Black Gate

Barry Malzberg died Thursday, December 19, 2024, at the age of 85. I never met Barry in person, but I knew him through correspondence — much of it on an email list, but also some personal email — for at least a quarter century. But I knew him as an author for far longer. When I was first buying books from the local drugstore, at the age of 14 or so, I bought a great many of his novels, slim paperbacks off the spinner rack. I confess that I bought the first one in part because it was 95 cents, and other books on the rack were $1.25. But I was immediately taken with his voice, one of the most recognizable voices in SF at that time, and I kept buying his books.

Malzberg was born in New York City on July 24, 1939. He was an avid reader of SF throughout the 1950s. He attended Syracuse, graduating in 1960 and returning in 1964 to study creative writing (fellow students included Joyce Carol Oates and Harvey Jacobs.) He received fellowships in creative writing and in playwriting, but had no success selling to literary magazines. He took a job with the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, and began selling stories to men’s magazine and SF magazines, as well as novels in various genres, including erotica.

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The Zones of Thought trilogy: A Fire Upon the Deep (Tor paperback reprint,
February 1993), A Deepness in the Sky (Tor, March 1999), The Children of the Sky
(Tor, October 2011). Covers by Boris Vallejo, Bob Eggleton, Stephan Martiniere

Vernor Vinge died on March 20, 2024, after several years suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. (I was aware that he had retired from writing, though I didn’t know about his illness, and part of me had hoped for one more novel or some more short fiction.) His last substantial work was the third Zones of Thought novel, The Children of the Sky, in 2011, though he did publish a couple of short-shorts in Nature, the last being “Legale” in 2017.

The first Vinge story I read must have been his first published story, “Apartness” (New Worlds, June 1965), a powerful indictment of South Africa’s apartheid regime via an ironic SF device. He continued to write occasional stories over the next few years. (His day job was as a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, and he made significant contributions to those fields.)

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The Last Days of the Edge of the World (Ace Books, September 1985), The Empire of Fear
(Ballantine Books, October 1993), and The Werewolves of London (Carroll & Graf,
November 1994). Covers by Don Maitz, uncredited, and uncredited

Perhaps it is recency bias, or poor memory, or some other artifact of how human minds process data, but I cannot recall a time when the science fiction field lost so many significant writers in such a short time. At any rate, I know I have never written so many obituaries for significant SF writers in such a short time!

Brian Stableford died February 24, after an extended period of poor health. He was 75. I never met him, and only corresponded with him as part of a mailing list (he did recommend a time viewer story to me!), but I have read his work extensively, and even so, have barely scratched the surface.

His bibliography is, frankly, intimidating. He wrote dozens of SF and Fantasy novels, as many or more short stories. He was a very prolific anthologist, with a particular interest in early SF, and, especially, in French works of fantastika. He translated countless* French novels and stories into English. He wrote hundreds of book reviews and essays, and published many non-fiction books. And for all that prolificity, his work was of exceptional quality.

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Galaxy December 1973, containing Part I of The Inverted World. Cover by Brian Boyle

I find myself writing another obituary for a major SF writer — this has been a terrible couple of months. Christopher Priest, one of the true giants of our field, has died at 80. He is survived by his partner, Nina Allan, a brilliant SF writer in her own right. (I suppose Priest had a “type,” as his two ex-wives, Lisa Tuttle and Leigh Kennedy, are also first-rate SF writers.)

When did I first know of Christopher Priest? That would have been when his novel, The Inverted World, was first serialized in Galaxy, December 1973 through March 1974, or at least when I first read the book. I have a probably false memory of reading the serial, which would have had to have been in back issues, as I first bought Galaxy in August of 1974. So likely I actually read the paperback from 1975. Be that as it may, the novel purely blew me away. I quickly read Darkening Island (the American title of his novel Fugue for a Darkening Island) and was entranced by its radically non-linear narrative, something new to teenaged me.

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