MICHAEL MOORCOCK
Arthur Settings
Arthur Sellings, pseudonym of Arthur Gordon Ley, a native Londoner, 1921-68, died suddenly September 24. From the wish fulfillment to be a writer at the age of seventeen, he moved steadily through the London book world to start an antiquarian book business in 1946, which mushroomed in the succeeding twenty years into a large successful organization. Poet, wit, raconteur, he acquired a knowledge of typography, book design, and lettering. His sf short stories commenced in 1953, over forty appearing in most of the leading sf magazines prior to his death.
His greatest asset, however, apart from intense friendliness, was his driving force on behalf of European sf; in recent years he spent considerable time in France and Spain and devoted great effort to establishing Spanish sf in magazine form.
Two collections of his stories have been published: Time Transfer and The Long Eureka; five novels, The Silent Speakers (Telepath in the United States), The Uncensored Man, The Quy Effect, The Power of X, and Intermind (under the name of “Ray Luther”). A sixth novel, Junk Day, completed just before he died, is due for publication in 1969. TED CARNELL
Harl Vincent
Harl Vincent was a pioneer whose literary career started in the Gernsback “scientifiction” era and continued through forty years into the “sci-fi” era of popular acceptance. At the end of his life he was a member of the Los Angeles Fantasy Society and the Count Dracula Society and enjoyed attending meetings of both and local conventions.
Born Harold Vincent Schoepflin, he was first published in Amazing Stories in June 1928: “The Golden Girl of Munan.”
His book-length novels “Venus Liberated” and its sequel “Faster Than Light” were featured in Amazing Stories Quarterly. His two-part novella of Mars, “Red Twilight,” appeared in Argosy in the thirties; “Rex” was in the paperback anthology The Coming of the Robots (Collier Books, 1966), and “Prowler of the Wastelands” same year in the Holt, Rinehart & Winston hardcover anthology Strange Signposts; while his original paperback Doomsday Planet has had two printings to date from Tower Publications.
In all he had seventy-seven science fiction stories in fifteen different publications, two of them being posthumous appearances in Space-way and Famous Science Fiction. As he was actively creating to the time of his demise, the total could still rise.
He died of emphysema and pneumonia complications, leaving widow, son, and daughter. FORREST J. ACKERMAN
A. A. Wyn
A. A. Wyn, truly a self-made man, was at the time of his death the last major publisher who owned his own business outright and who personally ran it in all its aspects. He began a literary career in the early 1920s after the usual variety of odd jobs which, for him, included cowboy and merchant seaman. He tasted success as a pulp writer and became an editor for Dell Magazines in the late twenties. In 1932 he struck out on his own by acquiring and ninmng the Ace magazine chain, one of the pulp magazine giants of the prewar days. In 1952, he started Ace Books and masterminded it into one of the better-established lines in the highly competitive paperback field.
Aaron Wyn, like many writers, was basically a shy man; most of his education had come from his own reading, and he was confident only of his own judgment. His venture into science fiction was one of his few gambles on another person’s views, my own, and it paid off by the rise of Ace Books (always marked by Wyn’s tight and cautious control) to the point where it is the largest publisher of sf paperbacks and one of the six or seven leading paperback firms. He was a man to be respected, of high intelligence, undoubted literary ability within strict limits, but always a tough, opinionated businessman for whom few ever acquired a warm affection. DONALD WOLLHEIM
… Something there is more immortal even than the stars, (Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,) Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter, Longer than any sun or any revolving satellite. Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.