Ladybug Private Detectives, Living Ponds, and Robot Owls: The Owlstone Crown by X. J. Kennedy
The latest in my series of reviews of mostly forgotten SF/F from the 1970s and 1980s is a fairly obscure YA fantasy. X. J. Kennedy was the name used for his writing by Joseph Charles Kennedy. He was known as Joe Kennedy but started using the X. J. pseudonym to avoid confusion with Joseph Kennedy, the father of President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was born in 1929, and is still alive, aged 95. This makes him a candidate for oldest living SF/F writer.
He was a prominent SF fan from the mid ’40s to early ’50s, publishing the fanzine Vampire, and co-founding an APA, the Spectator Amateur Press Association, that is (according to Wikipedia) still active. He also sold two stories to prozines in 1951 — “No More Pencils, No More Books” (not to be confused with the John Morressy story) to Science Fiction Quarterly and “Music From Down Under” to Other Worlds; both as by “Joquel Kennedy.”
By then he had received his B.A. from Seton Hall, and his M.A. from Columbia, and he went into the Navy as a journalist for four years. After his service, he studied at the Sorbonne and at Michigan, then went into academia as a professor at UNC Greensboro and at Tufts. The bulk of his writing from the early ’50s on was poetry — much of it light verse, and much of it for children — and college textbooks. He was also an editor, and with his wife Dorothy he founded a magazine devoted to New Formalist poetry, Counter/Measures. He wrote the occasional short story, and two YA fantasy novels, of which The Owlstone Crown, from 1983, was the first.
