Xenograffiti (28 page)

The second section, “Topics,” is a guide to anthologies, bibliographies, history and criticism, awards, journals, film books, associations and conventions, publishers, and other topics of interest. As with the previous section, each topic includes a general, one-paragraph descriptive annotation, plus lists of materials in alphabetical order by main entry. Bibliographical data for individual titles include: author and title, publisher, year of publication, and (occasionally) a brief, one-sentence annotation or contents listing.

The author/title index interfiles books and their authors in one alphabetical sequence, keyed to item number; however, the author listings lack book titles, and the books lack any indication of authorship, requiring the user to flip back and forth constantly to the main text.

Although
Genreflecting
has added some ninety pages of text since publication of the first (1982) edition, a significant portion of the material appears dated or incomplete. For example, the “Critical Journals” listing in the Topics section of the Science Fiction chapter lists
Starship
and
Science Fiction Review
as open entries, although both journals ceased publication many years ago; and also fails to include
Science-Fiction Studies
, a major academic journal of SF, or the
Journal of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts
. On the same page the authors devote an entire paragraph to the
International Science Fiction Yearbook
, which was published once in 1978, and is now totally useless; and in a subsection on “Reviews” they specifically highlight
Fantasy Review
, which they indicate as still being published (but which actually shut down in 1987)—and fail to mention
SFRA Review
, now the major review publication in the field. These lapses suggest a knowledge of the field which is at best superficial.

This is a mediocre guide to genre fiction, of use primarily to high school level libraries. Prefer Neil Barron’s guides,
Anatomy of Wonder
,
Fantasy Literature
, and
Horror Literature
.

(1983-2003)

Robert Adleman

Robert H. Adleman, 76, died on Nov. 16, 1995 at Ashland, Oregon. He was primarily known for his war novels, including
The Devil’s Brigade
, his first book, which was made into a 1968 film starring William Holden. He later attended Rutgers and Temple Universities, earning a law degree at the latter institution. His only novel in the SF field (out of ten books published) was
Annie Deane
(World Publishing Co., 1971). He was a dedicated environmentalist, and after moving to Oregon in 1975, transformed his ranch into a wildlife preserve.

Spiro Agnew

Spiro Theodore Agnew, 77, died of leukemia on Sept. 17, 1996 at Berlin, Maryland. He was born on Nov. 9, 1918 at Baltimore, the son of Greek immigrants. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he received an LL.B. degree from the University of Baltimore in 1947, and an LL.D. from the University of Maryland. After working for ten years as an attorney, he was appointed to the Baltimore County Government in 1957, became County Executive in 1962, was elected Governor of Maryland in 1967, and Vice-President of the United States in 1969. He resigned in 1973 after pleading “no contest” to charges of taking bribes while Governor. Three years later he published his only fiction,
The Canfield Decision
(Playboy Press), a near-future political novel in which a Vice-President proposes arming Israel with nuclear weapons.

Bibi Besch

Bibi Besch, 56, died of cancer on Sept. 7, 1996 at Los Angeles. She was born on Feb. 1, 1940 at Vienna, Austria, the daughter of actress Gusti Huber. Her parents brought her to the United States after World War II, settling in Westchester County, New York. She attended Connecticut College for Women, and later studied with Bill Hickey, Herbert Berghof, and Milton Katselas, making her stage debut in
Pygmalion
in 1964. From the theatre she moved into TV soap operas, guest appearances on series, and television movies, and then to motion pictures in 1975. In the SF world she is primarily known for her role as Dr. Carol Marcus, Captain James Kirk’s former flame and the mother of his only child, in
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982). Sadly, the actor who played her and Kirk’s son in that film, Merritt Butrick, had already perished of AIDS in 1989.

Whit Bissell

Character actor Whitner Bissell, 86, died on March 5, 1996 at Woodland Hills, Calif. He was born on Oct. 24, 1909 at New York City, and began his career in acting on Broadway during the 1930s. He debuted on film in the 1943 production,
Holy Matrimony
, and appeared in ninety-eight motion pictures overall, plus numerous television movies and TV series roles. His work in SF films included:
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
(1954),
Target Earth
(1954),
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956),
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
(1957),
I Was a Teenage Frankenstein
(1957),
The Time Machine
(1960),
Seven Days in May
(1964),
City Beneath the Sea
(TV movie, 1970),
Soylent Green
(1973),
Psychic Killer
(1975), and
The Time Machine
(TV movie, 1978). He also appeared in the TV series,
The Time Tunnel
(1966-1967).

Thomas D. Clareson

A giant has died. The father of science-fiction criticism has passed. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the academic study of fantastic literature could have developed in quite the same way without Tom Clareson. His stature and influence were in many ways comparable to that of John W. Campbell, Jr.’s contributions to the Golden Age of SF literature. Like Campbell, he served as editor of the major periodical of the field for over thirty years; however, Clareson actually founded and for many years published
Extrapolation
, nurturing it from its beginnings in 1959 as a typed 8.5” x 11” newsletter into a sophisticated quarterly journal published by Kent State University Press. Its first issue featured a lengthy bibliography by Clareson himself, material which would later form the basis for his definitive guide,
Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources
(Green-wood Press, 1984).

Thomas Dean Clareson was born on Aug. 26, 1926 at Austin, Minnesota. He displayed his interest in SF criticism early, publishing his first essay on the subject in 1954 in the pulp magazine,
Science Fiction Quarterly
. A year later he joined the faculty of The College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio, and in 1956 received his doctorate in English from Penn. By 1958 he had persuaded the Modern Language Association to sponsor a seminar on science fiction, an event which may well be used by future historians to mark the coming of age of SF criticism. A year later he assembled and published (through the English Department of The College of Wooster) the first issue of
Extrapolation
as
The Newsletter of the Conference on Science-Fiction of the Modern Language Association
. Kent State University Press acquired the journal in 1979, and has published it ever since.

As editor, Clareson avoided controversy, emphasizing readability in the essays he published, and avoiding academic jargon and the philosophical extremes. He disliked stodginess, and encouraged the publication of both critiques and bibliographical studies; among others, he provided a home for over ten years for Marshall Tymn’s annual guides to the secondary literature of the genre. For its first thirteen years, until the founding of
Foundation
in 1972 and
Science-Fiction Studies
in 1973,
Extrapolation
was the
only
periodical regularly to feature rigorously examined scholarly articles on fantastic literature. Clareson set the standards for the rest of the field to follow.

In 1970, sensing that the number of academics seriously interested in the study of SF literature had reached a critical level, he founded the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), and served as its President and guiding hand for six difficult years, until it was well enough established to continue life on its own. Included in the initial proposal for the organization was a series of annual academic conferences devoted to the study of fantastic fiction, the creation of a lifetime accolade (the Pilgrim Award) to honor career contributions to the study of the literature (an honor he was himself given in 1977), and the publication of the
SFRA Newsletter
(which became the
SFRA Review
in 1992) to provide members with news and reviews of interest.

Clareson’s own works included five anthologies of criticism and one of fiction, the first annotated checklist of
SF Criticism
(Kent State, 1972), critical studies on
Frederik Pohl
(Starmont House, 1987) and
Robert Silverberg
(Starmont House, 1983), and
Robert Silverberg: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography
(G. K. Hall, 1983), the compilation of two large microfilm collections on the pulp magazines and early science fiction novels (Greenwood, 1984), a general guide to
Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction
(University of South Carolina Press, 1990), and two major works on the bibliography and history of fantastic literature:
Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s
(Greenwood Press, 1984) and
Some Kind of Paradise: The Emergence of American Science Fiction
(Greenwood Press, 1985). Forthcoming are a major biographical and critical study of
Robert A. Heinlein
and an untitled collection of his essays, both from Borgo Press.

Tom was truly a modest man, he drove like a maniac, he smoked terribly for far too many years, and he was brilliant and fun and knowledgeable and a great conversationalist, a genius whose passion and belief in the study of science-fiction literature legitimatized and made possible the immense blossoming of SF secondary sources during the 1970s and ‘80s. He was determined to attend the SFRA Conference in Reno between June 16-20th, 1993, and when the airlines refused to allow him to fly with his oxygen tank, he and Alice made the difficult cross-country trip from Ohio to Nevada by car. He was thin and tired, but hadn’t lost any of his humor or
élan
. When I embraced him on the morning of the 20th, I knew it was the last time I would see him. He had a difficult journey home, catching a bug that just wouldn’t go away. But his passing on July 6, 1993 was totally unexpected, for us and for Alice, for no one expects such a torch ever to dim.
Ave utque vale
, old friend.

Michael L. Cook

Michael Lewis Cook, 58, bibliographer, genealogist, and historian, died suddenly of a heart attack on June 14, 1988, at Evansville, IN. He was born at Evansville on June 28, 1929, and had lived there all his life, working as an insurance agent, office manager, and real estate broker before retiring in 1976 to become a full-time researcher and publisher. He was the author of forty-seven books, including eleven indexes and bibliographies of mystery, pulp, and adventure fiction. His last book,
Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Fiction
, was published by Garland a month after he died, as the first of a three-volume set indexing mystery, adventure, and science fiction pulp magazines. Work had nearly been completed on Volume Two,
Adventure, War, and Sports Fiction
, and that book, together with Volume Three on the science fiction magazines, will be completed by Cook’s collaborator, Steve Miller, with help from William G. Contento on the latter.

Richard Condon

Richard Thomas Condon, 81, well-known American novelist, died on Apr. 9, 1996 at Dallas, Texas. He was born on Mar. 18, 1915 at New York, New York, and worked as a publicist for various film companies in New York and Hollywood from 1936-1957. He began writing in the 1940s, selling stories and travel articles to the slick magazines, and having a play,
Men of Distinction
, produced on Broadway in 1953. His first novel,
The Oldest Confession
, appeared in 1958, but it was his next book,
The Manchurian Candidate
(McGraw-Hill, 1959), which dealt with sophisticated brainwashing techniques, that vaulted him into the ranks of the bestsellers. His best-known later work was
Prizzi’s Honor
, one of a series of four novels focusing on a fictional Mafia family. In the SF field he produced a number of satirical near-future works, including:
A Talent for Loving; or, The Great Cowboy Race
(McGraw-Hill, 1961),
Winter Kills
(Dial, 1974),
The Star-Spangled Crunch
(Bantam, 1974),
The Whisper of the Axe
(Dial, 1976),
Emperor of America
(Simon & Schuster, 1990), and
The Final Addiction
(St. Martin’s, 1991).

Pam Conrad

Pam Stampf Conrad, 48, died of breast cancer on Jan. 22, 1996 at her home at Rockville Center, Long Island, New York. She was born on June 18, 1947 at New York City, and received a B.A. from the New School for Social Research. Conrad was a well-known children’s writer, her first book,
I Don’t Live Here!
, being published by Dutton in 1983. She first attained widespread notice with
Prairie Songs
(1985), a young adult western, which won the Spur Award from Western Writers of America and many library accolades. In the SF field her only novel was
Stonewords: A Ghost Story
(Harper & Row, 1990), which won an Edgar Allan Poe Award and a California Young Reader Medal. A sequel,
Zoe Rising
, is scheduled to be published by HarperCollins in June of 1996.

Ted Dikty

He was the best man I ever knew. In a business known for its cutthroat deals, back alley politics, and pervasive cynicism, he never lost his innocence, his sense of wonder, his outright joy at being able to spend his life doing exactly what he loved most—publishing and editing—and getting paid for it.

Thaddeus Maxim Eugene Dikty was born on June 16, 1920 at Port Clinton, Ohio. He married writer and fan Julian “Judy” May on January 10, 1953, and they had three children: Alan Sam, David, and Barbara. He became an editor for Shasta Publishers in 1948, and stayed with that firm until its demise in 1957; he later worked as an editor for several other Chicago-area publishing houses before founding FAX Collector’s Editions in the early 1970s. He edited the first series of “best of the year” science fiction anthologies with Everett F. Bleiler beginning in 1949, and continuing through 1958. He founded FAX Collector’s Editions in 1972 with Darrell C. Richardson to reprint pulp classics, and Starmont House, Inc. in 1976 to publish criticism about science fiction.

Ted believed in the essential goodness of people. He was unfailingly kind and courteous towards friends and strangers alike, a truly “gentle” man, in the older sense of the word. Not a milquetoast nor a cipher, not by any means: I’ve seen him angry, but never abusive; I’ve seen him upset at people, but never vindictive. There wasn’t a spot of meanness anywhere in that giant soul. He knew publishing backwards and forwards and sideways, but he never let the needs of his business dictate the way he treated people.

Once a week or so I’d give him a call. “Hey, Thaddeus,” I’d say, “How’s it going?” He’d laugh, and we’d talk business for a few moments, and then get down to the
real
business of schmoozing for as long as we could get away with it. And we’d talk. About life, the universe, about everything. About death. He was ill, seriously ill, on and off for the last two years, mostly with circulatory problems. He didn’t want to die, and he certainly didn’t want Starmont to die with him. But even though he had felt much better during the last three months, he knew the end was coming. We all did. And he provided as best he could for the future of both his family and his business. Starmont House will continue under his daughter’s direction.