Lucius Shepard

Lucius Shepard (2011)

Lucius Shepard (born August 21, 1943 in Lynchburg , Virginia , † March 18, 2014 in Portland , Oregon ) was an American writer who was best known as a science fiction and fantasy author.

Life

Shepard was born in 1943. He himself mentioned the year 1947 on his homepage. In 1980 he was a participant in the renowned Clarion workshop for aspiring science fiction and fantasy authors, where he subsequently also worked as a lecturer. His first short stories appeared in 1983 during the cyberpunk movement, his first novel Green Eyes (dt. Green Eyes ) appeared 1984th

For his work, the author has received many awards, in 1985 he won the John W. Campbell Award for best new author, followed by the Nebula Award and the Locus Award for his story R & R , which in 1987 of his novel Life During Wartime (dt. Life in War ). In 1988 he received the World Fantasy Award for the short story collection The Jaguar Hunter and again in 1992 for The Ends of the Earth , and his novella Barnacle Bill the Spacer received the Hugo Award in 1993 . In 2003 he received the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Over Yonder . Shepard won other awards throughout his career.

Shepard lived in Vancouver , Washington .

Subject areas and development

Shepard dealt with a wide variety of topics during his writing career. At the beginning, Central America was a central theme of his writing: stories about future high-tech jungle wars that can be clearly identified as science fiction (e.g. R&R and Salvador ) as well as stories that can be assigned more to so-called magical realism (such as Black Coral and The Jaguar Hunter ) and in which he dealt with cultural clashes. In various interviews he took the view that the Bush administration would launch an attack on this region.

In the 1990s, Shepard's science fiction was rather quiet; he only returned towards the end of the decade with works such as the novella Radiant Green Star (which won the Locus Award in 2001). Though he was still writing thematically Central American fiction, his interests were more in the north. He published the novellas A Handbook of American Prayers (published by Edition Phantasia) and Viator , both of which are based in North America. He has also published some works in which culture and geography are only marginal (his story Jailwise as an important example), addressing broader issues such as the role of justice in society.

Much of Shepard's last work is non-fiction, for example he researched the so-called Freight Train Riders of America for some time and wrote both fiction and non-fiction about these experiences. The magazine The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as well as www.electricstory.com he was a regular film reviewer, his reviews often influenced by his disdain for the state of American cinema.

Works

Novels and short stories

• Green Eyes , 1989, ISBN 3-453-03471-6 , Green Eyes , 1984
• Life in War , 1989, ISBN 3-453-03144-X , Life During Wartime , 1987
• The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter ( short story), 1988
• The Father of Stones (short story), 1989
• Kalimantan (short story), 1990
• The Trail of the Golden Sacrifice , 1997, ISBN 3-404-13846-5 , The Golden , 1993
• The Last Time , 1995
• Colonel Rutherford's Colt , 2002
• Valentine , 2002
• Aztech , 2004, ISBN 3-937897-05-4 , Aztechs , 2003
• Floater , 2003
• End of the line Louisiana , 2006, ISBN 3-937897-14-3 , Louisiana Breakdown , 2003
• Liar's House , 2004
• Viator , 2004
• A Handbook of American Prayer , 2006, ISBN 3-937897-19-4 , A Handbook of American Prayer , 2004
• The Velt , 2005
• Softspoken , 2007
• Vacancy , 2009
• The Taborin Scale , 2010

Story collections

• The Jaguar Hunter , 1987
• Nantucket Slayrides: Three Short Novels , 1989 (with Robert Frazier )
• The Ends of the Earth: Fourteen Stories , 1990
• Vermillion (comic book series, copywriter), 1996–1997
• Barnacle Bill the Spacer: And Other Stories / Beast of the Heartland and Other Stories , 1997
• Hobo Nation , 2008, ISBN 3-937-89729-1 , Two Trains Running , 2004
• Trujillo: And Other Stories , 2004
• Eternity: And Other Stories , 2005
• Dagger Key: And Other Stories , 2007
• The Best of Lucius Shepard , 2008

Non-fiction

• Sports and Music , 1986
• Weapons of Mass Seduction , 2005
• With Christmas in Honduras: Men, Myths, and Miscreants in Modern Central America , 2007

Works available online

• The Night of White Bhairab
• Liar's House
• A walk in the garden
• Jailwise
• Senor Volto
• Emerald Street Expansions
• Over Yonder
• AZTECHS
• The Jaguar Hunter

criticism

• Colin Greenland on Green Eyes : "The superficial plot of being chased through a hostile landscape, accompanied by suffering, self-knowledge and growing love, is the earthly framework for a complex messianic escalation that threatens to be carried away more and more by its own hallucinatory vortex. The tense power of the style contains all the convulsive twitches of a sensual and visionary kind that it causes. With this novel, his first, Lucius Shepard immediately gains a place in the society of science fiction authors ... "
• Sascha Mamczak on Life in War : " Life during Wartime is far better than Shepard's far overrated debut novel Green Eyes , but it does not come close to his novellas and short stories. This is R & R , the novella on which the novel is based and the first chapter represents his best piece. In the course of the plot the story becomes more and more implausible - and more and more pathetic ... The characters in which the war has left wounds give his book depth: the general, who is an ancient 'monster' in his battle suit Keeping myth alive, Nate using PSI to train butterflies to kill, radiation-infested Tully sitting on the porch fighting against sadness. "

literature

• Rafael Sa'adah: A conversation with Lucius Shepard. In: Wolfgang Jeschke (Ed.): The Science Fiction Year IV. Edition 1989 , Wilhelm Heyne Verlag , Munich, ISBN 978-3453031395 , pp. 405-461.
• Christopher P. Stephens: Checklist of Lucius Shepard , 1992.
• Michael K. Iwoleit : Transformations and magical counter-worlds. Some notes on the stories of Lucius Shepard , in Quarber Merkur . Franz Rottensteiner's literary magazine for science fiction and fantasy, vol. 113, Lindenstruth Verlag, Gießen 2012, ISBN 978-3-934273-92-4 , pp. 143-160.

Web links

• Literature by and about Lucius Shepard in the catalog of the German National Library
• Lucius Shepard in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (English)
• Lucius Shepard in the Science Fiction Awards + Database (English)
• Works by and about Lucius Shepard at Open Library
• official homepage

Individual evidence

1. ↑ John Clute: Shepard, Lucius. In: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction . John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls (emeritus), Graham Sleight, September 2, 2019, accessed December 9, 2019 . 
2. ↑ John Clute: Shepard, Lucius. In: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction . John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls (emeritus), Graham Sleight, September 2, 2019, accessed December 9, 2019 . 
3. ↑ Lucius Shepard Bio. ( Memento of the original from July 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Biographical information on Lucius Shepard's homepage (accessed March 23, 2014). 
4. ↑ See Wolfgang Jeschke (Ed.): Das Science Fiction Jahr 1990 , Wilhelm Heyne Verlag Munich, ISBN 3-453-03905-X , p. 666.
5. ↑ In: The Golem. Yearbook for Fantastic Literature 1989, ed. by Harald Junker, Udo Klotz and Gerd Rottenecker, Freiberg 1990, ISSN  0937-5880 , pp. 98f.