Black Gate

Iain M. Banks, the Scottish novelist who — almost uniquely — created parallel careers as both a bestselling literary author and a top science fiction author, died yesterday at the age of 59, two months after announcing he had terminal gall bladder cancer.

Iain Banks burst onto the literary scene in 1984 with his first novel, The Wasp Factory. It was both a critical and commercial success, listed in 1997 as one of the top 100 books of the 20th century, and it allowed Banks to become a full-time writer.

I heard a great deal about The Wasp Factory when it was first published, but it was his first science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas (1987) that really brought him to my attention. It was the first volume of his popular The Culture series, a sequence of ten books set in a far future civilization run by intelligent machines. Consider Phlebas and the volumes that immediately followed — The Player of Games, The State of the Art, and Use of Weapons — were much read and discussed among my small circle of friends in Ottawa.

Banks published science fiction as “Iain M. Banks,” and literary fiction as “Iain Banks.” All told, he wrote a total of 26 novels; his most recent were The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks (Oct 9, 2012) and Stonemouth by Iain Banks, published one day later on Oct 10, 2012.

He won the British Science Fiction Association Award twice, in 1994 for Feersum Endjinn and 1996 for Excession. He was nominated for the Hugo Award in 2005 for The Algebraist.

His last novel, The Quarry by Iain Banks, is scheduled for publication later this month, on June 20.

Andrew J. Offutt, who authored many fantasy novels in the 70s and 80s, and who made a significant contribution to Sword and Sorcery as an editor with his seminal Swords Against Darkness anthology series, died yesterday.

Offutt wrote numerous novels under the name John Cleve (and other pseudonyms), including five volumes in the Crusader historical adventure line, and the long-running erotic SF adventure series Spaceways. The first science fiction novel to appear under his own name was Evil is Live Spelled Backwards in 1970.

But I first encountered him in Swords Against Darkness IV in 1979, a marvelous book which contains stories by Manly Wade Wellman, Orson Scott Card, Poul Anderson, Tanith Lee, and many others. The first Swords Against Darkness appeared in 1977 from Zebra Books, with a Robert E. Howard fragment completed by Offutt, a Simon of Gitta tale from Richard L. Tierney, and fiction from Poul Anderson, Manly Wade Wellman, David Drake, Ramsey Campbell and many others. Offutt edited a total of five volumes, with the final one appearing in 1979. Together with Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords anthologies and a handful of small press magazines like Weirdbook, Swords Against Darkness kept Sword & Sorcery alive throughout the 70s and into the early 80s.

Offutt went on to some success with collaborator Richard K. Lyons, beginning with the War of the Wizards trilogy (1978-81). He also wrote the War of the Gods on Earth trilogy (1979-83), but was mostly known for his Robert E. Howard pastiche novels featuring Conan and Cormac Mac Art, including The Undying Wizard (1976), The Mists of Doom (1977), and Conan and the Sorcerer (1978). He was a noted contributor to Thieves’ World, appearing in several volumes in the ’80s and ’90s.

Offutt had a long hiatus after his last Thieves World work appear in 1993. He returned briefly to the field in the last decade, contributing a short story co-authored with Richard K. Lyon for 2009’s Rage of the Behemoth from Rogue Blades Entertainment.

Altogether Offutt wrote and edited more than 75 books. He also contributed to the field in other ways, including two terms as president of SFWA, from 1976-78. He died yesterday at the age of 78.

It’s been a tough week for the genre. Science Fiction writer Iain M. Banks announced on Monday that he has terminal gall bladder cancer, both Eclipse Online and Night Shade Books packed it in on Thursday, and Roger Ebert died on Friday. And prolific English dark fantasy writer Basil Copper, a World Horror Grandmaster since 2010, also passed away Friday at the age of 89.

Basil Copper was born on February 5, 1924. His first short story, “The Curse,” was published when he was only 14; his first novel The Dark Mirror appeared in 1966. His is perhaps best known to genre fans for his popular Solar Pons stories, a character originally created by August Derleth as a tribute to Sherlock Holmes.

Copper wrote many detective books, including 58 novels featuring hard-boiled Los Angeles private detective Mike Faraday, but he is remembered today chiefly for his horror and dark fantasy work. His horror novels include The Great White Space (1974), Necropolis (1980), The House of the Wolf (1983), Into the Silence (1983), and The Black Death (1991).

He had a long-standing relationship with Arkham House, who published Necropolis and his short story collection From Evil’s Pillow — nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 1973 — and And Afterward, the Dark (1977).

For modern readers interested in trying some of his best work, I strongly recommend the 1999 Fedogan & Bremer collection Whispers in the Night, and the massive two-volume set Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper, edited by Stephen Jones and published by PS Publishing in 2010.

Here in Chicago, the airwaves and local newspapers are thick with commentary about the life of Roger Ebert, who died of cancer yesterday at the age of 70.

Roger Ebert was born in Urbana, Illinois in 1942 and began writing for the News-Gazette at age 15, covering high school sports. While at the University of Illinois, he became a reporter for The Daily Illini in Urbana, eventually becoming editor in his senior year. I lived in Urbana for four years while completing my Ph.D, from 1987-1991, and can attest to the mark he left on the city. Ebertfest, the annual film fest he started in Champaign-Urbana in 1998, continues to this day.

Roger Ebert won renown primarily as the nation’s preeminent film critic, starting at the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967. His columns were syndicated in more than 200 newspapers, and he published more than 20 books and dozens of collections of reviews. His TV show Sneak Previews, co-hosted with Gene Siskel, was nationally distributed beginning in 1978. He became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1975.

But Ebert left his mark on the genre as well, starting with early fanzines. A life-long science fiction fan, he wrote for some of the most famous SF fanzines of the 60s and 70s, including Pat and Dick Lupoff’s Xero. He provided the introduction to The Best of Xero, the 2005 Tachyon collection gathering many of its best articles (including some of his).

Ebert was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2002, and underwent multiple surgeries. On July 1, 2006, his carotid artery burst and he narrowly escaped death. He lost the ability to speak, and to eat or drink, taking all nutrition through a feeding tube. But he continued to write. He died on April 4th at the age of 70; the last sentence on his final blog entry, two days before he died, read “So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.”

Perhaps the best way to remember him is to sample his legendary wit. Several blogs have collected some of his finest critiques, including BuzzFeed’s Roger Ebert’s 20 Most Epic Movie Pans, and Inquisitr’s Our 20 Favorite Ebert Quotes. He will be missed.

American science fiction writer Kevin O’Donnell Jr., who added “Jr.” to his byline to distinguish himself from his famous father Kevin O’Donnell, director of the Peace Corps, died this week.

O’Donnell graduated Yale University in 1972; his first short story “The Hand Is Quicker” appeared a year later in Analog. He published more than 70 short stories in a variety of genre publications, including Galaxy, Galileo, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Amazing/Fantastic, and Omni.

His first novel, Bander Snatch, appeared in paperback from Bantam Books in 1979. He published a total of ten over the next eleven years, including Mayflies (Berkley, 1979), War of Omission (Bantam, 1982), and ORA:CLE (Berkley, 1984).

Most of O’Donnell’s fiction was standalone, with the notable exception of his four-book series The Journeys of McGill Feighan for Berkley Books: Caverns (April 1981), Reefs (October 1981), Lava (April 1982), and Cliffs (February 1986).

His last novel was Fire on the Border from Roc Books, published in September 1990; he retired from writing fiction after his last short story, “The Boys from Bethlehem” (written with Denise Lee) appeared in the anthology The Darkness and the Fire in August, 1998.

O’Donnell was very active in the Science Fiction Writers of America, serving as chairman of the Nebula Award Novel Jury in 1990 and 1991, and chairing the Nebula Award Committee 1990-1998. He was the Business Manager of the quarterly SFWA Bulletin from 1994-1998, and in April 2005 he received the Service to SFWA Award.