The Son and Editor of J.R.R. Tolkien Dies at 95

CHRISTOPHER TOLKIEN

[November 21, 1924 – January 15, 2020]

The son of JRR Tolkien and Keeper of his father's legacy

(Source: Variety) Christopher Tolkien, son of legendary “The Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien, has died, the Tolkien Society reports. He was 95.

“Christopher Tolkien has died at the age of 95,” the org tweeted. “The Tolkien Society sends its deepest condolences to Baillie, Simon, Adam, Rachel and the whole Tolkien family.”

Christopher was Tolkien’s third son and was well known among his father’s fans. As he grew up, Christopher showed a great interest in his father’s work, eventually going on to edit and publish his unpublished material, including “The Silmarillion” in 1977 and “The Fall of Gondolin” in 2018. He was best known for publishing his father’s historical record of Middle-earth after his death in 1973.

Born in Leeds, United Kingdom, Tolkien served in the military, joining the Royal Air Force during World War II. After the war, he returned home to finish his studies in English at Trinity College in Oxford, later lecturing on Old English, Middle English and Old Icelandic at that same school.

Shaun Gunner, the chair of Tolkien Society, mourned Tolkien’s death on Twitter.

“As chair of @TolkienSociety this must surely be the very saddest day for me and all of us,” he wrote. “Christopher Tolkien was a titan of fantasy and his legacy will live on forever. Namárië #Tolkien.”

The Twitter account for Amazon’s upcoming “Lord of the Rings” series also paid tribute. 
 

“Christopher Tolkien’s contributions to the world and to Middle-earth are incalculable. We are so grateful for his passion. He will be dearly missed,” they tweeted. 

The Tolkien Estate has been overseen by his wife, Baillie Tolkien, and Tolkien’s grandson Michael George Reuel Tolkien.

Fred Patton dies at age 77

FRED PATTON

Legendary Anime/Manga Pioneer in the U.S.

(1941 - 2018)

[Source: ComicsBeat, written by author Heidi MacDonald] Comics and animation lost another key figure this week. Fred Patton, a protean champion of  early anime/manga fandom passed away at age 77 this week. He had been confined to a nursing home after a stroke in 2005, but continued writing and pursuing his interests in anime.

 

Until then he wrote widely about anime, and you’ll find his byline in many of the same old fanzines I wrote for back in the day.

All The Anime has a fine obituary, including Patton’s key role at Streamline Pictures, one of the first companies to bring Anime to the US:

When Fred turned 50, Carl Macek lured him away from his real-world job into the world of movie-making. Fred became the first employee of Streamline Pictures, with many of his early amateur scripts forming the basis for some of Streamline’s pro releases. Inevitably, he would lock horns with Macek, who would change the dialogue beyond what Fred considered to be a reasonable nuance. Fred would warn him that fandom wouldn’t like it, and as Macek later admitted, Fred was often right. However, Fred also had a fine grasp of the politics of fandom, and was instrumental in decisions designed to avoid what today might be called flame-wars. It was he who brought up the fact that the subject of the first Lupin III film, The Mystery of Mameux, had been so consistently mistransliterated as Mystery of Mamo by American fandom that correcting it would only lead to protests.

Many remembered Patton on social media:

Fred was a regular in my young fan days in Southern California, and I would always see him at Comic-Con. We actually owned the same shirt emblazoned with Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan, and he wore his for many years after I stopped wearing mine. We’d always joke about it. He was a good guy and very instrumental in the fandom of the day.

Ursula K. Le Guin Passes Away at Age 88

Ursula K. Le Guin

Reknown Science Fiction Author

(October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) 

[Source: Syfy] Noted feminist author of science fiction and speculative fiction Ursula Le Guin, died on Jan. 22 at her home in Portland, Oregon. She was 88. Her son, Theo Downes-Le Guin, told the New York Times she had been in poor health for several months.

 

Born in 1929, the daughter of two anthropologists, Le Guin showed an early interest in science fiction but put it aside to attend college, where she ended up getting a master's degree in romance literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. She wrote five unpublished novels, which were deemed "too inaccessible" to publish. She then turned to genre.

Her first science fiction novel, Rocannon's World was published in 1966, and blended technology and traditional heroic fantasy elements. It was the first book in the Hainish cycle, and gave birth to the term "ansible," a fictional device for instant communication. It has since been used in the works of dozens of other authors, including Orson Scott Card. Over the course of her career, Le Guin would publish over 20 novels; 12 books of poetry; over 100 short stories; seven collections of essays; 13 children's books; and a guide for writers.

Le Guin's best-known work was The Left Hand of Darkness, a novel set on the planet Gethen, whose population has no fixed sex. The novel focuses on themes about the way sex and gender play roles in culture and society, and is noted as one of the first examples of feminist science fiction literature. It won both a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award for best novel.

Other notable works in Le Guin's library include the Earthsea series, which consists of six novels and eight short stories; The Lathe of Heaven, in which a character's dreams alter past and present reality; The Dispossessed, which goes into the mathematical theory used to create an ansible; and Lavinia, a book that focuses on a minor character in Virgil's Aeneid.
 

Despite her large catalog, very few of Le Guin's works have been turned into films or TV series. An adaptation of The Lathe of Heaven was made for WNET in New York in 1979. Made with Le Guin's involvement, she considered this to be the only good adaptation of her work. In 2002, A&E also did a version of the same book. 2004 saw an adaptation of Earthsea done for Sci Fi that Le Guin thought "whitewashed" many of her diverse characters. Hayao Miyazaki's son, Goro, created an animated version of the Earthsea books that became 2006's Tales from Earthsea.

Le Guin is survived by her husband, Charles Le Guin, her son Theo, and daughters Caroline and Elisabeth, two brothers, and four grandchildren.

Watership Down author Richard Adams dies at 96

RICHARD ADAMS
(May 9, 1920 – December 24, 2016)

[Source: blastr] Acclaimed British author Richard Adams passed away on Christmas Eve at the age of 96 years, just short of the fabled century mark.  If you are of a certain age, growing up in the 1970s, reading Adams' Watership Down was sort of a rite of passage, leading to lifetimes of reading, imagining and dreaming of living with the heroic rabbits Fiver, Bigwig, Hazel, Holly and Blackberry.

The 1972 novel was actually classified as a children's book when it reached America but it transcended that limited definition with its complex world of brutality, politics, religion, hope and despair among tribes of intelligent rabbits.  A better, more modern interpretation might be "Game of Thrones with bunnies."  I first read the thick 400-page paperback novel when I was 11, and while I wasn't immediately aware of the more sophisticated philosophical and psychological components of Adams' saga, it was an extremely emotional and rewarding read.  I highly recommend picking up a copy if you have not had the pleasure of Adams' poignant prose.

W A T E R S H I P   D O W N

The award-winning book centered around the lives of English rabbits has gone on to sell 50 million copies and remains a constant selection in classrooms, book clubs and library wait lists around the world.  A 1978 animated film directed by Martin Rosen delivered a faithful adaptation of the novel and a new BBC mini-series is currently in production, this time rendering the Watership Down rabbits in CGI.  Apparently the idea of his rabbits being brought back to life by the BBC in 2017 offered the author "great composure and comfort" in his waning hours.

“I assured him that he was much loved, that he had done great work, that many people loved his books,” his daughter Juliet Johnson told BBC Radio 4.

Besides Watership Down, Adams also wrote Shardik, the 1974 fantasy tale of a mythological great bear and the young hunter pursuing it. A collection of 19 short stories, titled Tales From Watership Down, was published in 1996 and returned to the familiar warrens of the legendary rabbits introduced in the original novel.

Frederik Pohl passes away at 93 years old

Frederick Pohl
(1919 - 2013)
"And now who will take me to the stars 
when I sleep at night?"

• [Source: Syfy.com; by Trent Moore] After spending almost a century helping shape the genre of science fiction, legendary writer and editor Frederik Pohl, 93, passed away on Monday, September 2, 2013. He cut his teeth editing groundbreaking genre fare like Super Science Stories and Astonishing Stories in the early 1940s. He also edited Galaxy and If for most of the 1960s, along with numerous other books.
• 
  But, he’s likely best know for his original works — including the short story Day Million, the award-winning 1977 novel Gateway and his numerous collections of short stories and novellas. He leaves behind a treasure trove for sci-fi fans to rediscover, and hopefully he’ll keep inspiring for years to come.
• 
  Pohl also racked up numerous Hugo Awards, Nebula Awards, the Campbell Memorial Award and the National Book Award during his decades of work.
  

• He talked about what got him interested in science fiction in a great interview with Locus Magazine in 2009. Check out an excerpt below:
  

  “Then, some time later, someone else left one of the early copies of Astounding Stories around. That had 'Manape the Mighty' as the cover story: this King Kong-like creature doing something terrible to a girl. That led me to believe if there were two there had to be more, and I went to a second-hand magazine store and looked around and found lots of them. Then I discovered there were SF books in the public library -- not very many in the children's section, but there were some. And at 12 I discovered that one of my classmates also had one of those things, so we became fans.
  In the early days, we science fiction readers were like cellar Christians: they didn't talk to anybody else because everybody else laughed at them, but they kept running into each other. Mostly they were writing letters to each other, all over the country -- all over the world, actually. I had pen pals in France and England, although I had hardly ever been out of Brooklyn.”

  In honor of Pohl, and to show anyone who might not be familiar with his work how great he was, the following clips are of Pohl reading one of his most famous stories, with some nice editing sprinkled in to help accent his stark voice: