Dean Ing (1931-2020)
SF writer Dean Ing, 89, died July 21, 2020 at home in Ashland OR. He was best known for his technothrillers and near-future survivalist novels.
Ing was born June 17, 1931 in Austin TX. He served in the US Air Force from 1951-55, graduated from Fresno State University in 1956, earned a master’s at San Jose State University in 1970, and got his doctorate at the University of Oregon in 1974. Ing worked for many years as an engineer, and also taught college.
Ing’s first work of genre interest was “Tight Squeeze” in Astounding (1955), and he began to publish regularly starting in the late 1970s. “Devil You Don’t Know” (1978) was a Hugo and Nebula Award finalist. Some of his short fiction is collected in High Tension (1982), Firefight 2000 (1987; as Firefight Y2K, 2000), and Pulling Through (1983; as The Rackham Files 2004). Anasazi (1980) collects linked short pieces.
Debut novel Soft Targets (1979) is near-future SF. His Ted Quantrill series, set in a USA devastated by nuclear war, is Systemic Shock (1981), Single Combat (1983), and Wild Country (1985). Other works of SF interest include Blood of Eagles (1986), The Big Lifters (1988), Silent Thunder (1991), and Butcher Bird (1993).
He wrote numerous genre titles under the name of late author Mack Reynolds (based on Reynolds’s outlines), including Home Sweet Home: 2010 A.D. (1984), Eternity (1984), The Other Time (1984), Trojan Orbit (1985) and Deathwish World (1986). Ing also contributed to Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars series, and wrote popular thrillers, including The Ransom of Black Stealth One (1989) and The Nemesis Mission (1991). He coauthored non-fiction titles Mutual Assured Survival (1984, with Jerry Pournelle) and The Future of Flight (1985, with Leik Myrabo).
For more, see his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
