper, he started reviewing films. In 1975 he began hosting a weekly TV show with Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, which led to his long TV career. He won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975, the first film critic to do so. Ebert published over 20 books, including many volumes of his annual collection of film reviews. He co-wrote the screenplay for Russ Myers’s cult classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
Ebert developed thyroid cancer in 2002, and ceased appearing on television when complications from a 2006 surgery left him unable to speak. In April 2013 he announced online that a hip injury had ‘‘been revealed to be a cancer.’’ He is survived by his wife Chaz Hammelsmith.
THE SUPREME VIRTUE WAS KINDNESS by Dick Lupoff
It was 1960, Ike was President, nobody had even heard of the Beatles, and Pat and I were a pair of sophisticated 20-something fanpublishers cranking out mimeographed issues of Xero every couple of months. We received a letter from a teenaged neofan in Illinois pleading for a copy of our fanzine. You couldn’t buy it in those days – you either had to write for Xero or swap your own fanzine for it or… what was called, ‘‘the usual.’’
The teenaged neofan seemed so earnest, we couldn’t turn him down, so we sent him a copy of Xero and he sent back a letter-of-comment and eventually he became – I’m grinning through my tears as I write this – our resident poet. His name was Roger Ebert.
When Roger came to New York he visited our apartment and we showed him Times Square and Chinatown and a few other sights. He was a classic teenaged science fiction fan: chubby, pink-cheeked, bespectacled, and full of excitement. We all had a great time and then Roger went on his way. We stayed in touch via fandom after that, but eventually we exchanged messages less and less frequently until one day a friend told me about a wonderful new TV show where these two Chicago guys showed film clips and argued about the movies. We decided to give it a try and – lo! and behold – there was our old friend, onetime teenaged science fiction fan poet, Roger Ebert.
I wrote to Roger, he wrote back, and we resumed our friendship. Soon we were using e-mail instead of paper. I critiqued his reviews and he thanked me for copies of my new books.
Fast forward to 2003. I wind up in the hospital for a protracted stay, thanks to a very nasty situation in my innards. At the same time I learn that Roger is fighting cancer. We start exchanging e-mails at an increased pace, each of us encouraging the other to hang in there and get through this thing. For a while – in fact, for a decade – we both did.
When Jacob and Rina Weisman’s Tachyon Publications brought out The Best of Xero, Roger wrote a wonderful introduction to the book, reminiscing about that long-ago visit to those famous fan publishers in New York. The next time Roger was in San Francisco, Pat and I brought Jacob and Rina to meet him. We would have loved to make it a longer visit but Roger’s handlers spirited him off to the next bookstore or newspaper interview or TV studio or wherever the publicity people had promised to deliver their visiting star.
I was worried about Roger’s health, but there was no question about his ebullient spirits. He was a modest genius. He lived every day to its fullest. In his writings he sometimes waxed philosophical, and he said that to him the supreme virtue was kindness.
–Dick Lupoff
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British author BASIL COPPER, 89, died April 4, 2013, likely of complications from Alzheimer’s.
Copper was a prolific author of horror and mystery fiction and was named a World Horror Grandmaster in 2010. His horror novels include The Great White Space (1974), The Curse of the Fleers (1976), Necropolis (1980), The House of the Wolf (1983), Into the Silence (1983), and The Black Death (1991). Copper did much of his best work for editor August Derleth, beginning with story ‘‘The House of the Tarn’’ (1971). Derleth’s Arkham House published two of Copper’s novels, and collections From Evil’s Pillow (1973, a World Fantasy Award finalist) and And Afterward, the Dark (1977). Copper also wrote many stories about Derleth’s character Solar Pons, an homage to Sherlock Holmes.
Basil Copper, Hugh B. Cave (1997)
Basil Copper was born February 5, 1924, and worked for 30 years as a journalist, including 14 years as a news editor. His first story was published when he was just a teenager, but his first professional sale was ‘‘The Spider’’ in The Pan Book of Horror Stories (1964). His many collections include Not after Nightfall (1967), When Footsteps Echo: Tales of Terror and the Unknown (1975), Here Be Daemons: Tales of Horror and the Uneasy (1978), Voices of Doom: Tales of Terror and the Uncanny (1980), Whispers in the Night: Stories of the Mysterious and Macabre (1999), Cold Hand on My Shoulder: Tales of Terror and Suspense (2002), Knife in the Back: Tales of Twilight and Torment (2005), and two-volume set Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper (2010). Stephen Jones compiled and edited biographical bibliography Basil Copper: A Life in Books (2008), winner of a British Fantasy Award.
Most of Copper’s output was actually hardboiled fiction, including over 50 novels about Los Angeles private eye Mike Faraday, and he was chairman of the Crime Writer’s Association in 1981 and ’82. He wrote nonfiction books, including The Vampire: In Legend, Fact, and Art (1973) and The Werewolf: In Legend, Fact, and Art (1977). Copper was an ardent film fan and collector, with over a thousand titles in his private library, and founded the Tunrbidge Wells Vintage Film Society. He is survived by his wife Annie Renée Guerin.
Back (l to r): Clive Barker, Stephen Barnes, Dave Carson, Graham Masterton, Dave McKean, Stephen Jones, Chris Claremont. Front (l to r): Larry Niven, Josh Kirby, James Herbert, Basil Copper (1990)
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Writ
er JAMES HERBERT, 69, died March 20, 2013 at home in Sussex, England. Herbert wrote 23 novels, most horror, many of them international bestsellers. His books include The Rats (1974), The Fog (1975), The Survivor (1976), Fluke (1977), The Spear (1978), Lair (1979), The Dark (1980), The Jonah (1981), Shrine (1983), Domain (1984), Moon (1985), The Magic Cottage (1986), Sepulchre (1987), Haunted (1988), Creed (1990), Portent (1992), The Ghosts of Sleath (1994), ’48 (1996), Others (1999), Once (2001), Nobody True (2003), The Secret of Crickley Hall (2006), and Ash (2012). He also wrote nonfiction and a graphic novel, and many of his works were adapted for TV, film, and radio.
James Herbert (1998)
Herbert was born April 8, 1943 in London, and attended St. Aloysius College and Hornsey College of Art. He worked in advertising, including as an art director, before becoming a full-time writer. Herbert was named a Grand Master by the World Horror Convention in 2010, the same year he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He is survived by wife Eileen O’Donnell, married in 1968, and their three daughters.
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Writer RICK HAUTALA, 64, died March 21, 2013 of a heart attack. Hautala was the prolific writer of more than 30 novels (primarily horror) and scores of short stories. He first rose to prominence during the horror boom of the 1980s, and is best known for the internationally bestselling novel Night Stone (1986). Other novels include Moondeath (1980), Moonbog (1982), Little Brothers (1988), Moon Walker (1989), Winter Wake (1989), Dead Voices (1990), Cold Whisper (1991), Dark Silence (1992), Ghost Light (1993), Twilight Time (1994), Shades of Night (1995), Beyond the Shroud (1995), The Mountain King (1996), Impulse (1996), The Wildman (2008). Novels The Demon’s Wife, Mockingbird Bay, and Star Road (with Matthew Costello) are all forthcoming. He also published several books under the name A.J. Matthews: The White Room (2001), Looking Glass (2003), Follow (2007), and Unbroken (2007). He co-wrote five novels in the Body of Evidence series with Christopher Golden from 2000-2005, and a Poltergeist: The Legacy TV tie-in in 1999. He also wrote screenplays.
Rick Hautala (1990s)
His novellas include Cold River (2003), Reunion (2009), and Indian Summer (2012). Some of his short work has been collected in Bedbugs (1999), Four Octobers (2006), Untcigahunk (2007), and Occasional Demons (2010), and the forthcoming Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala (2013). Hautala was active in the Horror Writers Association, where he served terms as vice president and trustee.
Richard Henry Hautala was born February 3, 1949 in Rockport MA, and graduated from the University of Maine in 1974 with a Masters in English, focusing on Renaissance and Medieval literature. He lived in southern Maine, and is survived by his wife, writer Holly Newstein, and their three adult sons.
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Editor, author, and fan PAUL WILLIAMS, 64, died March 27, 2013 in Encinitas CA. Williams was in hospice suffering from early-onset dementia, likely the result of a 1995 brain injury.
Born May 19, 1947 in Boston, Paul S. Williams grew up in Cambridge MA and attended Swarthmore College for a year. In the late ’60s he moved to California, where he became friendly with Philip K. Dick, and was named Dick’s literary executor after the author’s death. Williams co-founded the Philip K. Dick Society (running it from 1983-1992), and was incredibly influential in promoting Dick’s work to a wider audience. He wrote early Dick biography Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick (1986), a Hugo Award finalist. Later he turned his attention to Theodore Sturgeon, shepherding the Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon into print as a series of 13 volumes published from 1994-2010. He personally edited 11 of the volumes, until he became too ill to continue. He was twice nominated for special professional World Fantasy Awards, in 1995 and 1996, for his work on the Sturgeon anthologies.
Philip K. Dick, Christopher Dick, Paul Williams (1975)
Williams was also an influential rock music critic – often described as the first rock critic – and founded groundbreaking music magazine Crawdaddy! in 1967. He left the magazine in 1968, though he continued to write about music extensively, and revived the magazine for a second run from 1993-2003. He wrote 25 books, notably cult classic Das Energi (1973) and the three-volume Bob Dylan: Performing Artist (1990-2004). Williams was active in the counterculture movement for a time, managing Timothy Leary’s brief campaign for governor of California in 1969 and living in a Canadian commune in 1970. He settled down in California around 1976.
In 1995 Williams suffered a traumatic brain injury after a bicycle accident, which caused both immediate and gradual long-term losses of brain function, and may have triggered early-onset Alzheimer’s. In 2009 he entered a nursing home, and he moved to hospice care in February 2013. Williams is survived by his third wife, singer Cindy Lee Berryhill, their son, two children from his first marriage to Sachiko Kenanobu, and three from his second marriage to Donna Grace Noyes.
PAUL WILLIAMS by Eileen Gunn
In the spring of 1966, at Briggs & Briggs in Harvard Square, I bought, for a quarter, the first issue of Paul Williams’s Crawdaddy! It was a simple typed-and-mimeographed fanzine, stapled on the left side. It looked like a term paper. But, from just a look inside, it was clear to me that it was written by someone who was trying, as I was, to understand the past and the present and the future of cross-cultural American popular music. He was bringing to bear on that effort all the equipment that an earnest, impressively smart Swarthmore freshman could deliver.
Re-reading that first issue now, I am engaged again: ‘‘Paul Simon is not ‘a man with a message,’’’ he writes. ‘‘It’s simpler than that. He wants to talk to you.’’
Paul Williams (1983)
This conjoining of the personal and the trenchant pleased my own inner voice, and I read every issue avidly. Our intellectual young-adulthoods took place at the same time, and his sometimes profoundly influenced mine, or voiced an opinion I didn’t know I had. In the case of a lengthy essay he wrote for Rolling Stone on the rise and fall of the Fort Hill Community in Roxbury, Paul gave a coherent inside account of an adventure I had witnessed but not participated in. Reading it was like having reality unfolded so you could see its bones.
The style and sensibility that Paul used in listening to music and understanding its lyrics became part of my own critical approach, and reading those old issues, I hear the origins of my own style. Turns out it’s not so personal after all: I swiped it from this kid I didn’t even know.
I first actually met Paul a dozen years later, at Iguanacon in Phoenix, at a fabulously crowded party hosted by David Hartwell. By then, we had a number of friends in common and even more shared experiences that we had never actually shared. It was like re-connecting with an old friend – and I’m confident that many people have had that reaction to meeting Paul for the first time.
After that, we kept in touch. I read his earlier books, and he sent me some new ones. Reading his work is a process, a conversation. You start off with the feeling that you’re having a beer with the smartest hippie you ever met, and then, somehow, he gets you on his wavelength and you’re leaping from Herman Melville as a wide-eyed cabin boy to Lou Reed on the nod to Bob Dylan accepting chaos.
Paul’s insights into the work of Dylan are invaluable, as is his work about, with, and on behalf of Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon. Williams served as Dick’s literary executor, revived his reputation, and renewed interest in his work. He then put together the definitive collection of Sturgeon’s work and edited the first 11 of its 13 volumes. The amount of work he did for these two great writers is staggering.
At the same time, Paul continued to write his own books, on Dylan, Neil Young, the Beach Boys, and much more. He downloaded his brilliant, wide-ranging mind into his twenty-four (I think) books, and they are all out there, new and used, in stores and online. The Crawdaddy! Archive, too, is online, with covers bright as beetles, begging to be read, at
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Writer NICK POLLOTTA, 58, died on April 12, 2013 in Chicago IL of cancer. Pollotta wrote more than 50 SF, fantasy, and adventure novels under his own name and various pseudonyms.
Nick Pollotta (1989)
Nicholas Angelo Pollotta, Jr. was born August 26, 1954 in Saddle Brook NJ. Pollotta’s first novel was Illegal Aliens (1989, with Phil Foglio). Other titles include That Darn Squid God (2004, with James Clay), Damned Nation (2010), Belle, Book and Candle (2012), and the Bureau 13 trilogy of roleplaying game tie-ins. Some of his short fiction was collected in Tequila Mockingbird (2004). He wrote at least 19 volumes of the postapocalyptic Deathlands series under house name James Axler, and other action/adventure novels under house name Don Pendleton. His Satellite Night series was written as by Jack Hopkins.
Pollotta spent four years as a stand-up comedian in Manhattan, working under the stage name Nick Smith, before moving to Philadelphia, where he became active in SF fandom. He is survived by his wife, Melissa Hutchings (married 1995), and three sons.
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Writer ROBERT MORALES, 55, died April 18, 2013 at home in Brooklyn NY. Morales is best known for writing the Truth: Red, White & Black comic mini-series for Marvel (2003), about government experimentation on black men to create “super soldiers” like Captain America, with chilling echoes of the Tuskegee Experiments. Morales wrote other comics for Marvel, worked as an entertainment journalist, and was a former arts editor for Vibe magazine. Born February 3, 1958 in New York City, he attended the Clarion workshop in 1976, and had many close friends in the SF community.
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Writer JENNIFER SCHWABACH, 45, died March 26, 2013 at home in Hammondsport NY after several years of illness. She wrote two novels, Dark Winter (2006) and Curse’s Captive (2007), and published stories and poems in publications including Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Flytrap, and Oceans of the Mind.
Locus, May 2013 Page 24
