George Slusser (1939-2014)

Critic and scholar George Slusser, 75, died November 4, 2014. He was professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of California, Riverside, and curator emeritus of the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection, as well as director of the Eaton Program for Science Fiction and Fantasy Studies.

George Edgar  Slusser was born July 14, 1939 in San Francisco CA. He earned his PhD in comparative literature at Harvard, and was co-founder and curator of the  Eaton Collection, one of the premier SF collections in the world. He organized the annual Eaton Conference for many years, and  worked actively with the Eaton collection and conference even after retirement.

Slusser wrote and edited numerous scholarly books on SF, including Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in His Own Land (1976), The Farthest Shores of Ursula K. Le Guin (1976), and Gregory Benford (2014), among others. He edited many anthologies of critical essays, including a series collecting papers delivered at the Eaton Conference, co-edited with other scholars. The Eaton Conference Papers series began with Bridges to Science Fiction (1980, with George Robert Guffey and Mark Rose) and continued for more than 20 volumes.  He also translated French genre-related works by Honoré de Balzac and J-H Rosny aîné.

Slusser received the Pilgrim Award for his contributions to SF criticism in 1986. He  is survived by his wife, Danièle Chatelain.

For more, see his entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

See the December issue of Locus for a complete obituary.