Martin Amis (1949-2023)

Writer Martin Amis, 73, died of esophageal cancer on May 19, 2023 in Lake Worth FL. Amis was a celebrated UK literary writer, essayist, and journalist.

Martin Louis Amis was born August 25, 1949. His father was writer Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), author of many famous works, including New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction; Martin Amis also wrote a great deal of SF criticism, producing reviews under the name Henry Tilney after graduating from Oxford in 1971. After university, he worked for The Times Literary Supplement and by age 27 was literary editor of New Statesman. His debut novel, The Rachel Papers, appeared in 1973, and over the course of a 50-year career he wrote novels, essay collections, memoirs, and screenplays. In 2007 he became a professor of creative writing at the Manchester Center for New Writing at the University of Manchester, retiring in 2011. He relocated to the US in 2012, where he had homes in Brooklyn and Florida.

Amis is best known for the non-genre London trilogy: Money (1984), London Fields (1989), and The Information (1995). His fiction often incorporated elements of the surreal and satirical, but he wrote more explicit SF, too, starting with his second novel, near-future SF Dead Babies (1975). Other works of genre interest include Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), London Fields (1989), Time’s Arrow; Or, the Nature of the Offense (1991), Yellow Dog (2003), and Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012). Some of his short SF work is collected in Einstein’s Monsters (1987; as God’s Dice, 1995) and Heavy Water; and Other Stories (1998). He also wrote the screenplay for SF horror film Saturn 3 (1980).

His non-fiction collections, often including essays of genre interest, include The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986), Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993), The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001), and The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage 1994-2017 (2017).

Amis is survived by his second wife, Isabel Fonesca, and three daughters, two sons, and four grandchildren.

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