Mick Farren (1943-2013)

Author and musician Mick Farren, 69, died July 27, 2013, collapsing on stage during a show with his band The Deviants in London.

Farren began writing SF with The Texts of Festival (1973). His series work includes the SF Jeb Stuart Ho trilogy, urban fantasy sequence Time of Feasting, and the Flame of Evil series. Additional works of SF interest include The Feelies (1978), The Song of Phaid the Gambler (1981), Protectorate (1984), The Long Orbit (1988), Their Master’s War (1988), Armageddon Crazy (1989), Exit Funtopia (1989), and Mars – The Red Planet (1990), among others. Some of his short work was collected in Zones of Chaos (2009).

Michael Anthony Farren was born September 3, 1943 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He played with The Deviants from 1967-69, with the group reuniting periodically over the years, and was a mainstay of the counterculture in the UK. He edited underground newspaper IT from 1970-73, and founded underground comic Nasty Tales, where he wrote SFnal comic strip Ogoth the Wasted. He also wrote and edited numerous non-fiction titles about music.

See the September issue of Locus for a complete obituary. For more, see Farren’s entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.