The Worlds of Robert F Young

HE LIVES IN A house by the shore of a Great Lake, from which, on days as clear as those he writes about so lovingly, he can see Canada—a sight on which he is sometimes reluctantly obliged to draw the curtain in order to continue writing. He knows people, books, machinery, as well as scenery, and—equally lovingly—this knowledge is reflected in his writing. I'm writing about Robert F. Young, a man known to and appreciated by the editors, publishers, and readers of science fiction. One reason why this book is a good thing is that it will acquaint a lot of people with him who perhaps don't often read the genre. There are, of course, many good reasons for not reading it; you won't find any of them here, though. No cowboy or knighthood-gone-to-seed stories set on Betelgeuse, no tonight-we-overthrow-the-23rd-century-Caligula yarns, no accounts of computers Taking Over, thousand-times-twice-told tales of Doomsday and The Bomb, not a single insectoid or reptilian Earth-conquering monster—with or without bug-eyes. None.

What you will find, though, is—as I've said above—love. Calm. Compassion. Rational imagination. Laughter. Sense. Excitement. Scorn. Integrity. And hope. There's the sun and the moon, and night and day, brother—all good things. . . . There's the wind on the heath, brother. I could gladly live for that.

Nor, in dealing with Some Aspects of the Future, has Mr. Young ignored certain musty corners of the present. Quasi-compulsory conformity and consumption, quiz shows, symbiosis on several times six cylinders, planet-plundering, and quite a few others—all are carried to a logical confusion in sentences which never stumble over one another. If Mr. Young, like the personal aides of Gulliver's Laputa,

thwacks us now and then with a pea-filled bladder, it is to waken the dozers among us from their daze. No tax-free foundations subsidize him to give the world yet another damned dull book, nor is his eye forever on the word rate. Once, in the dear, dead days when I was an editor, I said of someone that He writes with love. Someone else wrote in, promptly and tartly, Ink would be better. Robert F. Young uses both.

Robert Franklin Young (June 8, 1915 – June 22, 1986) was an American science fiction writer born in Silver Creek, New York. Except for the three and a half years he served in the Pacific during World War II, he spent most of his life in New York State. He owned a property on Lake Erie.

He remained little known by the public, in the USA as well as abroad. His career spanned more...

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