STOVER, Leon E(ugene)

(1929-)

   US editor and writer, professor of ANTHROPOLOGY at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he also taught sf courses, and science editor of AMZ 1967-9. He was most active in sf in collaboration with Harry HARRISON, editing with him Apeman, Spaceman: Anthropological ScienceFiction (anth 1968), and writing with him Stonehenge (1972), a historical novel in which refugees from ATLANTIS - here rather conventionally identified as the Mediterranean island, Thera (Santorini), which exploded in Mycenaean times - help build the eponymous megalith. With Willis E. MCNELLY he ed Above the Human Landscape: An Anthology of Social ScienceFiction (anth 1972). He was founder and first chairman of the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD.LES's critical studies perhaps represent him at his most interesting. La science-fiction americaine: essai d'anthropologie culturelle ("American Science Fiction: An Essay in Cultural Anthropology") (1972 France) was based on one of his courses. Ostensibly a RECURSIVEtale, The Shaving of Karl Marx: An Instant Novel of Ideas, after the Manner of Thomas Love Peacock, in which Lenin and H.G. Wells Talk aboutthe Political Meaning of the Scientific Romances (1982) was more accurately a dramatized debate. In The Prophetic Soul: A Reading of H.G. Wells' Things to Come together with his Film Treatment "WhitherMankind?"and thePostproduction Script (1987) LES continued to argue that H.G. WELLS - especially in his Samurai mood - produced Leninist solutions to social problems. His Robert A. Heinlein (1987), more stridently, works better as an assault upon H. Bruce FRANKLIN's powerful study of HEINLEIN than as a balanced presentation of the author; the advocacy of his friend and subject in Harry Harrison (1990) proves ineffective through lack of judicious distance.Throughout his work, LES has been perhaps most notable - after his erudition is acknowledged - for a gadfly vigour.

   JC

   See also: ECONOMICS.