IN MEMORIAM

Among many science fiction people, be they professionals, amateur but valuable scholars of the field, or simply readers, there exists an intimacy unique in literature. Over the years it has kept a small glow of humanness alive for us in this darkening world. But friendship and love have their price, which death finally exacts. The year 1968-actually, counting from late 1967-was as disastrous for our little circle as for the whole planet.

Space does not allow that we here memorialize any but those who worked with text for pay. You, the general public, never knew the rest. It was your loss. The women who have departedHelen Bretnor, Anna-Louise Germeshausen, Barbara Pollardwere more than wives, more even than beautiful and gracious ladies, they were outstanding achievers in their special lines of endeavor. Likewise, George Sailer was important in fantasy art. The other men were not just fans (though several of them had much to do with making fandom what it is), they counted for a great deal in their daily lives: Ron Ellik, Lewis Grant, Jr., Andy Harris, Dale Hart, Lee Jacobs, Harry Sanders.

We will always miss them.

Meanwhile, in honor and as a contribution to literary history, a number of writers have kindly donated obituaries of their colleagues.

Anthony Boucher

Anthony Boucher died last April. He has been gone over a year now, and as James Reach wrote in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, “How shall we manage without him?” The answer is that we haven’t managed too well.

Tony Boucher was the Renaissance ideal of the universal man.

He was an editor, a writer, a reviewer, a writer for radio and 219

television, a musicologist, an opera critic. In addition to all these, he was a lover of sports, a shrewd and deadly pokef player, a devout Catholic who knew his church’s doctrine better than some priests, and a man who took a friendly interest in the activities and professions of his fellow man.

There was seldom a day that passed that I didn’t phone to Tony about some problemof the detective story, who wrote what and when, of the science fiction world, of a myriad things. In answer to the query of Mr. Reach, I, for one, have found a goodly portion of my life empty with Tony’s passing. There is no one to pose questions to, to discuss politics, football, or cookery, no one to argue with about a score of subjects.

We who knew him are doing a memorial anthology of crime and science fiction. It sums up what people felt about Anthony Boucher, I think, when I state that we have been swamped with submissions by writers who .wish to use this opportunity to do him homage. He was a pre-eminent critic but a just and gentle one. What man can say more of him? J. FRANCIS MCCOMAS

Rosel George Brown

When Damon Knight (Orbit 3) admitted “… I was [wrong] …

when I told Rosel George Brown she couldn’t sell a novel about a female private eye …” he paid deserved tribute to the outstanding craftsmanship-under-handicap of this “handsome Southern gentlewoman,” as Horace Gold once described her. For Rosel, who died of lymphatic-system malignancy in November 1967, and whose eminently successful achievements in science fiction coincided with a decade of illness, produced increasingly notable and major works during the terminal phase of her affliction.

Moreover, despite her infirmity, she remained, at forty-one, “handsome”petite, attractive, delightful; “gentle”as the wife of Dr.

William Burlie Brown, Tulane University history professor, and mother of two children; and “Southern”but 6nly geographically and in the sense of suggesting picturesque regional charm, for hers was a broad, cosmopolitan outlook. Even as she pursued the distinctive and unique in futuristic fiction, she lived in a large, old home in New Orleans’ quiet university section, where sprawling plantations once drowsed.

But Rosel, indeed, neither drowsed nor bent under affliction.

Her novel “about a female private eye” (Sibyl Sue Blue, Doubleday, 1966) came as somewhat of a landmark in science fiction and underscored the authoress’ ranging skill at cloaking unconventional protagonists with vividly drawn credibilitym this case a cigar-smoking, gin-guzzling matron who likes her investigative chores well spiced with sensual interludes. Had Rosel lived, Sibyl Sue Blue would have become a familiar serial adventuress in this genre. Fortunately, Sibyl will wade damtily-swashbucklingly through The Waters of Centaurus, still to be published by Doubleday; unfortunately, the third of this series was never finished.

Then there was Rosel’s noteworthy Nebula Award nominee, Earthblood (Doubleday, 1966; Science Fiction Book Club selection, January 1967), written in collaboration with Keith Laumer and again expanding standards of characterization and exotic situation. Heralding Rosel’s promise of signal accomplishment as a crisp stylist were her short stories, rich in emotion and satirical content”Visiting Professor,” “Car Pool,” “Fruiting Body,” and many others. In not a few of these she drew heavily upon academic knowledge deriving from her University of Minnesota master’s degree in Greek. “Rosel George Brown,” wrote James Blish in The Issue at Hand (Advent, 1966), “is the only one of F&SF’s recent gaggle of housewives who knows how to write.” An overstatement, of course. But Rosel, a charter member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, stood among the very best of them.

DANIEL P. OALOUYE

Grog Conklin

In 1946 there appeared The Best of Science Fiction, the first of the science fiction anthologies to attract general notice and the first, as it happened, to contain a story by myself. The editor was Groff Conklin, and over the next twenty years he remained the master anthologizer. He was not to remain alone on the heights; others joined him; but he was there first.

In those twenty years, I saw him all too rarely, but letters flowed back and forth freely. He loved science fiction with a childlike delight that infused itself into all who would listen to him. He was acerbic in his criticism but always fair, and when he didn’t like one of my stories (as sometimes happened) his words cut deep but left no sting behind. He was a lovable fellow, good-natured and kind, but he smoked too many cigarettes and they killed him at last. ISAAC ASIMOV

Bernard 1. Kahn

Bernard Kahn’s first story arrived at my office by mail, landed in the “slush pile”stories from people we’ve never heard of, or who have not merited special attentionand promptly earned a place in the magazineAstounding then, Analog now. I’d bought a second Bernard Kahn story before I met the man; he lived in Sa.U Francisco, I in the New York area. Then I found out that the stories had a large autobiographical component. Dr. Bernard 1. Kahn had Been There in the governmental medical business. A Navy doctor during the early part of World War II, he learned about sinuses and infected ears during a winter in the Aleutian Islands. The latter part of the war he spent as chief of psychiatric research for the Navy at Mare Island Navy Base. After the war he joined in setting up the Kaiser Foundation Hospital’s unique Family Health Plan, which treated the whole family as whole individuals, both minds and bodies.

He knew the problems of the medical-psychiatric public service.

He was, also, one of the few psychiatrists I fully respected as a man, as a person, and as a psychiatrist. There is a tendency among psychiatrists to consider that Being A Psychiatrist means that they are a few notches above such fumbling things as mere human beings. Bernard Kahn knew he was a human being practicing psychiatry.

The trouble with that approach is that it means they take on the woes of many menand that’s very hard on a human heart.

It’s not a safe or a smart thing to do.

My friend Bamey Kahn died of heart failure during 1968.

JOHN W. CAMPBELL

Anna Kavan

Anna Kavan’s name may be little known among science fiction readers; yet to those readers who also take their pleasure in wider fields of literature, her short storiesin which a frequent streak of fantasy is blended with a sense of apprehension, with abrupt changs of mood, and with a keen though veiled sense of humorhave great appeal. At her best, she recalls Kafka. Back in the fifties, she was doing effortlessly the sort of story that, ten years later, would appear rather stylishly modern in an sf magazine.

Born at about the turn of the century, Anna Kavan was a cosmopolitan; of British parents, she first saw the light of day in France, spent much of her childhood in Europe and the United States, and lived in Burma after her first marriage. She pursued her writing career despite frequent illness. Her first novel. Asylum Piece, was published in England in 1940not a good year for publication!and in the States by Doubleday in 1946. Her last novel. Ice, a powerfully conceived and mysterious piece of higher science fiction, was published in 1967. I nominated it the Best SF

Novel of 1967 in my Oxford Mail column. Now, I am happy to say, Doubleday has accepted ice for future publication. This good news, unfortunately, failed to reach Anna by about a week; she died in her beautiful little home in Kensington on 5 December 1968. BRIAN W. ALDISS

Gerald Kersh

When he wrote good, few men could touch him at what he did best. When he wrote bad, at his worst he was merely dull. A writer could go to meet his maker with few regrets if he knew that to be true. It was true of Kersh, and he certainly knew it.

Despite the short shrift he got from most American publishers and critics, who chose to ignore the almost legendary awe in which he was held by Continental authorities, he continued working, producing, and besides the stature acquired from simply brilliant novels like Fowler’s End, Night and the City, and The Implacable Hunter, he assured himself a place in the hall of fame of fantasy writers with short stories like “Whatever happened to Corporal Cuckoo?” “The Queen of Pig Island,” and “Men Without Bones.”

I never met him, but it fell to me to edit the last book of his work ever published, just last year. He died soon after, on Novmber 7, 1968. The throat cancer that killed him had first led to the removal of his larynx. The few letters we exchanged testify to his unbroken courage and steady grip on reality.

The last sentence he wrote to me was, “I hope we may meet when you are in my part of the world, or I am in yours.” Looks like it’ll have to be in his part of the world, now. But that’s cool. I suspect I’d come upon Kersh, with his voice restored, playing some five-card stud with Cyril Kombhith, Henry Kuttner, and Chuck Beaumontand ignoring boring mothers like Shakespeare and Thomas Wolfe, over there in the corner, brooding because they hadn’t written the way Kersh had. Mary Shelley would be serving the refreshments.

But until that time, there’s a quote from a Kersh story that I have over my typewriter; it keeps my head straight. It says: “… there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.”

Have you ever noticed: though the good ones go, they never really leave. HARLAN ELUSON

Edison Marshall

Edison Tesia Marshall, noted author of historical novels, including Benjamin Blake, Yankee Pasha, and The Viking, as well as a number of lesser-known fantasy novels, died October 29, 1968, at the age of seventy-three.

He was born in Renssalaer, Indiana, where his father edited and published a small newspaper. The family later moved to Oregon, where Edison attended the state university from 1913 to 1915. His first published story was “The Sacred Fire” in Argosy for May 1915. For the next twenty to twenty-flve years he turned out countless serials and short stories for both pulp and slick magazines before turning to the writing of his colorful and popular historical novels.

Edison Marshall’s list of published fantasy is short but generally of a high quality: “Who Killed Charles Avison?” Argosy, May 1916, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1939; Ofden’s Strange Story, Kinsey, 1934, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1949 (first published in 1928 as Og, the Dawn Man, a fourpart serial in Popular Magazine)’, his most famous fantasy novel, Dian of the Lost Land, Kinsey, 1935, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, April 1949; The Stolen God, Kinsey, 1936; and The Jewel of Mahalea, Kinsey, 1938. ALVA ROGBRS

Frank Owen

In a letter from Frank Owen dated June 6, 1967, Brooklyn, New York, he offered mothe following statistics: “I wrote for Weird Tales occasionally for over thirty years… . Among other things, I have edited eighteen anthologies… . I was Hung Long Tom, who wrote the short poems… . My own favorite [of my]

novel(s) was ‘The Scarlet Hill’ about China 1200 years ago.”

Since his “Shadows” appeared. Weird Tales, April 1924, there have been around fifty more Frank Owen fantasies there, and in Oriental Stories, Dance, Magic Carpet. A couple novels. A few poems. Seven or eight books, in all. Not a prodigious produce.

Yet even his titles evoke. “The Old Man Who Swept the Sky,”

“Pale Pink Porcelain,” “The Tinkle of the Camel’s Bell,” the classic “The Wind That Tramps the World.” Frank Owen’s stories weave a fine sorcery for the initiate, for those in tune. It is like holding a tropical sea shell up to your ear, hearing (not what science says) a far-off music of exotic half-remembered dreams.

Nobody else quite matched Frank Owen’s special delicate whimsey, those splashes of Oriental color, that sly patriarchal philosophy hidden within those sweet small songs. EMIL PETAJA Stuart Palmer

Perhaps Stuart Palmer’s best-known creation is Hildegarde Withers, the schoolma’am sleuth with the impossible hats and unerring nose for crime. His mystery stories carried the tang of his enthusiasm for science fiction and fantasy; his detectivejournalist Howie Rook dreamed of becoming the successor of Charles Fort. In our own field, his tales include “A Bride for the Devil,” which was the cover story for V I N I of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the charming “Three-Dimensional Valentine” in the same publication.

Stu was a big, hearty man, and if his life was one of uncertainty, he could enjoy its variety: now a reporter covering the Barbara Graham case, now in charge of a correspondence course in writing, now a top-paid private investigator, now editing nudist magazines. To each of his occupations he brought an innate professionalism and a full measure of hard work. Among friends he was warm, generous, irreverent but never discourteous. When he and his wife last stayed with Poul and me, and shortly afterward we with them, he concealed the seriousness of his illness with his usual good cheer for a festive holiday. His fellow writers miss Stu as a colleague and as a friend. KAREN ANDERSON

Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake was a generous man in an ungenerous world.

He died on November 17, 1968, having suffered for more than ten years from encephalitis akin to Parkinson’s disease. Best known in England for his drawings and paintings, he was considered by many to be the century’s greatest illustrator, but he also had a reputation as a poet and won the Heinemann Award and an Award from the Royal Society of Literature. His four novels the three Titus Groan books and Mr. Pyehad a small, devoted audience for years, and it was a bitter irony that he died just as a very much larger public began to appreciate his talents. He was much more than a writer of charming fantasy; his technical range was great and his subject matter was rich and varied, controlled superbly; his characters were as vital as those of Dickens, whom Peake resembled in style and humor.

Born in China in 1911, Mervyn came back to England while young, studied art, and eventually taught it. It was while teaching that he met and married Maeve Gilmore (a fine artist in her own right). They had three children, Sebastian, Fabian, and Claire.

His early reputation was made chiefly as a child portraitistbe could draw children without a trace of sentimentalityand he also designed the sets for the first British production of The insect Play. He illustrated fine editions of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Treasure island, Alice in Wonderland, Grimm’s Household Tales, and The Hunting of the Snark. His play The Wit to Woo has been staged in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, and two other plays, Mr Loftas and The Cave (about an H-bomb shelter), have yet to be produced. His collected poetry includes Shapes and Sounds (1944), The Glassblowers (1950), The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (1962), and A Reverie of Bone (limited to 320

copies, 1967).

He was a man of enormous goodness and vitality, deeply loved by all his friends and as inspiring to know as he was to read. The illness, which grew steadily worse from around 1958, robbed him of his vitality and his ability to create, but his great character remained even when he could no longer frame a sentence. Kind, generous, without any apparent neuroses or hatreds, Peake was badly treated by publishers and galleries. His last book (Titus Alone) was savagely and stupidly copy edited by the original publisher when Peake was unable to defend his work (this edition has, unfortunately, been reprinted m the United States, but the original book will probably appear in Britain in 1970), and his books have been erroneously labeled “Gothics”: an insult to a subtle, sophisticated, and skillful writer whose work has been a seminal influence on many younger modern writers in this country.