Xenograffiti

by Robert Reginald

  Thomas Dean Clareson was born on Aug. 26, 1926 at Austin, Minnesota. He displayed his interest in SF criticism early, publishing his first essay on the subject in 1954 in the pulp magazine, Science Fiction Quarterly. A year later he joined the faculty of The College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio, and in 1956 received his doctorate in English from Penn. By 1958 he had persuaded the Modern Language Association to sponsor a seminar on science fiction, an event which may well be used by future historians to mark the coming of age of SF criticism. A year later he assembled and published (through the English Department of The College of Wooster) the first issue of Extrapolation as The Newsletter of the Conference on Science-Fiction of the Modern Language Association. Kent State University Press acquired the journal in 1979, and has published it ever since.

  As editor, Clareson avoided controversy, emphasizing readability in the essays he published, and avoiding academic jargon and the philosophical extremes. He disliked stodginess, and encouraged the publication of both critiques and bibliographical studies; among others, he provided a home for over ten years for Marshall Tymn’s annual guides to the secondary literature of the genre. For its first thirteen years, until the founding of Foundation in 1972 and Science-Fiction Studies in 1973, Extrapolation was the only periodical regularly to feature rigorously examined scholarly articles on fantastic literature. Clareson set the standards for the rest of the field to follow.

  In 1970, sensing that the number of academics seriously interested in the study of SF literature had reached a critical level, he founded the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), and served as its President and guiding hand for six difficult years, until it was well enough established to continue life on its own. Included in the initial proposal for the organization was a series of annual academic conferences devoted to the study of fantastic fiction, the creation of a lifetime accolade (the Pilgrim Award) to honor career contributions to the study of the literature (an honor he was himself given in 1977), and the publication of the SFRA Newsletter (which became the SFRA Review in 1992) to provide members with news and reviews of interest.

  Clareson’s own works included five anthologies of criticism and one of fiction, the first annotated checklist of SF Criticism (Kent State, 1972), critical studies on Frederik Pohl (Starmont House, 1987) and Robert Silverberg (Starmont House, 1983), and Robert Silverberg: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (G. K. Hall, 1983), the compilation of two large microfilm collections on the pulp magazines and early science fiction novels (Greenwood, 1984), a general guide to Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction (University of South Carolina Press, 1990), and two major works on the bibliography and history of fantastic literature: Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s (Greenwood Press, 1984) and Some Kind of Paradise: The Emergence of American Science Fiction (Greenwood Press, 1985). Forthcoming are a major biographical and critical study of Robert A. Heinlein and an untitled collection of his essays, both from Borgo Press.

  Tom was truly a modest man, he drove like a maniac, he smoked terribly for far too many years, and he was brilliant and fun and knowledgeable and a great conversationalist, a genius whose passion and belief in the study of science-fiction literature legitimatized and made possible the immense blossoming of SF secondary sources during the 1970s and ‘80s. He was determined to attend the SFRA Conference in Reno between June 16-20th, 1993, and when the airlines refused to allow him to fly with his oxygen tank, he and Alice made the difficult cross-country trip from Ohio to Nevada by car. He was thin and tired, but hadn’t lost any of his humor or élan. When I embraced him on the morning of the 20th, I knew it was the last time I would see him. He had a difficult journey home, catching a bug that just wouldn’t go away. But his passing on July 6, 1993 was totally unexpected, for us and for Alice, for no one expects such a torch ever to dim. Ave utque vale, old friend.

  Michael L. Cook

  Michael Lewis Cook, 58, bibliographer, genealogist, and historian, died suddenly of a heart attack on June 14, 1988, at Evansville, IN. He was born at Evansville on June 28, 1929, and had lived there all his life, working as an insurance agent, office manager, and real estate broker before retiring in 1976 to become a full-time researcher and publisher. He was the author of forty-seven books, including eleven indexes and bibliographies of mystery, pulp, and adventure fiction. His last book, Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Fiction, was published by Garland a month after he died, as the first of a three-volume set indexing mystery, adventure, and science fiction pulp magazines. Work had nearly been completed on Volume Two, Adventure, War, and Sports Fiction, and that book, together with Volume Three on the science fiction magazines, will be completed by Cook’s collaborator, Steve Miller, with help from William G. Contento on the latter.

  Richard Condon

  Richard Thomas Condon, 81, well-known American novelist, died on Apr. 9, 1996 at Dallas, Texas. He was born on Mar. 18, 1915 at New York, New York, and worked as a publicist for various film companies in New York and Hollywood from 1936-1957. He began writing in the 1940s, selling stories and travel articles to the slick magazines, and having a play, Men of Distinction, produced on Broadway in 1953. His first novel, The Oldest Confession, appeared in 1958, but it was his next book, The Manchurian Candidate (McGraw-Hill, 1959), which dealt with sophisticated brainwashing techniques, that vaulted him into the ranks of the bestsellers. His best-known later work was Prizzi’s Honor, one of a series of four novels focusing on a fictional Mafia family. In the SF field he produced a number of satirical near-future works, including: A Talent for Loving; or, The Great Cowboy Race (McGraw-Hill, 1961), Winter Kills (Dial, 1974), The Star-Spangled Crunch (Bantam, 1974), The Whisper of the Axe (Dial, 1976), Emperor of America (Simon & Schuster, 1990), and The Final Addiction (St. Martin’s, 1991).

  Pam Conrad

  Pam Stampf Conrad, 48, died of breast cancer on Jan. 22, 1996 at her home at Rockville Center, Long Island, New York. She was born on June 18, 1947 at New York City, and received a B.A. from the New School for Social Research. Conrad was a well-known children’s writer, her first book, I Don’t Live Here!, being published by Dutton in 1983. She first attained widespread notice with Prairie Songs (1985), a young adult western, which won the Spur Award from Western Writers of America and many library accolades. In the SF field her only novel was Stonewords: A Ghost Story (Harper & Row, 1990), which won an Edgar Allan Poe Award and a California Young Reader Medal. A sequel, Zoe Rising, is scheduled to be published by HarperCollins in June of 1996.

  Ted Dikty

  He was the best man I ever knew. In a business known for its cutthroat deals, back alley politics, and pervasive cynicism, he never lost his innocence, his sense of wonder, his outright joy at being able to spend his life doing exactly what he loved most—publishing and editing—and getting paid for it.

  Thaddeus Maxim Eugene Dikty was born on June 16, 1920 at Port Clinton, Ohio. He married writer and fan Julian “Judy” May on January 10, 1953, and they had three children: Alan Sam, David, and Barbara. He became an editor for Shasta Publishers in 1948, and stayed with that firm until its demise in 1957; he later worked as an editor for several other Chicago-area publishing houses before founding FAX Collector’s Editions in the early 1970s. He edited the first series of “best of the year” science fiction anthologies with Everett F. Bleiler beginning in 1949, and continuing through 1958. He founded FAX Collector’s Editions in 1972 with Darrell C. Richardson to reprint pulp classics, and Starmont House, Inc. in 1976 to publish criticism about science fiction.

  Ted believed in the essential goodness of people. He was unfailingly kind and courteous towards friends and strangers alike, a truly “gentle” man, in the older sense of the word. Not a milquetoast nor a cipher, not by any means: I’ve seen him angry, but never abusive; I’ve seen him upset at people, but never vindictive. There wasn’t a spot of meanness anywhere in that giant soul. He knew publishing backwards and forwards and sideways, but he never let the needs of his business dictate the way he treated people.
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br />   Once a week or so I’d give him a call. “Hey, Thaddeus,” I’d say, “How’s it going?” He’d laugh, and we’d talk business for a few moments, and then get down to the real business of schmoozing for as long as we could get away with it. And we’d talk. About life, the universe, about everything. About death. He was ill, seriously ill, on and off for the last two years, mostly with circulatory problems. He didn’t want to die, and he certainly didn’t want Starmont to die with him. But even though he had felt much better during the last three months, he knew the end was coming. We all did. And he provided as best he could for the future of both his family and his business. Starmont House will continue under his daughter’s direction.

  A month before his passing I told him I’d be flying up to Seattle in October. It had been two years since our last meeting, and we were greatly looking forward to a few days together. Then the conversation took a strange turn, as we started reminiscing about all the good and awful publishing decisions we had made during our respective careers, each trying to outdo the other in a facetious way with bad examples, and noting that, had we only had the benefit of hindsight, we could have both retired long since. It gave us a good laugh: we knew perfectly well, of course, that retirement was never an option for either of us.

  Thaddeus Dikty never made much money in publishing. He wasn’t a household name, even in the microcosm of science fiction. He never sought the limelight, and rejected any attempts to be dragged into the public eye. But those who knew the man any length of time came to love him dearly, heart and soul, without exception.

  I made my plane reservation for Sunday, Oct. 13th, 1991. Ted kept another appointment, damn him, on the afternoon of Friday, Oct. 11th, sitting at his desk editing a manuscript. It was the way he would have chosen to go: quietly, without fuss, doing the work he loved so well. I think somewhere he’s doing it still. Old friend, dear friend, rest in well deserved peace.

  William K. Everson

  William Keith Everson, 67, film historian and critic, died of cancer at New York, New York on Apr. 14, 1996. He was born on Apr. 8, 1929 at Yeovil, Somersetshire, England. He came to the U.S. in 1950, where he worked as a publicist, writer, editor, and producer for various film and television companies, and also taught occasional classes at New York University and other schools. Beginning in the 1950s, he amassed one of the largest private collections of classic and obscure films in the world, amounting to over 4,000 motion pictures, which he kept for private viewing in his apartment. He also wrote hundreds of articles and some twenty books on cinema, including Classics of the Horror Film (Citadel Press, 1974) and its sequel, More Classics of the Horror Film (Citadel Press, 1986).

  Herk Harvey

  Harold A. “Herk” Harvey, 71, died on April 3, 1996 at Lawrence, Kansas. He was born in Colorado, and later attended school at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, majoring in theater arts. He joined the staff of Centron Films at Lawrence, and produced over 400 educational and industrial films for them. His only feature film, Carnival of Souls (Herts-Lion, 1962), was independently produced and directed by Harvey at Lawrence for less than $100,000. This atmospheric and chilling ghost story starred Candace Hillgoss in the main role, with Harvey himself playing the leader of the dead. The move was never given a proper release in the theaters, but slowly gained a following from periodic showings on late-nite TV and at film festivals, finally achieving cult status in the 1980s and ‘90s, and earning favorable reviews in The New Yorker and other publications.

  Ryerson Johnson

  (Walter) Ryerson “Johnny” Johnson, 93, died on May 24, 1995 in Florida. He was born on October 19, 1901, and became a well-known writer for the pulp magazines, specializing in mystery and western stories. In the SF field he authored three Doc Savage novels during the 1930s under the house name, Kenneth Robeson: The Fantastic Island (reprinted by Bantam Books in 1966); Land of Always-Night (Bantam, 1966); and The Motion Menace (Bantam, 1971). In later life he wrote a number of popular children’s books. A collection of his pulp westerns, Torture Trek and Eleven Other Tales of the Wild West (Barricade Books), was published just before his death in 1995.

  David Lasser

  David Lasser, 94, died May 5, 1996 at Rancho Bernardo, Calif. He was born on Mar. 20, 1902 at Baltimore, Maryland. After serving in France with the U.S. Army during World War I, he attended M.I.T. and then worked briefly as an engineer in New Jersey. In 1927 he was hired by Hugo Gernsback for Gernsback Publications and Stellar Publishing Corporation, and edited the pulp magazines Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories from 1929 (the two titles were combined as Wonder Stories in 1930) and Wonder Stories Quarterly, also beginning in 1929; he also briefly edited Gernsback’s Scientific Detective Monthly in 1930. He left Stellar in 1933, but not before writing The Conquest of Space (Penguin Press, 1931), the first serious attempt to outline the possibility of real-life exploration of the solar system, including a manned trip to the Moon; the book influenced an entire generation of science fiction writers. To promote his beliefs he helped create the American Interplanetary Society in 1930, which metamorphosed into the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In 1935 Lasser founded a Depression-era labor organization, the Workers Alliance of America, but resigned in 1940 when the Communists took over the union; ironically, he was unjustly labeled as a Communist during the Joseph McCarthy era because of his previous association with the group. From 1950-1969 he served with the International Union of Electrical Radio and Machine Workers.

  Andrew Lytle

  Andrew Nelson Lytle, 92, died Dec. 12, 1995 at Monteagle, Tennessee. He was born on Dec. 26, 1902 at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1925. There he became associated with the Agrarians, a group of writers (among them Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom) who railed against the effects of technology on modern society, and who advocated a return to a simpler, farm-based way of life. He had a long and distinguished career as an author, lecturer, and teacher of creative writing at the University of Florida and University of the South; his many students included well-known writer Flannery O’Connor. Lytle’s first novel, The Long Night, was published in 1936. His only fantasy novel was A Name for Evil (Bobbs-Merrill, 1947), a psychological ghost story with gothic overtones, which was later reprinted in the omnibus A Novel, a Novella, and Four Short Stories (Obolensky, 1958), and separately by Avon Books in the 1970s.

  Og Mandino

  Og Mandino, 72, died of an aneurysm on Sept. 3, 1996 at Antrim, NH. Augustine A. Mandino was born on Dec. 12, 1923 at Boston, MA, and briefly attended Bucknell Junior College before entering the Army Air Force as a 1st Lieut. during World War II; he received the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal for his valor. Following the war, he became a successful life insurance salesman and manager, retiring in 1965. He then founded the magazine Success Unlimited to promote his motivational ideas. His first book, A Treasury of Success Unlimited, was published in 1966, but he was best known for such inspirational classics as The Greatest Salesman in the World (1968) and The Greatest Secret in the World (1972); his nineteen books sold more than thirty million copies in aggregate. His only venture into SF was the novel The Christ Commission (Lippincott & Crowell, 1980), in which a disillusioned 20th-century time traveler returns to the Jerusalem of 36 a.d. to determine for himself the truth behind Christ’s resurrection.

  Annette Peltz McComas

  Annette Peltz McComas, 83, died on Oct. 7, 1994 at her home in Oakland, CA. Annette Peltz was born on June 26, 1911 at San Francisco, California, daughter of Alfred and Jennie Peltz. At age five she moved with her family to a small Jewish community in Hutchinson, Kansas, where she lived until 1929. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, during the early 1930s, and her master’s degree from Cornell University a few years later. She then worked for several years in New York as a stage manager and short story writer, and later taught at UC Berkeley and at a community college at Oakland, California. She married Jesse Francis Mc
Comas (later co-editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) in 1943, and had one son who died at the age of thirty-seven; they were divorced in 1961, and he died in 1978. In later years she wrote, directed plays, and traveled extensively until losing much of her sight. She edited the SF anthology, The Eureka Years: Boucher and McComas’s The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1949-54, for Bantam Books in 1982. She is survived by her grandson, Tony Stoughton, and a great-granddaughter. An autobiography, Kansas and Me: Memories of a Jewish Childhood, was published by The Borgo Press in 1995.

  Christopher Milne

  Christopher Robin Milne, 75, died on Apr. 20, 1996 at London. He was born on Aug. 21, 1920 at London, the son of well-known writer A. A. Milne. In 1924 the elder Milne published a book of light verse called When We Were Very Young which was inspired by the antics of his four-year-old son, and soon had produced the classic children’s book, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), based upon Christopher’s love for a bear of that name at the London zoo. Milne Junior spent the rest of his life trying to live down the fame that Winnie and its sequels engendered, finally publishing his own examination of his own life and those of his parents in The Enchanted Places (1974), which was followed by two sequels, The Path Through the Trees (1979) and The Hollow in the Hill (1982).

  Mayo Mohs

  Mayo Mohs, 62, was killed in an automobile accident at Santa Monica, Calif., on August 22, 1996. The son of Lewis Mohs, former owner of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, Mayo Mohs began working as a high school teacher in Los Angeles, while simultaneously pursuing a career as a freelance writer. His submissions to Time magazine earned an invitation from that publication to join its staff in 1968 as Religious Editor. Ten years later he transferred to Times Mirror’s companion publication, Discover. He retired in 1987. His first book, the anthology Other Worlds, Other Gods: Adventures in Religious Science Fiction (Doubleday, 1971), reflected his interest in philosophy and theology. In the mid-1970s he also co-authored two phonograph records, The God Beat and Media and the Church, plus a well-received political biography of the Prince of Wales, H.R.H.: The Man Who Will Be King (Arbor House, 1979), written with Tim Heald.