Obituaries

Publisher and author Tim Underwood, 75, died October 11, 2023 in hospice.

Tim Edward Underwood was born January 12, 1948 in Sault Ste Marie MI. Underwood co-founded small press Underwood Miller in 1976 with Chuck Miller; their first book was a hardcover of The Dying Earth by Jack Vance that same year. They went on to publish works by Philip K. Dick, Robert E. Howard, Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny, and ...Read More

SF writer Michael Flynn died September 30, 2023 at home in Easton PA.

Michael Francis Flynn was born in 1947 in Easton PA and attended La Salle University, where he earned a BS, and Marquette University, where he got his Master’s degree in topology. He worked as an engineer and statistician, and lived in Colorado and New Jersey before returning to settle in his hometown.

He began publishing short fiction ...Read More

Publisher and fan Ira M. Thornhill, 69, died July 25, 2023 in Mississippi following a long illness.

Ira Mitchell “Mitch” Thornhill was born December 23, 1953 in Mississippi, attended Louisiana State University, and worked as a nurse. He became involved in fandom in the 1970s while living in New Orleans and Minneapolis, working on fanzines including Bozo Bus Tribune, Fear and Loathing in the Night, New Matrix, and Rainbow. He ...Read More

Writer and librarian Michael D. Toman, 73, died September 2, 2023. He wrote several short stories published in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.

Toman was born October 8, 1949, and attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in 1973. He worked as a librarian for the South Pasadena Public Library until he retired around 2015, where he tirelessly supported the work of SF writers.

His own work appeared in Science ...Read More

SF writer REKKA KOROL JAY, who wrote as R J THEODORE, 43, died July 18, 2023 of cancer at home in Connecticut.

Rebecca A. Jay was born April 30, 1980. They attended Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota FL, majoring in graphic design with a major in philosophy. They worked as a graphic designer, and did design work on The Deadlands.

Debut novel Flotsam (2018) launched ...Read More

Author Sydney J. Van Scyoc, 83, died June 17, 2023.

Sydney Joyce Brown was born July 27, 1939 in Mt Vernon IN and later settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. She began publishing with “Shatter the Wall” in Galaxy in 1962, and produced numerous stories throughout the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. Debut novel Saltflower appeared in 1971, and was followed by Assignment Nor’Dyren (1973), Starmother (1976), Cloudcry (1977), Sunwaifs ...Read More

Alan Arkin, 89, died June 29, 2023. Though best known as an actor and director, Arkin also wrote SF, including stories “Whiskaboom” (1955) and “People Soup” (1958) in Galaxy, “The Amazing Grandy” (2001) in F&SF, and novel The Clearing (1986).

Alan Wolf Arkin was born March 26, 1934 in Brooklyn NY, and moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was 11. He took acting classes at Los Angeles ...Read More

Literary agent FRANCES COLLIN, 87, died February 27, 2023 in Wayne PA. Frances Wene was born July 11, 1935 in Philadelphia PA. She graduated from Hunter College, and got her start in publishing in the typing pool at St. Martin’s Press. She also worked at Knopf before joining literary agency Brandt & Brandt, then moved to Marie Rodell’s agency in 1975. Collin later took over the agency, where she ...Read More

Author Nicky Singer, 66, died June 17, 2023 in Brighton, England following a stroke. Singer wrote for children and adults, occasionally producing young-adult work with speculative elements.

Singer was born July 22, 1956 in Chalfont-St.-Peter, Buckinghamshire, England. She worked in publishing, the arts, and television, and co-founded and co-directed charity Performing Arts Lab, dedicated to teaching new writers how to create work for the stage and screen. Her debut Feather ...Read More

Author Cormac McCarthy, 89, died June 13, 2023 at home in Santa Fe NM. McCarthy was a celebrated and bestselling novelist, mostly of Westerns, but he also wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning postapocalyptic novel The Road (2006), adapted as a film in 2009.

Debut novel The Orchard Keeper appeared in 1965. Other novels are Outer Dark (1968), Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985), National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award winner ...Read More

Writer Nick Wood, 62, died in June 2023.

Nicholas Wood was born in 1961 in Kitwe, Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia), and grew up in South Africa and the US before settling in the UK. He began to publish SF with “African Shadows” (as Nicholas Wood) in 1999, and made his first professional sale to Interzone with “God in the Box” (2003). His debut novella, young-adult The Stone Chameleon, appeared ...Read More

SF writer Rajnar Vajra, 75, died May 16, 2023 in Amherst MA.

David Rajnar Vajra-Loeb was born September 16, 1947 in New York City, where he lived until his family moved to San Diego CA when he was six. He attended Berkeley College in the 1960s, where he formed a band. He later relocated to Massachusetts, where he remained heavily involved in the music scene as a performer, sound designer, ...Read More

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 ...Read More

Australian author and fan Lee Harding, 86, died April 18, 2023 in Perth, Australia.

Lee John Harding was born February 19, 1937 in Colac, Victoria, Australia. He was active in Australian fandom starting in the early ’50s under the names Leo Harding and LJ Harding, producing fanzines Perhaps: The International Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Wastebasket.

His first professional sale was “Displaced Person” (1961), later expanded as YA ...Read More

Author Anne Perry, 84, died April 10, 2023 in Los Angeles CA. Though best known for mystery novels (notably the Thomas Pitt and William Monk series), she also did occasional genre work, including Tathea (1999) and sequel Come Armageddon (2001), the Timepiece sequence, and anthology Death by Horoscope (2001).

Perry was born Juliet Marion Hulme on October 28, 1938 in London, and spent time in the Caribbean, South Africa, and ...Read More

Japanese writer KENZABURO OE, 88, died March 3, 2023 in Tokyo. Oe won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. Some of his work had genre elements, and he edited anthology Fire from Dream­ the Ashes: Short Stories About Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1985), which also includes speculative material.

Oe was born January 31, 1935 in Shikoku, Japan, and attended Tokyo University. He began publish­ing stories in college, and won ...Read More

Author, editor, and fan Joseph Wrzos, 93, died April 7, 2023. He often wrote and edited under the name Joseph Ross.

Joseph Henry Wrzos was born September 9, 1929 in Newark NJ. He attended Rutgers University, graduating in 1952, and went to graduate school at Columbia University. He worked as a high school librarian, and spent most of his career as an English teacher.

Wrzos was an editor at Gnome ...Read More

Author Rachel Pollack, 77, died April 7, 2023 in New York of cancer.

Rachel Grace Pollack was born August 17, 1945 in Brooklyn NY. She attended New York University, graduating with a degree in English, and earned her Masters in English from Claremont Graduate University. She taught English at various institutions and workshops, including Clarion West, and was on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing program at Goddard College. ...Read More

Literary agent VALERIE SMITH, 71, died March 2, 2023 following a brief illness.

Smith was born May 6, 1951 in Newburgh NY. She began her career as an agent in the 1970s at the Virginia Kidd agency before going independent. She represented authors including Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Pamela Dean, Debra Doyle, John M. Ford, James D. Macdonald, Madeleine Robins, Delia Sherman, Will Shetterly, and Pat Wrede, among many ...Read More

Author Michael Reaves, 72, died March 20, 2023 in Los Angeles CA. He had Parkinson’s.

James Michael Reaves was born September 14, 1950 in San Francisco CA. He attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in 1972, and his first SF story was “The Breath of Dragons” in Clarion 3 (1973). Some early work appeared under the name J. Michael Reaves. Debut novel I, Alien appeared in 1978, ...Read More

Writer Eric Brown, 62, died March 21, 2023 of sepsis. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2022. Brown was the author of over 50 books, and a longtime SF reviewer for The Guardian.

Brown was born was born May 24, 1960 in Haworth, West Yorkshire. He traveled extensively in Greece and Asia in the ’80s, eventually settling in Berwickshire, Scotland.

Brown’s first work of genre interest was children’s play ...Read More

Writer John Jakes, 90, died March 11, 2023. While famed for his bestselling historical novels, Jakes was a prolific SF and fantasy author early in his career. He published over 60 books in a variety of genres, but became famous with two historical epics: the eight-volume Kent Family Chronicles histories in the 1970s, and the North and South trilogy in the 1980s, which collectively sold tens of millions of copies. ...Read More

Writer Christopher Fowler, 69, died March 3, 2023 in London. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2020. Fowler was the author of over 50 books in a variety of genres.

Christopher Robert Fowler was born March 26, 1953 in Greenwich, London, and split his time between London and Barcelona until his cancer diagnosis. In addition to his fiction career, he was a marketing writer, and founded film marketing company The ...Read More

Publisher, writer, and editor John Teehan, 56, died February 23, 2023 at Rhode Island Hospital after suffering a stroke. He was an editor and the longtime production manager for the SFWA Bulletin, and in 2010 founded The Merry Blacksmith Press, publishing fiction and non-fiction by Tobias S. Buckell, Ron Collins, Tim Pratt, Bud Webster, and others. Teehan was also an author of occasional short fiction, essays, and poetry in the ...Read More

SF writer and illustrator Ray Nelson, 91, died November 30, 2022 in El Cerrito CA. He was a prolific author of SF and mystery fiction and longtime member of fandom.

Radell Faraday Nelson was born October 31, 1931 in Schenectady, New York. He became involved in fandom as a teenager in Cadillac MI. He claimed to have invented the propellor beanie in 1947, and popularized the headgear as a symbol ...Read More

Author Paul La Farge, 52, died of cancer on January 18, 2023. His novel The Night Ocean (2017) was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist.

Paul Bayard La Farge was born November 17, 1970 in New York City, and was a graduate of Yale University. He taught writing at Bard College, Wesleyan, and the University of Leipzig, and from July 2020 was a member of the faculty at Bennington College. Debut ...Read More

Artist Richard Bober, 79, died December 10, 2022.

Bober was born August 18, 1943 in Elizabeth NJ. By his teens he was fortunate to have the well-known artist Lee E. Gaskins as one of his teachers in public school (1957-1958). Bober won a scholarship to the Pratt Institute in 1961, where (as he put it) he “caused general havoc and aggravation to many professors.” By his own reckoning, he was ...Read More

SF writer Suzy McKee Charnas, 83, died January 2, 2023. She was best known for her ambitious works that explored gender, sexuality, and feminist issues.

Suzy McKee was born October 22, 1939 in New York City. She attended Barnard College, where she studied economic history, and then served in the Peace Corps for two years in West Africa before getting a masters degree in teaching at NYU and working as ...Read More

Literary agent Henry Morrison, 86, died November 2, 2022. Morrison’s past clients included Samuel R. Delany, Dean Koontz, Robert Ludlum, Eric van Lustbader, David Morrell, and Roger Zelazny.

Morrison was born in New York and grew up in New Jersey. He got his start at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency before leaving to launch his own agency in his late 20s. He was active in the business for more than ...Read More

Fan and scholar JUSTIN E.A. BUSCH, 63, died October 21, 2022. He was best known in the field for his first book, The Utopian Vision of H.G. Wells (2009), and for his work in fanzines.

Justin Edwin Anton Busch was born April 23, 1959 in St. Louis MO. He lived in Nashville TN as a child before moving with his family to Geneva NY. He earned a BA in ...Read More

Writer and artist JILL PINKWATER, 81, died October 4, 2022 in Rhinebeck NY. She was best known for the illustrations she contributed to her husband Daniel Pinkwater’s books for children. Jill Miriam Schutz was born May 29, 1941 in the Bronx NY, and worked asan artist and teacher. She met Daniel Pinkwater in 1969, and they were married that same year; they subsequently collaborated on more than 50 books, including ...Read More