FAST, Howard (Melvin)

(1914-)

   US writer best known for his work outside the sf field: historical novels under his own name and detective novels and thrillers as E.V. Cunningham. The Unvanquished (1942) and Spartacus (1951), both as HF,are perhaps his most familiar titles. He began publishing sf with "Wrath of the Purple" for AMZ in 1932, but did not actively produce sf until the later 1950s, when he started a long association with FSF. His sf and fantasy stories have been collected in The Edge of Tomorrow (coll 1961), The General Zapped an Angel (coll 1970) and A Touch of Infinity (coll1973); all the stories in the latter two volumes were reassembled as Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (coll 1975). His work is sharply political in implication - he was a member of the Communist Party 1943-56, being imprisoned for contempt of Congress in 1947 - and eschews most of the cruder satisfactions of genre fiction. Harlan ELLISON, among others, has expressed high praise for HF's stories, but admiration, though widespread, is not universal. Some critics have seen their occasionally religiose moralizing as cloying and their ideative content as trite. Phyllis (1962), as by E.V. Cunningham, is a borderline novel in which a USand a Soviet scientist come together to try to force their governments to ban the bomb by threatening to explode two themselves. In "The Trap", a novel-length tale which occupies most of The Hunter and The Trap (coll 1967), the US Government secretly attempts to raise exceptional childrenin a monitored environment; when the Department of Defense attempts to view the results the children, now telepathic, close themselves off from the world to breed Homo superior.

   JC

   Other works: Tony and the Wonderful Door (1968; vt The Magic Door 1980), a juvenile.

   See also: SATIRE.