Cryonics advocate Robert C. (Chester) W. (Wilson) Ettinger, who wrote a number of non-fiction books about extending life through cryonic freezing, died the same day, aged ninety-two. He also published some SF stories, beginning with “The Penultimate Trump” in Startling Stories (1948). Not surprisingly, his body was cryopreserved at the Cryonics Institute, which he founded in 1976.
Eighty-year-old Japanese SF writer Sakyo Komatsu (Minoru Komatsu), best known for his 1973 disaster novel Nippon Chinbotsu (Japan Sinks, filmed in 1974 and 2006), died of pneumonia on 26 July. He was also a prolific writer of short stories, articles and anime scripts.
Best-selling urban fantasy and paranormal romance writer L. A. Banks (Leslie Esdaile Banks) died of a rare form of adrenal cancer on 2 August, aged fifty-one. The author of more than forty books since her debut in 1996, her popular “Vampire Huntress Legends” series began in 2003 with Minion and continued with The Awakening, The Hunted, The Bitten, The Forbidden, The Damned, The Forsaken, The Wicked, The Cursed, The Darkness, The Shadows and The Thirteenth. She also wrote the “Crimson Moon” werewolf series, comprising Bad Blood (2008), Bite the Bullet, Undead on Arrival, Cursed to Death, Never Cry Werewolf and Left for Dead. Surrender the Dark and Conquer the Dark were the first two books in a new series about angels. Banks also wrote romance, crime and media tie-ins under various pseudonyms.
American children’s and young adult author William Sleator (William Warner Sleator III) died in Thailand the same day, aged sixty-six. His more than thirty books include The Angry Moon, Blackbriar, House of Stairs, Fingers, Interstellar Pig, Singularity, The Duplicate, The Boy Who Reversed Himself, Rewind, The Boy Who Couldn’t Die and The Phantom Limb. Sleator was also an accomplished pianist, playing for a number of ballet schools.
American comics writer and editor Del Connell died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease on 12 August, aged ninety-three. He started out as a character sculptor for the Walt Disney Studio in 1939, where he worked on the stories for The Three Caballeros and Alice in Wonderland (1951). After moving to Western Publishing’s Dell Comics in 1954, he wrote thousands of comics (usually uncredited), including Space Family Robinson (which was turned into the TV series Lost in Space) and numerous Disney titles. For more than twenty years Connell also wrote the daily and Sunday Mickey Mouse newspaper strip.
Fifty-year-old British fantasy and SF author Colin Harvey died on 15 August, having suffered a massive stroke the day before. His novels include Vengeance, Lightning Days, The Silk Palace, Blind Faith, Winter Song and Damage Time, and his stories appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Albedo One, Interzone, Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Fearology and Gothic.net. His short fiction was collected in Displacement, and he also edited the anthologies Killers, Future Bristol, Dark Spires and Transtories. While working for Unilever, Harvey helped launch Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream in Iceland.
British artist John Holmes, best known for his iconic cover for Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), died on 17 August, aged seventy-six. His other credits include the cover of Peter Benchley’s Jaws, the Ballentine editions of H. P. Lovecraft, the Peter Haining anthologies The Evil People and The Midnight People, plus reissues of Pan’s two volumes of The Hammer Horror Omnibus and various editions of The Fontana Book of Horror edited by Mary Danby.
Veteran Hammer scriptwriter, producer and director Jimmy Sangster (James Henry Kimmel Sangster, aka “John Sansom”) died on 19 August, aged eighty-three. He began his career at the studio as an assistant director on Man in Black, Dick Barton Strikes Back, Room to Let, Stolen Face and Spaceways. However, starting as a scriptwriter with X: The Unknown in 1956, Sangster was responsible (with director Terrence Fisher and others) for ushering the Hammer House of Horror era with The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula), The Revenge of Frankenstein, The Snorkel, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, The Mummy (1959), The Brides of Dracula, The Terror of the Tongs, Taste of Fear, Paranoiac, Maniac, Nightmare, Hysteria, The Nanny, Dracula Prince of Darkness, The Anniversary and Crescendo. For Hammer he also directed The Horror of Frankenstein, Lust for a Vampire and Fear in the Night, and he novelised a number of his screenplays. Sangster worked for other production companies, and his film credits also include Blood of the Vampire, The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye), Jack the Ripper (1959), The Hellfire Club, Deadlier Than the Male, A Taste of Evil, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, Scream Pretty Peggy, Maneater, Good Against Evil, The Legacy, The Billion Dollar Threat, Phobia, Once Upon a Spy, Disney’s The Devil and Max Devlin and Flashback – Mörderisc Ferien. During the 1970s he wrote numerous scripts for American TV shows, including Ghost Story, The Six Million Dollar Man, Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Wonder Woman. His autobiography, Do You Want it Good or Tuesday? was published in 1997.
Sixty-three-year-old American bookseller Bill Trojan (William T. Trojan) died of a massive heart attack in his hotel room on 21 August, the final day of Renovation, the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, Nevada. He had been suffering with health problems for several years. Trojan was one of the chairs of the 1996 World Horror Convention in Eugene, Oregon, and was a major financial supporter of Pulphouse Publishing in the late 1980s.
Fifty-nine-year-old American SF fan Dan Hoey, who chaired the 1995 Disclave convention in Washington DC, committed suicide on 31 August.
American journalist and cartoonist Bill Kunkel (William Henry Patrick Kunkel), who co-created Electronic Games, the first video and computer game magazine, died of an apparent heart attack on 4 September, aged sixty-one. He also wrote comic books for Marvel and DC Comics and created video games.
Digital publishing pioneer Michael S. (Stern) Heart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, the world’s oldest digital library, died of a heart attack on 6 September, aged sixty-four. He is often credited as the “creator” of the ebook, having made an electronic copy of the American Declaration of Independence available for download at the University of Illinois in Urbana in 1971.
Former US Army soldier and shipyard worker Charles E. Hickson died of a heart attack on 9 September, aged eighty. On 11 October, 1973, Hickson and another man were fishing off the west bank of the Pascagoula River, Mississippi, when they claimed they were abducted by aliens. This became known as the “Pascagoula Abduction”. Hickson appeared in the 1978 feature documentary, The Force Beyond, and in 1983 he wrote a book about his experience, UFO Contact in Pascagoula.
American comics artist Jack Adler died on 18 September, aged ninety-four. He was a staff member of DC Comics’ production department from 1946 to 1981, working as a cover artist and colourist on such titles as Sea Devils, Green Lantern and G.I. Combat.
American horror short fiction writer and editor Mark W. (Whitney) Worthen died on 19 September, aged forty-nine. He created the online magazine Blood Rose (1998–2005) and co-edited Desolate Souls, the souvenir anthology of the 2008 World Horror Convention, with his second wife, Jeannie Eddy (aka “J. P. Edwards”). Worthen was closely involved with the Horror Writers Association, as both a webmaster and co-chair of the awards committee. He received the HWA’s Richard Laymon President’s Award for Services in 2007.
Eighty-nine-year-old British author John [Frederick] Burke died on 21 September following a fall in his home. He became a SF fan in the 1930s, writing letters to Weird Tales and founding the early UK fanzine The Satellite with David McIlwain (aka “Charles Eric Maine”). Sam Youd (aka “John Christopher”) was also a regular contributor to the magazine. Burke’s short stories appeared in Authentic Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, Nebula, New Worlds, the 6th and 9th Pan Book of Horror Stories, Tandem Horror Three, the 6th and 8th Ghost Book, New Terrors 2, After Midnight, Scare Care, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Nine, Don’t Turn Out the Light, Brighton Shock! and many other magazines and anthologies. His first novel, published in 1949, won an Atlantic Award in Literature from the Rockefeller Foundation, and he worked for Museum Press before becoming European story editor for 20th Century-Fox Productions in 1963. Best known for
his 1970s trilogy of novels featuring psychic investigator “Dr Caspian” (The Devil’s Footsteps, The Black Charade and Ladygrove), he wrote more than 150 books (under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms), many of them film and TV novelisations, including the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, The Hammer Horror Film Omnibus, The Second Hammer Horror Film Omnibus, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Privilege, Moon Zero Two and two tie-ins to Gerry Anderson’s U.F.O. (as “Robert Miall”). Burke also edited three anthologies for Pan Books (Tales of Unease, More Tales of Unease and New Tales of Unease), and some of his best short stories are collected in We’ve Been Waiting for You, edited by Nicholas Royle for Ash-Tree Press. A new macabre collection, Murder, Mystery and Magic, and a new SF collection, The Old Man of the Stars, were published in 2011, and he had completed a new horror novel, The Nightmare Whisperers, shortly before he died. Burke also scripted the 1967 Boris Karloff movie The Sorcerers, but only received credit for the original idea.
Best-selling Australian fantasy author Sara Douglass (Sara Mary Warneke) died of ovarian cancer on 26 September, aged fifty-four. Best known for the “Wayfarer Redemption” series, which began in 1995 with the best-seller BattleAxe and continued with Enchanter, Starman, Sinner, Pilgrim and Crusader, her other series include the “Crucible” trilogy, “Darkglass Mountain” and “Troy Game”. Douglass also wrote Beyond the Hanging Wall, Threshold and The Devil’s Diadem, and some of her short stories were collected in The Hall of Lost Footsteps.
American playwright and screenwriter David Z. (Zelag) Goodman died of progressive supranuclear palsy the same day, aged eighty-one. His credits include Hammer’s The Stranglers of Bombay, Straw Dogs, Man on a Swing, Logan’s Run and Eyes of Laura Mars.
Italian comics writer and publisher Sergio Bonelli also died on 26 September, aged seventy-nine. His Sergio Bonelli Editore imprint published the psychic-investigator title Dylan Dog.
Italian editor and writer Vittorio Curtoni died of a heart attack on 4 October, aged sixty-two. He had been suffering from cancer. Between 1970–75 he co-edited the Galassia paperback line, founded the Italian SF magazine Robot in 1976 and translated more than 300 novels. Curtoni’s own short stories were collected in Bianco su nero (White on Black) and he wrote the novel Dove stiamo volando (Where Are We Flying To).
American lawyer and civil rights activist Derrick Bell (Derrick Albert Bell, Jr.) died of carcinoid cancer on 5 October, aged eighty. His SF story “The Space Traders” was adapted by HBO for the 1994 anthology TV show Cosmic Slop.
British author Jack D. Shackleford died of lung cancer on 13 October, aged seventy-three. A former professional heavyweight boxer, professional cricketer, folk-singer and practising traditional witch, he wrote the novels Tanith (1970), The Strickland Demon (1977) and The House of the Magus (1979), and he had a short story in The 17th Pan Book of Horror Stories.
Veteran American comic book writer Alvin Schwartz, who is credited for inventing the “Bizarro World” concept in Superman, died of heart-related problems in Canada on 28 October, aged ninety-five. He also scripted copies of Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash and House of Mystery. Schwartz wrote the newspaper strips for a number of DC Comics heroes and worked on rival Fawcett’s Captain Marvel.
Comic book writer, artist and editor Mick Anglo (Maurice Anglowitz), the creator of British superhero “Marvelman”, died on 31 October, aged ninety-five. Over the years he re-vamped the character (and often the same artwork) as “Captain Universe”, “Captain Miracle” and Miracle Man”. Anglo produced a 1966 hardcover annual for TV’s The Avengers; the short-lived mid-1960s comics Fantasy Stories, Macabre Stories, Spectre Stories and Strange Stories for John Spencer & Co., and he also illustrated the tie-in strips “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” and “Green Hornet” for TV Tornado, which he edited.
American author, journalist and musician Les Daniels (Leslie Noel Daniels, III) died of a heart attack on 5 November, aged sixty-eight. Best known for his centuries-spanning series of books about the vampire Don Sebastian de Villanueva (The Black Castle, The Silver Skull, Citizen Vampire, Yellow Fog and No Blood Spilled), he was also the author of the non-fiction study Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media and edited the anthology Dying of Fright: Masterpieces of the Macabre, illustrated by the Lee Brown Coye. Daniels was also an authority on comic books, and he wrote Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (1971) and definitive guides to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, along with authoritative histories of Marvel and DC Comics. His short fiction appeared in such anthologies as Best New Horror 4, Dark Voices 4 and 5, and Dark Terrors 5.
Hollywood screenwriter, producer and director Hal Kanter died of pneumonia on 6 November, aged ninety-two. He was the son of Albert L. Kanter, who founded the Classic Comics (later Classics Illustrated) line in 1941. Kanter wrote the screenplays for such Bob Hope comedies as My Favorite Spy, Road to Bali, Here Come the Girls and Casanova’s Big Night, and in 1953 he began regularly scripting the Annual Academy Awards show.
American composer, bandleader and trumpeter Russell Garcia, who composed the music scores for the George Pal productions The Time Machine (1960) and Atlantis the Lost Continent, died of cancer in New Zealand on 20 November, aged ninety-five.
American science fiction author Anne [Inez] McCaffrey died of a massive stroke at her home in Ireland on 21 November, aged eighty-five. She began her writing career in 1953, and is best known for her best-selling “Pern” series, which began with the “fix-up” novel Dragonflight in 1968 and continued for more than twenty further volumes, with later titles co-written with her son, Todd McCaffrey. Her more than 100 books also include the “Talents”, “Doona”, “Dinosaur Planet”, “Killashandra” and “Catteni” series, along with such stand-alone novels as The Mark of Merlin, The Coelura, Nimisha’s Ship and Catalyst. McCaffrey’s short fiction is collected in The Ship Who Sang and Get Off the Unicorn, she edited two anthologies and wrote two cookbooks, while Dragonholder (1999) is a biography written by her son. She was the first woman to win both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and her “Pern” book The White Dragon (1978) was the first SF novel to appear on the New York Times bestseller list. She was also a recipient of the British Fantasy Society’s Karl Edward Wagner Award, and was named a SFWA Grand Master in 2005.
Robert E. Briney (Robert Edward “Bob” Briney, Jr.), an expert on Sax Rohmer and mystery and supernatural fiction, died on 25 November, aged seventy-seven. A co-founder of the Advent: Publishing imprint in 1956, he edited the 1953 anthology Shanadu and also contributed a novella under the pseudonym “Andrew Duane” (written with Brian J. McNaughton). Briney edited the 1972 reference book SF Bibliographies: An Annotated Bibliography of Bibliographical Works on Science Fiction and Fantasy Fiction along with eighteen issues of The Rohmer Review (1970–83).
Japanese anime artist and director Shingo Araki died on 1 December, aged seventy-two. Among his credits are Ulysses 31, Inspector Gadget and The Mighty Orbots.
Sixty-three-year-old American fanzine publisher Bob Sabella died of an inoperable brain tumour on 3 December. He edited 170 issues of Visions of Paradise and wrote the 2000 study Who Shaped Science Fiction?
American artist Darrell K. (Kinsman) Sweet died on 5 December, aged seventy-seven. Best known for his work with such imprints as Ballantine Books and Del Rey in the 1970s, he produced the cover art for Robert Jordan’s “Wheels of Time” series, Stephen R. Donaldson’s “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” series, and Piers Anthony’s “Xanth” series. His artwork was collected in Beyond Fantasy: The Art of Darrell K. Sweet (1997).
American comic book artist and historian Jerry Robinson died in his sleep on 7 December, aged eighty-nine. Originally hired as an inker at the age of seventeen by “Batman” creator Bob Kane, Robinson went on to co-create “Robin, the Boy Wonder” and was a primary influence on the creation of the duo’s arch-nemesis “The Joker” (modelled after Conrad Veidt in the 1928 movie The Man Who Laughs), “Two-Face” and Bruce Wayne’s butler,
“Alfred Pennyworth”. In later years he moved into newspaper comic strips and became an advocate for the rights of artists. Robinson’s 1974 book, The Comics, was one of the first books about newspaper strips.
Scottish writer, critic and translator Gilbert Adair died on 8 December, aged sixty-six. In the 1980s he wrote the children’s sequels Alice Through the Needle’s Eye and Peter Pan and the Only Children.
British fantasy author Euan Harvey died of cancer on 9 December, aged thirty-eight. He began his writing career in 2007 and sold eight stories to Realms of Fantasy magazine.
French SF author Louis Thirion died the same day, aged eighty-eight. He published more than thirty novels, starting in 1964 with Waterloo, morne plaine. He also contributed several scripts to the radio series Théâtre de l’Étrange.
American-born author and illustrator Russell [Conwell] Hoban, best known for his post-holocaust novel Riddley Walker (1980), died of congestive heart failure in London on 13 December, aged eighty-six. He began publishing in 1959, and produced more than twenty titles for children and adults, including Pilgerman, The Medusa Frequency, Turtle Diary, The Mouse and His Child and the “Frances the Badger” series.
American SF author and medical doctor T. J. Bass (Thomas J. Bassler) died in Honoloulu the same day, aged seventy-nine. Starting in 1968, he had a number of stories published in If and Galaxy magazines, and his linked novels Half Past Human (1971) and The Godwhale (1974) were both nominated for Nebula Awards.
Legendary comic book creator Joe Simon (Hymie Simon, aka Joseph Henry “Joe” Simon) died after a brief illness on 14 December, aged ninety-eight. He created (with Jack Kirby) such characters as Captain America, the Newsboy Legion, the Boy Commandos, Manhunter, Fighting American and the Fly. The duo also worked on Adventure Comics, Detective Comics, Sandman and numerous other titles in all genres, including the horror comics Black Magic and The Strange World of Your Dreams. Titan Books recently published the huge retrospective volume of their work, The Best of Simon and Kirby, along with the autobiographical work Joe Simon: My Life in Comics.
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