Don D'Ammassa

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Donald Eugene D'Ammassa (born April 24, 1946 in Providence , Rhode Island ) is an American science fiction writer and lexicographer .

Life

D'Ammassa grew up in Providence and Cumberland , Rhode Island. Since learning to read at the age of five, he read everything he could get his hands on, often two books a day. He didn't encounter science fiction until he was fourteen, but was then addicted once and for all. He first studied mathematics at Michigan State University , but soon switched to English and graduated there in 1968. In the same year he married Sheila Glover. It was the time of the Vietnam War , he was drafted, trained at Fort Dix and Fort Lee, and then sent to Vietnam, where he did office work and wrote press releases for a helicopter unit. His final year of service served in Fort Sill , Oklahoma . There his son David was born.

After his return from Vietnam in 1971 he could not find a job as a teacher, so he worked for a silverware manufacturer in material procurement for the next 25 years, most recently as a department head. After the company was liquidated, he worked as a temporary worker for several years and then at Air Products & Chemicals until the company closed its Rhode Island office in 2002. From then on, D'Ammassa was a freelance writer.

D'Ammassa is best known for its critiques and reviews. That started in 1974 with Mythologies , a fanzine that he originally wrote hectographically for a few friends. With the number of editions, both the volume and the subscriber list grew steadily, and by the time the nineteenth and final issue appeared in 1986, he had received six Hugo Award nominations for Mythologies . It was also Mythologies # 14 with the 1979 Fan Activity Achievement Award was awarded. In 1978 he had started another fanzine, Critical Mass , of which five editions appeared and which contained only book reviews. He had previously published book reviews in Delap's Fantasy and Science Fiction Review , SF Booklog . From 1980 he published his book reviews in the Science Fiction Chronicle at the invitation of the then editor Andrew I. Porter . There he was responsible for book reviews until 2006. During these 26 years D'Ammassa has published reviews of books by over 500 authors.

These critical works were then also the basis for several D'Ammassas lexicons. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction 2005, the Encyclopedia of Fantasy And Horror Fiction 2006 and the Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction 2009 were published, all three by the lexicon publisher Facts on File .

In addition to his work as a fan writer , critic and lexicographer, D'Ammassas has published over a dozen novels and over 100 short stories, the short stories being predominantly horror literature. According to John Clute , in his later novels, D'Ammassa seems to want to systematically pay tribute to the worlds of science fiction of the twentieth century one by one.

Works

Novels

  • Blood Beast (1988; revised edition as The Gargoyle , 2011)
  • Servants of Chaos (2002)
  • Haven (2004)
  • Dead of Winter (2007)
  • The Kaleidoscope (2015)
  • The Sinking Island (2015)
  • Caverns of Chaos (2015)
  • Living Things (2015)
  • Perilous Pursuits (2015)
  • Wormdance (2015)
  • Carbon Copies (2015)
  • Multiplicity (2015)
Sandor Dyle
  • Scarab (2004)
  • Narcissus (2007)
Wanda Coyne
  • The Maltese Gargoyle (2015)
  • The Hippogriff of the Baskervilles (2016)
  • Ten Little Homunculi (2017)

Short stories

  • Automatic Success (1982)
  • Love Charm (1985)
  • The Hatchetman (1989)
  • Literally Speaking (1990)
  • Little Evils (1991)
  • Strange Developments (1991)
  • The Guard Tower (1991)
  • The Splicer (1991)
  • Wake Up Call (1991)
  • Shadow Over R'lyeh (1991)
  • Context (1992)
  • The Dead Beat Society (1992)
  • Homework (1992)
  • Cleansing Agent (1993)
  • Friday Nights at Home (1993)
  • Puppets (1993)
  • Subterrine - Or 20,000 Leagues under the Soil (1993)
  • The Daylight Vampire (1993)
  • The Spirit of Mars (1993)
  • Forever in My Thoughts (1993)
  • Moloch's Furnace (1993)
  • Payment in Arrears (1993)
  • Passing Death (1993)
  • Corruption in Office (1993)
  • The Library of Lost Art (1993)
  • Shadow and Substance (1993)
  • Frontier Spirit (1994)
  • Inspiration (1994)
  • Jack the Martian (1994)
  • Misadventures in the Skin Trade (1994)
  • The Kaleidoscope (1994)
  • A Tight Situation (1994)
  • A Noteworthy Affair (1994)
  • All Flesh is Clay (1995)
  • Coming Attractions (1995)
  • Escape (1995)
  • Hair Apparent (1995)
  • Misapprehensions (1995)
  • Next-Door Neighbor (1995)
  • Present in Spirit (1995)
  • The Dunwich Gate (1995)
  • The Houseguest (1995)
  • The Knight of Greenwich Village (1995)
  • The Phantom of the Space Opera (1995)
  • Twisted Images (1995)
  • The Best of Company (1995)
  • Actual Mode (1995)
  • Empirical Facts (1996)
  • Translation Station (1996)
  • Sneak Thief (1996)
  • Orwell's Other Nightmare (1996)
  • The Potpourri Plot (1996)
  • Thoracic Park (1996)
  • Milk-Curdling Horror (1996)
  • Kites (1996)
  • Dark Providence (1997)
  • Expectations (1997)
  • Getting with the Program (1997)
  • Restoring Order (1997)
  • Remnants (1997)
  • Bad Soil (1997)
  • The Managansett Horror (1997)
  • Adding It Up (1998)
  • Scylla and Charybdis (1998)
  • Leave Me Alone (1998)
  • Bad Feelings (1998)
  • Candid Camera (1998)
  • Immortal Muse (1998)
  • Stakeout (1998)
  • The Chindi (1998)
  • The Piggy Bank (1998)
  • The Predator (1998)
  • Cat Eye’s (1998)
  • Prey for the Dead (1998)
  • Dominion (1999)
  • Dumb Genius (1999)
  • The Intrusion (1999)
  • The Karma Sutra (1999)
  • Realizations (1999)
  • Wormdance (1999)
  • Dark Paris (2000)
  • The Devil Is in the Details (2000)
  • Something in Common (2001)
  • Departure Delayed (2001)
  • The Black Rose (2002)
  • A Good Offense (2003)
  • Curing Agent (2003)
  • Dealing with Stress (2003)
  • The Word Mill (2003)
  • Parting Shot (2004)
  • The Man Who Walked to Procyon (2004)
  • Growing Old Together (2004)
  • Fore-Thought (2004)
  • Diplomatic Relations (2006)
  • The Natural World (2008)
  • No Problem (2008)
  • Funeral Party (2009)
  • Hearts of Stone (2009)
  • Complexity (2009)
  • Duck and Cover (2009)
  • Slipstream Fiction (2010)
  • Piecemaker (2010)
  • No Distance Too Great (2010)
  • Chronic Pain (2011)
  • Dead Reckoning (2011)
  • Farm on the Down (2011)
  • Remotely Possible (2011)
  • Scrimshaw (2011)
  • The Incorruptible (2011)
  • Misprints (2011)
  • Martyrs (2011)
  • Housebound (2011)
  • The Buddy System (2011)
  • The Last Demon (2012)
  • Echoes (2013)
  • Pre-Pirates (2013)
  • City Girl (2015)
  • Night Duty (2015)
  • The New Guy (2015)
  • The Thing in the Library (2015)
  • Border Town (2017)
  • Lost Canyon (2017)
  • Shell Games (2017)
  • The Bad Neighbor (2017)
  • The Key (2017)
  • The Old Place (2017)
  • The Warden of the Wall (2017)
  • The Well Being (2017)
  • Wendy (2017)
  • Creepy Hollow (2017)
Collections
  • Translation Station (2011)
  • That Way Madness Lies (2015)
  • Little Evils (2015)
  • Passing Death (2015)
  • Elaborate Lies: Tales of Fantasy (2015)
  • Date with the Dark (2015)
  • Sandcastles (2015)
  • The Devil Is in the Details (2015)
  • Alien & Otherwise (2015)
  • Shadows Over R'lyeh (2015)
  • Phantom of the Space Opera (2015)
  • More Shadows Over R'lyeh (2017)

Non-fiction

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Autobiography
  2. ↑ See Mythologies & Other Fanzines . Four nominations in the fan writer category and one each for Mythologies in the fanzine and amateur magazine categories .
personal data
SURNAME D'Ammassa, Don
ALTERNATIVE NAMES D'Ammassa, Donald Eugene (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American science fiction writer and lexicographer
DATE OF BIRTH April 24, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Providence , Rhode Island