H. Bruce Franklin (1934-2024)
Scholar and editor H. BRUCE FRANKLIN, 90, died May 19, 2024 in El Cerrito CA. He taught one of the first university courses on science fiction literature while he was at Stanford University, and also wrote and edited numerous works of SF interest.
Howard Bruce Franklin was born February 28, 1934 in Brooklyn NY. He worked his way through college, graduating from Amherst College in 1955. He served in the US Air Force from 1956-59, and resigned from the Air Force Reserve in 1966 to protest the war in Vietnam. He earned his PhD in English at Stanford, graduating in 1961, and began teaching there the same year, eventually earning tenure. He was infamously fired in 1972 after being accused of inciting antiwar protests on campus. Three years later he found another position at Rutgers university, teaching English and American Studies there until his retirement in 2015.
His first book was The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology (1963). Other titles of note include Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (1980) and War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (1988; expand 2008). Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War (2018), a history of America in the form of a memoir.
He edited the important retrospective anthology Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century (1966, repeatedly revised and expanded), along with Countdown to Midnight: Twelve Great Stories about Nuclear War (1984). He also published many articles and essays about SF, and was a longtime consulting editor at Science Fiction Studies.
Franklin was honored with the Eaton Award in 1981, the Pilgrim Award in 1983, and the Pioneer Award in 1991, and was named a Distinguished Guest Scholar by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts in 1990. He was predeceased by his wife Jane Morgan (married 1956) in 2023; they had three children.
