I was a fan of Joel Rosenberg’s work long before I ever met him, but I eventually came to admire him more as a man than as an author. I wasn’t a close friend of his, more the friend of a friend, but I did have the good fortune to get to know him over the last 15 years. It was a privilege for an SF/F fan, but more than that, it was a genuine pleasure. Growing up in Minnesota, which at the time felt rather like the cold side of the back of beyond, I had no idea that there were Real Live Writers living there, never being much inclined to read the author bios at the back.

Like many a teenage boy in the Eighties, I had dabbled in role-playing games such as AD&D, Gamma World, and Traveller in the Time Before Girls, and so The Guardians of the Flame were a real revelation to me. Rosenberg’s novels were gritty long before grit became fashionable; he made a distinct impression on a young reader by killing off a major character practically at the beginning of the first novel, then went himself one better by killing off the lead character in only the fourth book in the series.

I can’t recall being more shocked while reading fiction any time before or since. Karl Cullinane is dead? But… but what will happen to the series?

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I am very sorry to report that Joel Rosenberg, the author of the Guardians of the Flame series and well-known Second Amendment advocate, died yesterday, June 2nd, of a heart attack at the age of 57.

He is survived by his wife, Felicia Herman, and his daughters, Judith and Rachel. He was a friend, a man who was always generous with his advice on writing and life, and an excellent shot.

If you have not had the pleasure of reading his fiction, I highly recommend his military sci-fi novel, Not For Glory.

Black Gate lost one of its own last month with the passing of noted short story writer Larry Tritten.

Larry began his lengthy career in 1968 with the story “West is West,” in Worlds of If magazine. He appeared in dozens of magazines such as The New Yorker, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Twilight Zone, and many others. In 2005 his story “It’s a Wonderful Con,” featuring a man who cons Santa Claus out of $200, appeared in Black Gate 9.

As much as I enjoyed his fiction, I was even more charmed with Larry’s letters, which related fascinating details of a writing life. I got his permission to include a few of those anecdotes in a sidebar that accompanied the story, and got more mail about that than about his fiction. The sidebar read, in part:

I was in the Mammoth Book of Future Cops a while back, with a Chandler parody set in future San Francisco, and not long ago I was the lone male (heterosexual) writer in the British anthology Va-Va-Voom – Red Hot Lesbian Erotica.  Just me and 32 Lesbian writers. I try to cover all territories.  Had a piece in Minnesota Parent a while back, though I am not a parent and have never been to Minnesota (except to change planes).  Had one in Range (but am not a cattle grower).  And so on.

The count is about 1500 pieces since the sixties, so I’ve had time to get around.  I’m probably one of the few writers to have published in both Hustler and The New Yorker.  I’m often astonishing younger writers with memories of the those early days.  For example, in December 1978 I made four or five sales (one to The New Yorker for, I think, about $1250), and the money added up to close to $5,000.  I was living in an apartment where the rent was $185 per month.  Rent for two years!  Hard to believe such times ever existed.  Today my rent and bills are about ten times what they were then, and just the next month’s rent always looms like the sword of Damocles.

F&SF editor Gordon van Gelder wrote:

He was a smart, talented, and funny writer. He was also the sort of professional writer that seems to be disappearing, the kind of professional who never met a market he didn’t like and had the versatility to tailor almost any work to meet the needs of any market.

He contributed a lot of funny stuff to F&SF over the years.

Larry died in April, 2011. A more complete obituary appears in the May issue of Locus.

Joanna Russ, acclaimed feminist writer and one of the most respected science fiction authors of the 20th Century, passed away yesterday at the age of 74.

Russ’s first SF story, “Nor Custom Stale,” appeared in F&SF in 1959. Numerous notable short stories followed, including Nebula Award winner “When It Changed” (1972), and Hugo Award winner “Souls” (1982). Altogether her fiction has been nominated for a total of nine Nebula and three Hugo Awards. Her short stories were collected in four volumes:  The Adventures of Alyx (1983), The Zanzibar Cat (1983), Extra(ordinary) People (1984), and The Hidden Side of the Moon (1988).

Her first novel Picnic on Paradise, the tale of a pleasure cruise that crash lands on a vacation planet with only enough food for a picnic, was nominated for a Nebula in 1968. It was collected with four additional stories featuring the resourceful protagonist Alyx as The Adventures of Alyx (1983). 

Her other novels include Nebula Award finalist And Chaos Died (1970), The Female Man (1975),  We Who Are About To… (1977), and The Two of Them (1978).

The Female Man, one of the most acclaimed SF novels of the decade, follows four women across four parallel worlds, all struggling against the restrictive role of the female sex, and what it truly means to be a woman. The character who bears Russ’s first name, “Joanna”  refers to herself early in the novel as the “female man” because she is convinced she must surrender her identity as a woman to be respected.

Annalee Newitz, in her terrific Russ retrospective at io9, calls it “Sliders as written by James Joyce. And it’s possibly the greatest book about what it’s like to be a woman in America that I’ve ever read.”

Russ went public as a lesbian later in her life, as her critical writing and other non-fiction became more noted — especially the landmark feminist work How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1984), and the Hugo-nominated To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (1995).

Beginning in the late 1980s Russ began to cope with a growing number of physical ailments, especially back problems and  chronic fatigue syndrome, which all but ended her writing career. She entered hospice care earlier this month after suffering a number of strokes, and passed away on Friday, April 29.

A more detailed obituary can be found at Locus Online, and a complete list of her work is at her Wikipedia page.

If you’ve never read anything by this remarkable woman, I urge you to try The Adventures of Alyx, The Female Man, or any of her thought-provoking short fiction. You won’t be disappointed.

Diana Wynne Jones, author of dozens of fantasy books including Howl’s Moving Castle, Archer’s Goon, Hexwood, and Dark Lord of Derkholm, died on Saturday, March 26, 2011.

The first Diana Wynne Jones novel I ever bought was Howl’s Moving Castle, in 1986. Everyone at the science fiction bookstore where I shopped — the House of Speculative Fiction, in Ottawa, Canada — was talking about it, and Pat Caven the owner pressed it into my hands.  It was by no means the last.

Jones studied English at St Anne’s College in Oxford, where she famously attended lectures by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis before she graduated in 1956. She began her writing career with plays, and had three produced in London between 1967 and 1970.

In 1970 she switched to prose with her first novel, Changeover, a comedy marketed for adults. She began writing for young adults with her second book, Wilkins’ Tooth (1973, published in the US as Witch’s Business), and never looked back.

Although Jones is widely admired as a YA fantasy writer, she had a surprising range. Perhaps my favorite of her books is The Tough Guide To Fantasyland (1996), a hysterical tourist guide which skewers dozens of fantasy clichés as it catalogues the common places, weird items, people, governments, and situations readers are likely to encounter as they journey through a typical fantasy novel.

Her later novel Dark Lord of Derkholm (1999), set in a Fantasyland which steadfastly adheres to the conventions she described,  is seen by some as a conceptual sequel to The Tough Guide.

Jones was nominated — and won — numerous awards in her lifetime. Her novel Archers Goon was nominated for a World Fantasy Award; The Tough Guide To Fantasyland was nominated for both a Hugo award and a World Fantasy Award, and Dark Lord of Derkholm won the 1999 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. The same year she won the Karl Edward Wagner Award in the UK.

She received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2007, perhaps the highest honor our field has to offer.

Her novels have enjoyed extended life in other media: Archer’s Goon became a BBC television serial in 1992, and Howl’s Moving Castle was famously adapted as an animated feature by Hayao Miyazaki in 2004.

Jones continued to work until late in life, publishing her last novel, Enchanted Glass, last year. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2009, and died on March 26, 2011.

Jim Roslof, the best boss in Middle Earth

The news of Jim Roslof’s battle with cancer took a negative turn this week. I was informed by Jeff Easley that time was limited, and I was crushed to hear that Jim passed away in his bed at home on Saturday morning, March 19, 2011.

As many of you who read my art blog know, Jim is one of the finest individuals I’ve ever had the honor of working with. Jim was bright, humorous, and a joy to correspond with. His beautiful contribution to the Art Evolution Project was done with a love of the industry that shown in his brush strokes, and sadly that image was the last he ever produced.

For all of you who’ve known Jim or appreciated his work, especially the art direction that brought us his TSR hires like Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, Keith Parkinson, and Jim Holloway, I hope you’ll find the time to send a card. Trust me when I say this, that when they made Jim, they broke the mold, but the world was much better for having him in it.

To me, Jim represented the very best of what gaming and the art that defined it should be. He never took himself too seriously, never fell in line with a corporate view, and had an eye for talent that very few in the industry ever will. I salute you, Jim, and thank you for being a friend when I needed it most, your insider information about the dawn of RPGs always bringing a smile to my face.

Cards can be sent to: Jim & Laura Roslof W5409 Kenosha Dr, Elkhorn, WI 53147

Brian Jacques, author of the Redwall series of anthropomorphic fantasy novels and the Castaways of the Flying Dutchman books, and one of the most popular fantasy authors of the last several decades, died on Monday, February 5, 2011 in Liverpool. He was 71.

I first discovered Jacques in 1988. I had just left Canada to finish my Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, and the covers of his first two novels — Redwall (1986) and Mossflower (1988) — captivated me the moment I laid eyes on them in a campus bookstore. I even had a poster of Jacques’ fifth novel Salamandastron in my dorm room. His charming fantasies set in and around Redwall Abbey, a place of refuge in a dangerous world, featured valiant creatures and daring adventure.

But it wasn’t until I was running my first website a decade later that I discovered what a phenomenon Jacques had become. I was editor of SF Site, and talking to Bettina Seifert, publicist at Penguin/Philomel. Jacques was now appearing in hardcover, and she offered to send me all his books for review.

Tempting, but that seemed like a few too many titles to commit to. So instead I offered Bettina a compromise: why not just send me what was still in print?

She agreed — a little too quickly — and a week later a box of hardcovers landed on my doorstep. A very large and very heavy box.

Inside were Brian Jacques’ novels. All of them. Every single book he had ever written. They were all still in print, in beautiful hardcover editions.

Here’s what I wrote in my rather sheepish article in 1998:

Now, maybe this doesn’t mean a lot to you. But perhaps you’re not an established science fiction author who just watched your Hugo Award-winning novel from the early nineties go out of print. Or a mid-list author finishing a three-volume series, already getting letters from frustrated readers who can’t find the first two volumes. Unless your name is Stephen King or Robert Jordan, you get used to having your work go out of print. And no matter who you are, you don’t get used to having your small print-run paperbacks returned to print in hardcover by a major publisher, ten years after they first appeared.

Except for Brian Jacques, apparently.

Jacques enjoyed this popularity until his death.  He wrote 22 novels of Redwall, including last year’s The Sable Quean and the upcoming The Rogue Crew (scheduled for release on May 3, 2011).

He also published three novels in the Castaways of the Flying Dutchman series, as well as two short story collections and several books for younger children.

Jacques had a vivid imagination and a unique storytelling gift, and I’m grateful he shared them with us.

Jennifer Rardin, author of the Jaz Parks series of contemporary urban vampire novels, died unexpectedly at the age of 45 on Monday, Sept. 20.

Her first novel, Once Bitten, Twice Shy, was published by Orbit Books in October 2007. It was followed by Another One Bites the Dust, Biting the Bullet, Bitten to Death, One More Bite, and Bite Marks.

The seventh volume in the series, Bitten in Two, will appear in November, and the eighth and final book is scheduled for June, 2011.

Rardin’s death took her fans by surprise.  Her most recent blog post, three days before her death, is upbeat and filled with details of her trip to Kenosha. Her obituary does not list a cause of death.

Rardin was born in Evansville, Indiana and lived in Robinson, Illinois. She leaves behind a husband and two teenage children.

More information can be found on her online bio and the Jaz Parks Wikipedia entry.

British science fiction author Edwin Charles (”E.C.”) Tubb died on September 10, 2010, at his home in London, England. He was 90 years old.

Tubb published his first novel, Saturn Patrol, in 1951.  Thus began an extraordinary career spanning nearly half a century, and including over 130 novels and more than 230 short stories in magazines such as Astounding/Analog, Galaxy, Nebula, Science Fantasy, and many others. His short story “Little Girl Lost” (1955) was adapted for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery TV series in 1972.

While Tubb received acclaim for much of his early work, including his novel of Martian colonization Alien Dust (1955), and his generation-Starship novel The Space-Born (1956), he is remembered today chiefly for his Dumarest of Terra saga, which began with The Winds of Gath in 1967 .

DAW publisher Don Wollheim commissioned the series, featuring star-hopping adventurer Earl Dumarest and his relentless search for the legendary lost planet of his birth: Earth. The worldwide success of Dumarest of Terra led Tubb to switch almost exclusively to novel writing. Following Wollheim’s death in 1990, Dumarest came to a premature end after 31 novels with The Temple of Truth (1985).

The next novel, The Return, existed for years only in French translation, until it finally appeared in English in 1997 from Gryphon Books.  The ending of The Return was inconclusive however, and it was not until 2009 that Tubb,  at the urging of his agent (and at the age of 90!), wrote the volume that brought Dumarest of Terra to a true conclusion: Child of Earth  (Homeworld Press, 2009).

Later collections of Tubb’s short fiction include The Best Science Fiction of E.C. Tubb (Wildside, 2005) and Mirror of the Night (Sarob Press, 2003).  In recent years, and despite failing health, Tubb continued to write and publish, including the first two novels in his sword & sorcery Chronicle of Malkar series, Death God’s Doom (1999) and The Sleeping City (1999), both from Prime; the Space:1999 novel Earthbound (2003), and three novels in the Linford Mystery Library. His dystopian novel To Dream Again was accepted on the day he died, and is scheduled for publication by Ulverscroft in 2011. At least one other new novel, Fires of Satan, is rumored to be under consideration

I admit I’ve never read any E.C. Tubb — his heyday, the early 1970s, was a bit before my time.  But he was a fixture on science fiction bookshelves in virtually every bookstore I walked into for over twenty years, as ubiquitous as Asimov, Heinlein, and Frank Herbert. His passing feels like the end of an era.

On June 24, Science Fiction author and critic F. Gwynplaine “Froggy” MacIntyre posted a short note in the Community News section of Jeffry Dwight’s SFF.Net, an online community of genre readers and pros. The apparently-casual note was titled, “I am just going outside and may be some time,” the famous last words of Titus Oates, the English explorer who committed suicide during an Antarctic expedition by stepping out into a blizzard.

Most readers didn’t catch the inference. One astute reader who did called 911, and Froggy was taken into custody, dragged out of his apartment by six police officers while yelling, “I want to die and I’m going to take everyone in the building down with me,” according to a neighbor.

Froggy was released a few hours later. He returned to his home, posted a bitter rant titled “One idiot ruins everything,” and lit a fire in his cluttered apartment that killed him and took a dozen fire trucks and 60 firefighters over an hour to extinguish, according to “Froggy’s Last Story“, the lengthy New York Times article that appeared Friday. The article quotes Black Gate’s Darrell Schweitzer, Andrew Porter and Bud Webster.

Although he produced only a handful of books, including the novel The Woman Between the Worlds and the anthology MacIntyre’s Improbable Bestiary, Froggy’s short fiction appeared in many outlets, including Analog, Weird Tales, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Amazing Stories. He was also a respected critic, writing books reviews for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for many years. More biographical details are in his Wikipedia entry.

Many of us in the SF & Fantasy community knew Froggy, but few of us knew him as well as we thought he did. His online bio (now taken down) stated his parents had given him up at an advanced age, sending him to an orphan labor camp in Australia, contacting him years later only to ask him to donate a kidney to his twin brother.  In the New York Times article, Darrell describes Froggy’s public persona as “basically a character he invented.” Froggy zealously guarded his privacy, and many of the tales he told were seemingly designed to obscure his origins as much as possible.

Whatever the case, Froggy was a talented writer and fan who was with us too briefly. Rest in peace, Froggy.