Animator and cartoonist Don R. Christensen (aka “Don Arr”) died on October 18th, aged 90. He was a sketch artist at Disney from 1937 to 1941, working on such films as Pinocchio and Dumbo. After a brief stint with Bob Clampett’s animation unit at Warner Bros, where he scripted several Looney Tunes shorts, Christensen moved to Dell/Gold Key, where he contributed to such comic books as Magnus Robot Fighter and Scooby Doo.
British playwright and YA author John Symonds died on October 21st, aged 92. He was also Aleister Crowley’s literary executor.
British playwright and author Paul [Victor] Ableman, whose SF novel The Twilight of the Vilp was published in 1969, died on October 25th, aged 79. He also scripted episodes of TV’s Tales of the Unexpected.
British author and screenwriter [Thomas] Nigel Kneale, best remembered for his pioneering Quatermass trilogy for BBC-TV, died after a long illness and a series of strokes on October 29th, aged 84. When The Quatermass Experiment was first broadcast in 1953, it emptied the streets and pubs for the six weeks it ran. Hammer produced the film version in 1955 (aka The Creeping Unknown) and the studio went on to film the two sequels as well, Quatermass 2 (aka Enemy from Space) and Quatermass and the Pit (aka Five Million Years to Earth). A fourth and final episode, Quatermass (aka The Quatermass Conclusion), was shown in 1979. There was a radio version, The Quatermass Memoirs, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1996, and the original show was remade as a live broadcast by the BBC in 2005. The live broadcast of Kneale’s adaptation on Nineteen Eighty Four (starring Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence) in 1954 prompted questions in the British parliament. His other TV work includes such dramas as The Creature (filmed by Hammer as The Abominable Snowman), Wuthering Heights (1962), The Road, The Year of the Sex Olympics, The Chopper, The Stone Tape, The Woman in Black and the series Beasts (1976) and Kinvig (1981), although he turned down a request to contribute to The X Files in the 1990s. He also wrote the scripts for First Men in the Moon, Hammer’s The Witches (aka The Devil’s Own) and the original draft of Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Kneale’s best short stories are collected in Tomato Cain and Other Stories (1949).
Leonard Schrader, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Kiss of the Spider Woman, died of heart failure on November 2nd, aged 62.
American pulp author and rare book dealer Nelson S. (Slade) Bond died of complications from heart problems on November 4th, just short of his 98th birthday. After making his SF debut in Astounding in 1937 with “Down the Dimensions”, his work appeared in Weird Tales, Unknown, Fantastic Adventures, Planet Stories and such mainstream magazines as Esquire, Blue Book and Argosy. His books include the 1949 novel, Exiles of Time, and the short story collections Mr Mergenthwirker’s Lobblies and Other Fantastic Tales, The Thirty-first of February, The Remarkable Exploits of Lancelot Biggs Spaceman, Nightmares and Daydreams, The Far Side of Nowhere and Other Worlds Than Ours (the last three titles from Arkham House). A scriptwriter for radio and TV, he wrote the 1957 teleplay The Night America Trembled, about Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast. He was honoured by the SFWA in 1998 as Author Emeritus.
British SF fan and book dealer Ron Bennett, whose fanzine newsletter Skyrack ran from 1959–71, died of leukaemia on November 5th, aged 73.
American composer Basil Poledouris died of cancer on November 8th, aged 61. His many film scores include Tintorera, Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, Red Dawn, Flesh+Blood, Robo-Cop, Cherry 2000, Spellbinder, The Hunt for Red October, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, RoboCop 3, Serial Mom, The Jungle Book (1994), Starship Troopers and The Touch. Poledouris also contributed music to the 1980s TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, Misfits of Science and the mini-series Amerika, as well as the 3-D computer game Conan (2004).
American SF cover artist Stanley Meltzoff died on November 9th, aged 89. In the 1950s he painted a number of influential covers for Signet/NAL paperbacks for books by Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Edmond Hamilton, Robert A. Heinlein and A. E. van Vogt, amongst others. He also did the covers for Science Fiction Terror Tales edited by Groff Conklin and the Gold Medal paperback of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Meltzoff illustrated the May 1955 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Jack (John Stewart) Williamson (aka “Will Stewart”), the oldest surviving author from Weird Tales and the early pulp magazines, died at his home in New Mexico on November 10th, aged 98. Widely regarded as “the Father of American Science Fiction”, he began his career with “The Metal Man” in Amazing Stories in 1928 (three years before the term “science fiction” was actually coined). In a career that spanned an incredible nine decades, he contributed to most of the major magazines, including Science Wonder Stories and Astounding, and his novels include The Girl from Mars (with Miles J. Breuer, 1929) published by Hugo Gernsback, The Legion of Space, Darker Than You Think, The Humanoids and its sequel The Humanoid Touch, Seetee Shock and Seetee Ship, the “Undersea Quest” and “Starchild” trilogies (both with Frederik Pohl), Manseed, Firechild and The Stonehenge Gate (2005). In the 1990s, Haffner Press began collecting all Williamson’s short fiction in handsome limited editions, and Seventy-Five: The Diamond Anniversary of a Science Fiction Pioneer was published in 2004. The annual Jack Williamson Lectureship Series began at Eastern New Mexico University in 1977, and The Jack Williamson Science Fiction Library at the university contains some 30,000 books and magazines. A winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for his fiction, he was also a recipient of the SFWA Grand Master Award, the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award, and the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award. His 1984 Hugo Award-winning autobiography, Wonder Child: My Life in Science Fiction, was updated in 2005.
Ken Ishikawa, who co-created the 1970s giant robot anime Getter Robo, died on November 15th, aged 58.
British literary agent Maggie (Margaret) [Irene] Noach died on November 17th, aged 57. She was admitted to hospital complaining of back pains. Diagnosed with a broken vertebra, she developed breathing problems during an operation on her spine that led to massive heart failure. After beginning her career at A. P. Watt, Noach established her own literary agency in 1982 and represented such SF authors as Brian Aldiss, Geoff Ryman, Stephen Baxter, Garry Kilworth, Michael Scott Rohan and Colin Greenland. With her second husband, Alan Williams (the son of actor and playwright Emlyn), she complied The Dictionary of Disgusting Facts (1986).