I write in early February 2003, and already the sf year is full of event, gossip, anxiety, and bereavement. The most public bereavement is for the astronauts lost in the Columbia space shuttle disaster. As with other events terrible or wonderful in the still-young exploration of space, it yielded images of a new type and scale: in this case the grisly and horrifying depictions on the weather radar maps of the United States, showing a swath of debris (which we all know included human remains) scattered in a band like the path of a storm across four or more southern states. Such events inspire grief on a new scale. . . .
I write in early February 2003, and already the sf year is full of event, gossip, anxiety, and bereavement. The most public bereavement is for the astronauts lost in the Columbia space shuttle disaster. As with other events terrible or wonderful in the still-young exploration of space, it yielded images of a new type and scale: in this case the grisly and horrifying depictions on the weather radar maps of the United States, showing a swath of debris (which we all know included human remains) scattered in a band like the path of a storm across four or more southern states. Such events inspire grief on a new scale.
Some of the distinguished elders of the sf community died of natural causes between early January and early February, including Leslie Fiedler, Virginia Heinlein, and Virginia Kidd. Fiedler was one of the great living scholars and critics of American Literature, a legendary figure in twentieth-century literary studies and academia. His advocacy of science fiction as a valuable genre of American Literature, and of such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Philip José Farmer, was a surprising and refreshing facet of his public lectures in the 1960s. Fiedler attended sf conventions and sf academic conferences from 1970 until at least 1985. His defenses of sf in person and in print for two decades were intelligent and knowledgeable. You ought to seek out Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (Simon & Schuster, 1978) for good material on sf.
My favorite memories of him at cons include a party in Toronto at the Secondary Universe Conference in the early ¹70s, watching him back Joanna Russ into a corner for two hours to tell her how sympathetic he was to feminism, and years later at the ICFA seeing him sit bemusedly but firmly in his poolside chair while Carol Pettit grasped his leg to avoid being dragged into the pool after Marshall Tymn had been pushed in.
Robert A. Heinlein¹s wife, Virginia Heinlein, was a gracious, smart, hard-nosed lady who took care of Heinlein¹s business. I found her charming and witty, and my favorite memory of her is at a penthouse luncheon at MidAmeriCon in 1976, when I sat with her and Sally Rand, the famous fan dancer and high school classmate of Robert. The stories told that day are not fit for print in the NY Times, but I certainly remember them. Ginny managed the literary estate after Robert died and did a careful job, even after losing most of her sight in later years.
Virginia Kidd was the one of the last of the Futurians. (I believe only Fred Pohl is still alive of that colossal fan club that once also included Isaac Asimov, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Robert Michel, Donald A. Wollheim, Damon Knight, James Blish, Judith Merril, Robert A. W. Lowndes, and Richard Wilson.) They were a wild group and bestrode the 1950s like colossi, changing the sf field forever, repeatedly, through the decades. They married each other, sued each other, slept with each other, fought with each other, and wrote incessantly: letters, stories, poems, everything. Milford, Pennsylvania‹the home of Kidd, Damon Knight, Judith Merril, and Jim Blish‹became the center of the sf universe outside of New York City, espcially after those four founded the Milford SF Workshop for professional writers there in the mid 1950s. Through the 1960s the joint was jumping. Avram Davidson lived there for a while, and many others, but Virginia Kidd was the last of that great generation. Her agency, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency, Inc., has been a major force in sf for more than four decades. She was the first female agent in sf and fantasy and was a woman of vast intelligence, reading, and (in later years) physical weight. For more than a decade she ran her agency efficiently from her bed, only giving up day-to-day control in the mid1990s when her eyesight failed because of diabetes. She was a great gossip, full of indiscreet stories of the 1940s, ¹50s, and ¹60s, and always avid to hear about current events, deeds, and misdeeds in sf. We visited Milford once or twice a year (Kathryn worked there for the agency in 19878) and felt like family friends. There are some pictures of her memorial service on page three of this issue.
Let these people not be forgotten.
‹David G. Hartwell
& the editors
