Time troopers, p.54
Time Troopers, page 54
Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) began his writing career in a 1939 issue of the now-legendary fantasy magazine Unknown, with “Two Sought Adventure,” which introduced his popular and enduring characters, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. The pair of itinerant swordsmen and thieves would return in a host of short stories, novellas, and novels, marking a high point in the fantasy subgenre of sword and sorcery, a term that Leiber coined. He may be best remembered for the Mouser and Fafhrd yarns, but he was equally adept at horror fiction, and often appeared in another classic fantasy magazine, Weird Tales. And of course, he was a master of science fiction. In 1981, the Science Fiction Writers of America made it official, naming him a SFWA Grand Master. His many other honors include being the guest of honor at the 1951 and 1979 World SF Conventions and a total of six Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, and three World Fantasy Awards—one of them for lifetime achievement. The Horror Writers Association also recognized his importance to their field, presenting him in 1988 with their Bram Stoker Award for lifetime achievement. In 2001, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. More could be cited, but space is limited, unlike Leiber’s talent.
Henry Beam Piper (1901–1964) was a prolific writer of science fiction from the late 1940s until the early sixties when he committed suicide. While he apparently had a number of reasons for checking out, one often cited is that he thought he was a failure as a writer. In fact, the reality was that he had an incompetent agent who had not notified Piper of a number of sales, nor sent along the proceeds before he suddenly died. (Note to beginning writers, choose an agent who is both competent and healthy!) The irony here is deafening, since his works proved very popular in the years after his death, with numerous paperback editions, and other writers continuing his series, including his Federation series, of which the “Fuzzy” stories about small but intelligent furry aliens have been a strikingly popular offshoot, and, in particular for this anthology, Piper’s “paratime” stories, in which one of a number of parallel timelines has invented the technology to travel between the adjacent universes, and exploits their resources in a benign but secret way. Piper’s own short stories in the series have been collected in the book Paratime, and the novel Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen was posthumously published. Piper was a student of history and a gun collector who put his knowledge to good use in his fiction. And as another person given the unfortunate name of “Henry,” I envy him the use of that more striking single initial.
Christopher Ruocchio is the internationally award-winning author of The Sun Eater, a space opera fantasy series, and the former junior editor at Baen Books, where he edited several anthologies. His work has also appeared in Marvel Comics. He is a graduate of North Carolina State University, where he studied English Rhetoric and the Classics. Christopher has been writing since he was eight and sold his first novel, Empire of Silence, at twenty-two. His books have appeared in five languages.
Christopher lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, Jenna.
Robert Silverberg, prolific author not just of SF, but of authoritative nonfiction books, columnist for Asimov’s SF Magazine, winner of a constellation of awards, and renowned bon vivant surely needs no introduction—but that’s never stopped me before. Born in 1935, Robert Silverberg sold his first SF story, “Gorgon Planet,” before he was out of his teens, to the British magazine Nebula. Two years later, his first SF novel, a juvenile, Revolt on Alpha C followed. Decades later, his total SF titles, according to his semi-official website, stands at 82 SF novels and 457 short stories. Early on, he won a Hugo Award for most promising new writer—rarely have the Hugo voters been so perceptive.
Toward the end of the 1960s and continuing into the 1970s, he wrote a string of novels much darker in tone and deeper in characterization than his work of the 1950s, such as the novels Nightwings, Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, and many other novels. He took occasional sabbaticals from writing to later return with new works, such as the Majipoor series. His most recent novels include The Alien Years, The Longest Way Home, and a new trilogy of Majipoor novels. In addition The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 1999. In 2004, the Science Fiction Writers of America presented him with the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. For more information see his “quasi-official” website at www.majipoor.com heroically maintained by Jon Davis (no relation).
Alfred Elton Van Vogt (1912–2000) was a roaring success as a science fiction writer, being one of the earliest to have novels and story collections published by major publishers in the postwar era, while Asimov’s first books, for example, came from fan presses, such as Gnome Press. His books stayed in print in paperback, and omnibus editions. He was the very model of a successful sf writer, you might say, and that seemed odd since he was one of the most attacked writers by notable sf critics, Damon Knight in particular, but also by such major writer-critics as Algis Budrys and Frederik Pohl (though Pohl’s adverse opinion didn’t keep him from publishing Van Vogt’s stories in the magazines he edited in the 1960s). Van Vogt’s targeting by critics might have led him to echo the prize fight promoter’s remark, “I cry all the way to the bank,” except that he also had his defenders, including such critics as David Hartwell and Leslie Fiedler, and such highly praised writers as Philip K. Dick, Barry Malzberg, and Harlan Ellison. And then there was France, where Van Vogt was even more popular in French than in English, and French critics considered him one of the leading surrealists of the twentieth century. In any case, Van Vogt remained in print, and obviously pleased the only critics who really matter, the readers, and this reader in particular, with such novels as The Voyage of the Space Beagle, and The Weapon Shops of Isher and its sequel The Weapon Makers, Empire of the Atom and its sequel, The Wizard of Linn, with its unforgettable image of spaceships that barbarian hordes use to transport horse cavalry to other planets, The Book of Ptath, The Mind Cage, The War Against the Rull, The Pawns of Null-A (which I much prefer to its predecessor, The World of Null-A), and many more novels, plus such shorter works as “Recruiting Station,” “The Vault of the Beast,” “Asylum,” “The Monster,” “Dear Pen Pal,” “Enchanted Village,” “The Search,” “Far Centaurus,” and I’d better stop there, though I will further note that reading Van Vogt’s great novel Slan when I was in the second grade made me a permanent sf addict. Thank you, sir, wherever you are.
Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) was one of, if not the most critically praised and award-winningest writers in science fiction and fantasy (if he saw a difference; he was once quoted as saying that “All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.”). He received two Nebula Awards, four World Fantasy Awards, a John W. Campbell Memorial Award, an August Derleth Award, a British SF Association Award, a Rhysling Award, seven Locus Awards, and was nominated for a Hugo Award eight times, but with no wins, which is . . . interesting . . . in view of some of the specimens of thin gruel that have won that tarnished rocket lately. And when it comes to lifetime achievement, he has received the World Fantasy Award and the Science Fiction Writers of America’s award for just that. In 2007, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. All that, and, according to Wikipedia, in his other life as an engineer, he contributed to the machine used to make Pringle’s potato chips. Of such things is immortality made. Ursula K. LeGuin has stated, “Wolfe is our Melville.” I don’t recall his writing about pursuit of great white whales, or even of stubborn scriveners, but if he had, I’m sure it would have been typically brilliant and typically atypical.
John C. Wright has been an attorney, a newspaperman, a technical writer, and, most important (of course), a notable science fiction and fantasy writer. His first novel, The Golden Age, was praised by Publishes Weekly, whose reviewer wrote that Wright “may be this fledgling century’s most important new SF talent.” The novel was followed by The Phoenix Exultant and The Golden Transcendence, to make up the major space opera trilogy The Golden Oecumene, which reads like a collaboration between A.E. Van Vogt and Jack Vance. Speaking of Van Vogt, Wright wrote a powerful continuation (and possible culmination) of that writer’s classic Null-A novels, the Null-A Continuum, as well as a companion book to another classic, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, titled Awake in the Night Land. His fantasy novel Orphans of Chaos was a Nebula Award finalist, and his novel Somewhither won the Dragon Award for the best novel of 2016. In 2015, he was nominated for six Hugo awards in both fiction and nonfiction: one short story, one novelette, three novellas, and one nonfiction related work, setting a historical record for the most Hugo Award nominations in a single year. His short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s SF Magazine, Absolute Magnitude, and other publications. For more details on his work, visit his website. He lives in Virginia with his wife, fellow writer L. Jagi Lamplighter, and their four children.
Hank Davis, Time Troopers
