TUCKER, (Arthur) Wilson

(1914-)

   US writer, orphaned, brought up in Bloomington and Normal, Illinois, where he set some of his fiction, some early stories being signed Bob Tucker. For several decades he worked as a film projectionist, retiring in 1972, and he always spoke of his writing - more than 20 books, half of them sf, half of them mysteries - as an avocation. WT began his involvement with sf about 1932, and during the 1930s was exceedingly active as a fan and FANZINE publisher, starting with The Planetoid in 1932, though his most notable fanzine was Le Zombie, which lasted morethan 60 issues 1938-75, the first half-decade of that period being its heyday; his Neo-Fan's Guide to Science-Fiction Fandom (1966 chap) demonstrates the quality of this work. As an example of the violent humour and intense emotions aroused in early FANDOM, it is notable that WT was twice subjected to hoax obituaries in the sf magazines of the time. His fanzine The Bloomington News Letter (later Science Fiction News Letter) dealt mainly with the professional field.While active as a fan WT was also writing fiction, though not until 1941 did he publish his first story, "Interstellar Way Station" as Bob Tucker, in Super Science Novels. Henever became prolific in shorter forms - The Best of Wilson Tucker (coll 1982) is definitive - soon turning to novels. His first, The Chinese Doll(1946), was a mystery, but made RECURSIVE use of the world of sf fandom. (WT pleased the knowledgeable fans, while annoying some critics, by his lifelong habit of using the names of fans and writers for the characters of his books; these names became known as Tuckerisms.) His first sf novel, The City in the Sea (1951), deals somewhat crudely with material similarto that treated far more effectively in the much later Ice and Iron (1974; exp 1975); in both, a matriarchal culture begins to re-invade a USA reverted to savagery, but in the latter the far-future matriarchy is linked through TIME TRAVEL to a USA, only generations hence, in the grip of a new ice age. This latter tale is not very coherently told, but the panoramas are lucid. Time travel is central to much of WT's work, featuring in tales like The Lincoln Hunters (1958), one of his best novels. Time travellers from an imperial USA several hundred years hence are sent to acquire a recording of a lost speech of Abraham Lincoln; the two cultures are effectively contrasted. The ending, in which the protagonist is trapped in an 1856 far less unattractive than the future from which he came, is both poignant and welcome. In The Time Masters (1953; rev 1971), whose protagonist appears also in the sequel Time Bomb(1955; vt Tomorrow Plus X 1957), a long-lived extraterrestrial's presence throughout human history generates some of the same perspectives as time travel itself.WT had a knack of choosing unusually resonant and appropriate titles for his novels. Examples are The Long Loud Silence (1952; rev 1970; early US edns delete implications of cannibalism, UK ednsdo not) and The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970). The former is a powerful post- HOLOCAUST novel, sombre and tough in feeling, though at points awkwardly told; the hero, unusually for a genre-sf novel, is in many ways cruel and insensitive. The latter, which won a JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD retrospectively in 1976, sends its Black protagonist forwards intime to around AD2020, where he finds the USA in dire shape, his Blackness terrifying to the racially divided remnants of the civil war which has ended civilization. The prophecy that he had discovered in a non-Biblical ancient manuscript is fulfilled: there is to be a Year of the Quiet Sun. He prepares to watch the final rites of history.WT was a very unevenwriter, but expanded the boundaries of genre sf with his downbeat and realistic variations on old material, and demonstrated how effective a generic cliche like time travel could become when treated with due attention. By tying his use of time travel to virtual archaeologies of the worlds thus exposed, he transformed that cliche into an instrument of vision. He became inactive in the field after about 1980.

   JC/PN

   Other works: Prison Planet (1947 chap); Wild Talent (1954; exp 1955 UK; The Man from Tomorrow 1955); Science Fiction Sub-Treasury (coll 1954; cut vt Time: X 1955); To the Tombaugh Station (1960 dos); Resurrection Days(1981).

   About the author: A Checkist of Wilson Tucker (1991 chap) by Christopher P. STEPHENS.

   See also: END OF THE WORLD; ESP; HUGO; IMMORTALITY; OUTER PLANETS; SPACE OPERA; SUPERMAN; TIME PARADOXES.